It's time to stop clinging to Firefox version 1.5 and move on up to 2.0, as the end of life period has not only arrived, but has been extended a little for late movers.

By mid-May, the Mozilla Foundation will end security and stability upgrades for Firefox 1.5. The release of Firefox 2.0 and its stable status means 1.5 users have a supported upgrade path they will want to follow.

More details about the end-of-life for 1.5 arrived from Basil Hashem, senior director of product management at Mozilla:

"Mozilla ensures that we provide security and stability releases for multiple versions of the Firefox product. We have communicated the plan for an end of life of the Firefox 1.5.0.x series of products since November of last year (See http://en-us.www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/releases/1.5.0.8.html). Yet, we encourage users to upgrade to the latest version of Firefox to take advantage of new functionality that is available.

The original end-of-life date for Firefox was April 24th, we decided to extend that out by a couple of weeks in order to allow for an additional Firefox 1.5.0.x release that incorporates the ability to accurately offer the user a chance to perform a major update (1.5 -> 2.0)."

Mozilla's Firefox developers have been working on making the browser a safer and faster application. Major extensions seem to have come across to the 2.0 version without much difficulty, as have themes. The shift in support to 2.0 after mid-May should be enough motivation to go forward with the upgrade before that time arrives.

Mozilla, Firefox