Support Change Spells End for Mozilla Firefox 1.0.x

Mozilla Corp. Thursday outlined a new support policy that includes a "sunset" provision which will quash any further security updates to the Firefox 1.0.x, Thunderbird 1.0.x, and Mozilla Suite 1.7.x product lines.

"[Firefox 1.0.8] marks the end-of-life of the 1.0.x product line," Mozilla said in an online statement.

Mozilla defined its new support policy by saying that it would, of course, continue to roll out security updates for the current version -- which in Firefox's case is the 1.5 family -- but that all support for prior versions would end 6 months after the introduction of the most current edition.

Firefox 1.5 was introduced in late November 2005; if the six months applies, then Mozilla would stop updating 1.0.x after May 29, 2006. Since it said that Thursday's update to 1.0.8 was the last, one can assume that it had made no plans to release additional updates between now and late May.

Mozilla did not respond for a request for clarification.The short lifecycle, which Mozilla admitted was "consumer-focused," will be supplemented by hands-on cooperation with corporations that have adopted the browser, although Mozilla was thin on details.

"We’ll work with downstream enterprise-oriented distributors and support vendors to provide a program to enable extended support for otherwise legacy releases," the company said.

Microsoft, Mozilla's rival in the browser wars, supports its applications for a much longer period. Internet Explorer 6 SP1 for Windows XP Home, for example, debuted in August 2002, and won't be retired until October 2006.