Firefox 3.6 Update To 7.0

Martin Brinkmann
Oct 4, 2011
Updated • Mar 15, 2012
Firefox
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Firefox users who are still running a 3.6 version of the web browser should prepare themselves for receiving an advertised update on Thursday. Users will receive a prompt with the option to update the browser from their version to the very latest. Mozilla is quick to note that this has "no bearing on support levels", which means that Firefox 3.6 will continue to receive updates after the update prompt has been launched.

I know a few guys who are still running a Firefox 3.6 version and they will be glad to hear that the update prompt is opt-in. Users can decline and stay on their Firefox 3.6 version, at least for now (Mozilla says decline and I'm not sure how this goes along with the update being opt-in, but we will see).

Mozilla expects to move regular Firefox users to the new version. Christian Legnitto notes that the update's main intention is to make users aware of the new version of Firefox to give them an option to update their web browser to the new version.

Based on previous advertised update offers we expect to see a significant percentage of users installing the new version. We are, of course, watching the data closely to see what happens and to make sure there are no unexpected issues.

Considering that Mozilla already prompted Firefox 3.6 users to update when Firefox 4 and Firefox 5 were released, I'd say it is questionable if many will take the opportunity this time to move to the newest version of the web browser.

The time of Firefox 3.6 is regardless of that slowly coming to an end. With the new suggested Extended Support Releases of Firefox comes the end of support for the Firefox 3.6 branch. It is not clear yet if Mozilla will make Firefox 8 or Firefox 9 the first ESR release but when that happens it is game over for Firefox 3.6.

Are you still running Firefox 3.6? If so, what is your main motivation to stay with the browser and avoid the new Firefox updates?

Update: Mozilla has postponed the advertised update notification. According to Christian Legnitto the update has been postponed to make sure the "server capacity is sufficient for release". No word yet on the new date for the update.

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Comments

  1. andosmo said on July 6, 2012 at 10:53 am
    Reply

    why is it there’s no more throttle in latest version of firefox? PLEASE let throttle back in latest version.

  2. sblitz said on December 2, 2011 at 4:21 am
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    firefox 3.6 is the best looking of all the versions

    the only way if would upgrade is if they changed the look back

    to the 3.6 look

  3. John said on November 12, 2011 at 8:09 pm
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    to add to my post from the 29th, if i am ever forced to upgrade to a newer version of firefox against my own will, im going to either go back to internet explorer or switch to chrome

  4. Mick Russom said on November 2, 2011 at 4:11 am
    Reply

    Firefox – how the mighty have fallen, it went from the best to a cheap, half baked rickety shoddy fragile bad clone of Chrome. What a bunch of losers that are working over at Mozilla, a total group of losers. I would imagine someone like JWZ would laugh at how stupid they are for the garbage they have done of late. Totally embarrassing.

  5. sq3ak said on October 29, 2011 at 9:52 pm
    Reply

    I still use FF3.6. And honestly I don’t see myself ever switching to a new Firefox version. Every new version I have tried is crap, the interface is counterproductive and unintuitive, add-on dev’s seem to be practically struggling to keep up with moz’s stupid rapid release. Everything about mozilla has gone/is going down the sh*tter.

    I really hope someone with decent programming skills can snag the 3.6 code and continue developing it as a “Firefox classic” project or something. At first, I didn’t know about this sort of movement (in a loosely defined sense.) However I’ve even noticed on IRC and in Linux forums that I’m not alone. Any tech savvy person who knows anything about a computer knows the new versions of FF are quite simply mainstream crap [inb4 hipster.]

    The bad news: The way I see it, when 3.6 is no longer usable to browse the web, I suppose I will then move on to a different browser altogether. Maybe even (although reluctantly) Chrome.

    Good news? If Lynx can browse the web, i doubt there will be a day when FF3.6 won’t be able to :)

  6. john said on October 29, 2011 at 8:19 pm
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    Im staying on Firefox 3.6 for 2 reasons. The main reason being is that Firefox versions 4 and newer are RAM hogs, I tried Firefox 4 and i had 4 tabs open and was using 400MB of RAM. where as on 3.6 im only using 120MB of RAM, and just for the record i do not use memory fox. The other reason being that the new interface is crap. I am staying on 3.6 and have no intention of upgrading. To be honest with you at this point it is going to take an awful lot to get me to upgrade

  7. notzed said on October 6, 2011 at 2:16 pm
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    I hate the ‘windows 7’ look and the arbitrary re-arrangement of the interface.

    But mostly I just stick to what fedora provides – i don’t want to have to maintain a separate application installation apart from that which yum provides. The thought that it might update itself rings lots of alarm bells too. I’m still using 3.0 on an old machine, and tbh i don’t notice any difference. It’s just a friggan browser.

    If I come across web applications that run too slowly because they’ve moved to much of their crapplication to run on my browser, well I just stop using them. e.g. i stopped using gmail in the browser since it was far too slow to be usable. Even though thunderbird sucks it uses less memory and runs faster than using gmail in a browser. How dumb is that …

    1. odio said on October 7, 2011 at 3:04 am
      Reply

      You can make the interface of Firefox 4 and above looks like 3.6, just need a little about:config tweak and a couple of add-ons.

  8. SFdude said on October 5, 2011 at 9:37 pm
    Reply

    I still use FF 3.6.23
    .
    My precious collection of FF extensions,
    are all working just fine in FF 3.6.23 – thank you.

    I do not intend to buy myself headaches by upgrading FF,
    any time soon.

    In my case, there is absolutely no justification to upgrade
    out of the 3.6 series.

  9. P. MANNING said on October 5, 2011 at 1:30 pm
    Reply

    Hello, All! I use Windows XP, SP3 with 512M hard drive. That is what I can afford now and in the near future. Currently using FF3.6.23 but tried FF5 about three months ago and right away had issues with very high memory usage, hard drive constantly revved every few minutes and sucked up system memory, computer load constantly spiked to 100% and Virtual memory got sucked dry in no time during playback of Flash videos. Even now, with 3.6.23 (latest release) hard drive is revving up, but virtual and system memory is stable.

    What prompted the initial upgrade to FF5 was because flash videos (at HULU, YouTube, and PBS) that had previously worked fine with 3.6.16 (the version I had at upgrade time), suddenly began to stall every 10 minutes, degrading, until within a few days degraded the video and audio would pause every 2 seconds.

    I’ve been having problems with my computer since I uninstalled FF5 and now every time I use FF 3.6 it is slow. I do not intend to upgrade until FF forces 3.6 users to do so. Then at that time if the browser continues to suck up memory and hang, I will uninstall FF and use Chrome exclusively which sucks but at least it plays flash videos with little aggravation. FF is a better browser and I love it. But for the last several months on my computer FF is cumbersome and slow like an old geezer. I’m going to try Opera or something–hate IE, not a fan of Chrome, either.

    Thank you for this Opp to voice my thoughts about FF.

  10. Undefined_ID said on October 5, 2011 at 11:13 am
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    Because FF > 3.6 doesn’t work on PPC computers such as Apple PowerMacG5 or iMac G5!!

  11. Lafie3 said on October 5, 2011 at 7:39 am
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    As a user there is nothing wrong with staying with 3.6. I find 3.6 is up there with IE 8 in terms of site comparability and support. Everything renders correctly near a 100 percent of the time and there still a lot of .gov and .edu site that only support FF 3.6 and IE 8 and below. I keep up to date and mainly use the latest Firefox versions, but I have a 3.6 portable version ready for this reason.

  12. Grantwhy said on October 5, 2011 at 1:11 am
    Reply

    I still use 3.6.23 because, even with the add-on-compatibility-reporter, the Firefox Throttle didn’t work (with FF4 an FF5 …. might be time to check again with FF7)

    Yeah, wanting to make my internet browsing *SLOWER* probable puts me in a sub-set of one, but at home I’ve usually got a torrent program running in the background and limiting Firefox’s speed to about 1/3 of my broadband speed is usually good enough for browsing, and when I need full speed it’s just one click to turn off Firefox Throttle.

    At work (using Firefox Portable from PortableApps.com) I share a slooooooow (seriously, download speed tops out at about 28KB :-P) connection with another person so limiting my browsing speed is not only being considerate, but also tends to hid the fact that I might be browsing.

    Unfortunately I’ve gotten so used to Firefox Throttle that unless I can find another (free ;-) way of limiting my browsing speed (that is so easy to temporarily disable for a burst of speed) I’m likely to stay with FF 3.6 for a while yet.

  13. odio said on October 5, 2011 at 12:21 am
    Reply

    Add-Ons, REALLY??
    Just one link to you people….

    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compatibility-reporter/

    One Add-On to resolve your Add-On problem…

  14. asdf said on October 4, 2011 at 10:50 pm
    Reply

    Because Firefox 3.6 was the last version I found with a U3 installer and I don’t want to make my own. Plus my banking use only memory stick I know my security plugins work and in addition the 3.6 code base has had longer to mature and is less likely to have some new obvious security bug.

  15. Alex said on October 4, 2011 at 10:13 pm
    Reply

    Because of the theme. I haven’t found yet a good Firefox 2 theme… Vessalios one hasn’t been updated and it seems it won’t and “Firefox 2 for Firefox4+” it’s just not as complete…

    Actually what I dislike most is that tabs on bottom looks like “cut” in the bottom border.. maybe there’s a way to change the border via some css/chrome rule.. but I’m not aware of it.
    Other than that I use Firefox 7 in my notebook and I keep portable ones in my main computer.

    Maybe* Firefox should implement some sort of backwards compatibility of add-ons… That even if they won’t work 100% well it should allow them to function. Similar to windows “run or install applications in compatibility mode”

  16. Jojo said on October 4, 2011 at 8:44 pm
    Reply

    FF 3.6.23 runs just fine for me. My add-on’s work. JS is not slow. HTML5 video plays fine. I also don’t like how the FF developers are arbitrarily changing the UI whenever they feel like it w/o polling the user universe for their opinions.

    Ultimately, a browsers only value is to display web pages correctly and efficiently. As long as 3.6 does that effectively, why bother with upgrading?

    I understand that they have made some changes in the v6 (or is it 7 or 8 or 9 or 10?) release that reduces FF memory footprint. That might get me to upgrade at some point (maybe when FF gets tired of this fast-release crap and settles down on one release number for a decent period of time again, like the old days).

  17. JohnJ said on October 4, 2011 at 8:10 pm
    Reply

    I’m still using 3.6.x as my main browser. But I’ve installed on a pen-drive 7.01. I felt I should give it another chance.

    Well, every time I click a link in 7.01 the browser hangs a bit then begins to load the page. I have no Idea why it does this and it is VERY annoying. I’m also not thrilled at how I have to click a link or tab a couple of times, sometimes, to activate it.

    So, I’ll stick with 3.6.x for now.

  18. Crodol said on October 4, 2011 at 7:46 pm
    Reply

    v3.6 on my work PC
    v4.0 on my Laptop
    v7.0.1 on my home PC

    Getting used to v4 and v7 (not much of a difference) but the advantages are minimal compared to the time I (wasted?) playing around with the settings, changing the add-ons and so on! With hindsight, I probably should have stayed with 3.6!

  19. Dan said on October 4, 2011 at 7:33 pm
    Reply

    I am running 3.6 and willing and wanting to upgrade to the latest FF release now that v7 is out with memory management, but am having to wait for a day that I can devote to a clean uninstall / reinstall project. With the number of add-ons and customizations I have, that requires a big time commitment.

  20. johnp80 said on October 4, 2011 at 6:37 pm
    Reply

    Firefox used to make their releases full of new features, and actually worthy of the upgrade. Now, its completely meaningless.

    With the rapid release, they were supposed to be able to push out several features with each upgrade. In practice, they look more like minutemen.

  21. al pief said on October 4, 2011 at 6:35 pm
    Reply

    I had updated my Dell/Windows 7 laptop the Firefox 4.0 and found that FFX crashed several times a day. Just poof and the browser was gone. So I reverted to 3.6 which works fine. No problem with the newer Firefox versions on my iMac.

  22. AC said on October 4, 2011 at 5:15 pm
    Reply

    The only excuse that I have heard from people about why they are still on 3.6 is add-ons. I get the impression that if it wasn’t for add-ons, then every FF users would be on the latest edition. By the time Christmas gets here there will be even more incentive to switch. FF9 will be released and FF10 will be in beta. Both of which will blow 3.6 out of the water. The sooner that add-ons are made compatible by default, the better.

  23. FX9 said on October 4, 2011 at 3:51 pm
    Reply

    http://www.conceivablytech.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/JAVASCRIPT.jpg

    Using a browser 424% slower than Firefox 9.0 in 2011. You should be ashamed of yourselves, Firefox 3.6 users aka the new IE6, holding back the Internet from being able to deploy HTML5 websites.

    1. wh said on October 5, 2011 at 1:44 pm
      Reply

      @FX9:
      Firefox 4+ are not considered stable on Gentoo. AFAIK version can be considered stable after some period of time (maybe around month) without bug reports. As you can conclude, only 3.6.X versions passed to the date.
      I am already searching for alternatives, because I can’t stand Firefox anymore – especially newer versions. And if they will stop supporting 3.6 line I will probably switch to vimprobable2 and surf or maybe Chromium for compatibility (read: broken pages).
      I would prefer JS-free web, so give me a break with this ridiculous “be ashamed with yourselves”.

    2. Crodol said on October 4, 2011 at 7:45 pm
      Reply

      Speed advantage with JavaScript?
      I am even faster, having JavaScript disabled!

    3. Swapnil said on October 4, 2011 at 4:32 pm
      Reply

      No. There are many Firefox 3.6 users that using version 3.6 because something is broken for them in latest Firefox versions. I support Firefox 3.6 users who are forced to stick to version 3.6 because something that they rely on is not working. On the Mozilla Support forum itself, there are many users using Firefox 3.6-

      https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/questions?filter=unsolved&tagged=firefox-36

      The above URL lists out Mozilla support forum members using Firefox 3.6. Unfortunately that includes all Firefox 3.6 users whether in 2010 or 2011. But if you take a look closely, then you will still be able to find plenty of Firefox 3.6 users in 2011.

  24. Nebulus said on October 4, 2011 at 2:21 pm
    Reply

    I am still using latest Firefox 3.6 and I’m happy with it. I switched up every version up to 6.0, and every time I had to tweak some settings and to disable plugins in order for everything to work. So I decided to stay with 3.6 untill there will be a compelling reason to upgrade to the latest version. If, at that time, all addons that I use will not work, I will switch completely to another browser (I already use Opera extensively, but my main browser is still Firefox).

  25. Zen said on October 4, 2011 at 1:31 pm
    Reply

    Half the add-ons I love still don’t work when I upgrade, which is why I always come back to 3.6. I also found the last few upgraded versions to be a little buggy, so I just stay until I can’t anymore (in terms of security updates).

  26. Threshold said on October 4, 2011 at 1:19 pm
    Reply

    I don’t get how people can stay on such an old version of Firefox. I’m on 10 and would never switch back.
    I am also finally able to use a x64 version thanks to lazy asses Adobe and Microsoft who decided to eventually release x64 versions of Flash and SIlverlight.

  27. odio said on October 4, 2011 at 1:07 pm
    Reply

    firefox 4 is much better than 3.6. now about 5, 6, and 7… i dont see difference

  28. Dominic said on October 4, 2011 at 11:53 am
    Reply

    6 months ago 3.6 was perfectly fine as a default browser. There has not been enough innovation in browser features to provide a compelling case to upgrade for an average user. Personally I run v7, and on android I’m up to v9, but my wifes pc is still on 3.6, because she doesn’t care about upgrading for the sake of it.

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