Firefox 3.6 EOL & dropping support for Windows 2000 & XP SP1

[TonyE]

A couple of notes that may be of interest to some.

Firefox 3.6 will reach end of life on April 24th. Firefox 3.6 was mainly being maintained until an extended support version was made available for organizations to deploy. The extended support version has now been released, for more details on it see http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

For those using Windows 2000 or Windows XP SP1, Mozilla will be dropping support for those operating systems with the release of Firefox 13 on 5th June 2012. The main driving force behind this change is the limitations of the compiler currently used. The current compiler is 32 bit and when compiling Firefox it needs to store the complete code in memory whilst conducting optimizations. There is a 3GB limit to what can be held in memory and Mozilla are at this limit with Firefox 12. This is holding back further development so they are switching to a 64 bit compiler to overcome the memory limitations. The downside of this is the new compiler does not support Windows 2000 or Windows XP SP1.