Mozilla Extends Firefox 1.5 Support, Perhaps by Three Weeks

While yesterday had been slated to be the final official day of Mozilla's support for the older Firefox version 1.5, a blog posting on the organization's Web site yesterday indicated that it will continue to provide security upgrades for the browser for another few weeks.

In an official announcement last February, Mozilla said, "Due to the security fixes, we strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to these latest releases...Firefox 1.5.0.x will be maintained with security and stability updates until April 24, 2007."

But now, perhaps due to another security upgrade in the works, the blog posting recommends a temporary change of tact: "Mozilla will only supply security and stability upgrades for Firefox 1.5 until mid-May of this year. We encourage all Firefox 1.5 users to visit http://getfirefox.com to download the latest version of Firefox today. We will provide updates as we get closer to the date."

Though the message does not absolutely specify that a version "1.5.0.12" would be released between now and the middle of next month, one could draw the conclusion that if no such version were in the works, Mozilla could have easily decided to end its 1.5 product lifecycle on schedule.

Late yesterday, a Mozilla product manager told ZDNet blogger Ryan Naraine that extending the support deadline would allow for the possibility (not exactly a certainty) of an additional Firefox 1.5 build that would prompt the user to upgrade to 2.0.

Presumably, the revised 1.5 build would be installed automatically by current 1.5 users who are set to check for updates. However, that feature would already have had considerable time to have detected the existence of 2.0. So the possibility remains that a final 1.5 build may be released, as the Mozilla blog post said, for security purposes.