Mozilla gives passive-aggressive missive to pre-Firefox 3.6 hold-outs

Upgrade now, thankyouplease

Mozilla has begun shepherding Firefox fans through the browser door marked 3.6, in a move to encourage users to upgrade to the open source outfit's latest surfing tool.

As of yesterday, Mozilla claimed that Firefox 3.6 had been downloaded by over 100 million people since it landed in January this year.

That milestone was enough for the organisation to start haranguing stick-in-the-mud types on earlier versions of Firefox to get with the programme and upgrade.

Uber Mozilla man Mike Beltzner said his team of free browser bandits were "proud" of the number of downloads Firefox 3.6 had clocked up since launch.

"Starting today, users running older versions of Firefox will be offered the choice of upgrading to Firefox 3.6. We’re presenting this upgrade offer for our users who may not realise that a new version is available," he said.

Firefox fans will be presented with a pop-up screen prompting them to either sleep on it by "deferring the decision for 24 hours", turn down the offer, or hit the button for an upgrade to the latest version of Mozilla's browser.

"The offer screen will only appear after 60 seconds of keyboard inactivity to ensure we don’t get in the way of anyone’s activities," said Beltzner.

However, some Firefox users have been reluctant to upgrade the browser through fear of losing add-ons created in earlier versions that are missing in 3.6. Ever-sensitive Mozilla tried to allay those concerns.

Firefox 3.6 is "fast, stable, compatible with over 90 per cent of the thousands of Firefox add-ons, and contains new features such as lightweight themes and plugin version checking," said Beltzner. ®