Mozilla Extends Firefox 1.5 Support For One More Security UpdateMozilla Extends Firefox 1.5 Support For One More Security Update

On the day that support for Mozilla Firefox 1.5 was scheduled to end, the company announced support will continue through to the middle of May.

Mozilla released an advisory on Tuesday afternoon alerting users that it will only supply security and stability upgrades for Firefox 1.5 for another month. Basil Hashem, senior director of product management at Mozilla, said in a written statement to information that the original end-of-life date for Firefox 1.5 was April 24, but they decided to push that date off so they can ship one more 1.5.0.x release.

"Mozilla ensures that we provide security and stability releases for multiple versions of the Firefox product," said Hashem. "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. Yet, we encourage users to upgrade to the latest version of Firefox to take advantage of new functionality that is available."

A release date for the upcoming browser update hasn't been announced.

The last update was Firefox 1.5.0.11, which was made available on March 20.

Mozilla is recommending that all Firefox 1.5 users to go to it's "Get Firefox" Web site to download the latest version of the browser, which is Version 2.0.0.3.

As of February, Mozilla's open-source browser in all its versions, had been downloaded more than 300 million times since its initial release on Nov. 9, 2004. However, in January, for the first time in more than year, it lost market share, according to Web metrics vendor Net Applications. That month, Firefox saw its share of the browser market drop to 13.67% from 14% in December, while Microsoft's Internet Explorer reversed a year of consistent decline, to reach 79.75% market share, a gain of 0.11 percentage points from the previous month.