is now accounting for 11.07% of the market. Mozilla has even sacrificed version 1.5 of its open source browser for Firefox 2.0. With support cut at the end of June, Firefox 1.5 dropped to just 2.85%." Firefox 2 began to lose notable market share to Firefox 3. Within 24 hours after its release, Firefox 3 usage rose from under 1% to over 3% according to Net Applications in that time period. Firefox 2 market share consistently dropped, eventually being surpassed by Firefox 3 in 2008 and Firefox 3.5 in 2009 in the general browser market as the Firefox version with the greatest share, and by early 2009 had dropped under 3 percent. Release compatibility End of Life Firefox 2.x was end-of-lifed in December, 2008. With roughly 26 months of support, only Firefox 3.6 was supported longer. The Gecko 1.8.1 browser core continued to receive patches for projects such as Camino, K-Meleon, and SeaMonkey, even after official Firefox releases had ceased. By 2011, the 1.8.1 core had become obsolete, as major websites dropped support for it by employing newer technologies for presentation and complex scripting. The latter can be resource-intensive with the older core, and users stuck with it should use NoScript to avoid problems with scripts that take too long to process (at the cost of losing some or all site features beyond basic functionality). Services with large user bases have relegated browsers with the Gecko 1.8.1 rendering engine to using lightweight or mobile versions of their sites, alongside recommendations to upgrade the browser; while others only recommend to upgrade. Nevertheless, there is still a very large number of websites that are freely usable and navigable with Firefox 2.0 or equivalents, alone because many of them must still support other older browsers, like Internet Explorer 6 or IE7. Release history See also Firefox early version history References External links Mozilla Firefox homepage for end-users Mozilla Firefox project page for developers Mozilla EULA 2 2006 software Free software programmed in C++ Gopher clients History of web browsers Linux web browsers MacOS web browsers POSIX web browsers Unix Internet software Windows web browsers Software that uses XUL