Criteria for OS EOL

Mozilla bases changes in supported operating systems on:

• population size and trends
• vendor support
• testing resources
• technical feasibility of continued support

Drivers

• Team asking for EOL of an OS
• Product Team - Asa Dotzler
• Marketing - Laura Forrest
• Release Management - Alex Keybl, Lukas Blakk, or Bhavana Bajaj
• PR - Mark Lavine or Erica Jostedt
• Add-on Hotfix lead - determined on a per-hotfix basis

Steps for EOL

1. Team asks for EOL consideration on dev-planning and dev-platform, with justification based upon the criteria above. This must happen at least 3 cycles prior to desired EOL.
2. Allow time to discuss on those lists
3. Final call on whether to proceed comes from the Product and Release Management teams
4. Bugs filed for no longer offering updates/installs to the affected OS version
5. Timeline for EOL is determined by Release Management and Engineering
6. Bug filed for EOL communication hotfix targeted specifically at EOL OS. Decision must be made at the versions of Firefox we target with the communication (all, or last version before EOL)
7. Test the hotfix on the Beta population, two cycles prior to release EOL
8. Either leave up the beta hotfix or roll out a release version at least a cycle before EOL
9. Blog about the decision at least a cycle before EOL

Past EOL Efforts

• bug 741004 – Create a hotfix add-on to communicate the FF13 de-support
• bug 774509 – We need to communicate the FF17 OS X 10.5 EOL to our users (add-on hotfix)

Past Blog Posts

• https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2012/03/23/upcoming-firefox-support-changes/
• https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2012/10/04/we-bid-you-adieu-spotted-cat/