Mozilla to offer Firefox 3.6 users upgrade to 7.0.1

Today Mozilla will offer those Firefox users sticking with version 3.6 a chance to upgrade to the lastest 7.0.1 version.

This was announced by Firefox release manager Christian Legnitto in a mailing list message to mozilla.dev.planning earlier this week:

Just a friendly reminder that we are planning to offer the Firefox 3.6.23 -> 7.0.1 advertised update this Thursday, 2011-10-6.

What does the advertised update mean?

* We will be offering an advertised update (also sometimes called a “major update”) for Firefox 3.6.x -> Firefox 7.0 on 2011-10-06 (1 week and 2 days after Firefox 7’s release)

* The advertised update has no bearing on support levels. It does not mean Firefox 3.6 is end-of-life

* The advertised update has no bearing on the Firefox ESR proposal

* This is part of the old release process and is unchanged from what we have been doing for the past 3+ years

* The prompt is opt-in…if users decline, they stay on 3.6.x and get security updates until the next time we decide to prompt

* We did this for 3.0.x -> 3.5, 3.5.x -> 3.6, 3.6.x -> 4.0 and 3.6.x -> 5.0…nothing new

* If enterprise deployments have advertised/”major” updates disabled in rollouts their users will not see the prompt but they will see Firefox 3.6.24 when it is released on 2011-11-08

This is mainly to move regular Firefox users who don’t know there is an update up to a newer/better version if they are so inclined.

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.

You can still decline the update if you feel that way.