Do I need to include Firefox 5 in cross-browser testing?

Question

Firefox 5 introduced auto-updating. I noticed that my installation of FF5 has already updated itself to version 6.

Does this mean that, like older versions of Chrome, Firefox 5 doesn't really need to be included in my cross-browser testing battery? Or is there a way some users may prevent it from updating that I should worry about?

Answer 1

You should look at the statistics when making such decisions. At this point, only 12% of Firefox users are using Firefox 5, with 55% being on Firefox 6. For comparison: Firefox 3.6.x is still being used by 20% of the users, Firefox 4 by 5% of the users.

I think that once the old branches (especially Firefox 3.6) expire you will indeed be able to concentrate on the latest Firefox release. The current tendency is that the previous release becomes irrelevant two weeks after its successor is released. While there will always be some who turn off auto-updates, the numbers are pleasantly low.

Source of statistical data: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/statistics/addon/1865. Feel free to compare with other sources.

Answer 2

Though it "auto-updates", I'm always given the choice to do so.

For instance, I often don't install the update until I know my add-ins (especially FireBug) are not flagged as being disabled with the new version. This, among other contingencies, may suggest to keep FF5 support.

Answer 3

Always include Firefox 5 cause there are plenty of developers and users that somehow have disabled the auto update feature for whatever reason they have.

The user can, as said by Brad, always make the choice to update or not. They could edit some registry values or just using about:config, so always include FF5, etc..

Answer 4

Does this mean that, like older versions of Chrome, Firefox 5 doesn't really need to be included in my cross-browser testing battery?

If you are going to support older version you should always test it with older versions.

Auto-update can be disabled on most (/ all?) platforms.

Answer 5

I would say for your applications sake that you use AT LEAST one previous version of the popular browsers as well as their current addition when testing. Many people take awhile to update or never update. A large portion of the business world still uses IE6 for instance.

Answer 6

If you are maintaining a production site, perhaps monitor your web analytics to see what percentage of your users are lingering on FF5. That'll determine how best to serve your users.

As for the topic of auto-update taking hold, there could be any number of reasons why users lag. I declined to update to FF6 on my local machine the first few times it offered to, for fear of a few beloved developer plugins breaking. Unnecessarily cautious, in this case...

Answer 7

Firefox has a checkbox in preferences that lets you disable updates if desired. So yes, users can turn off updates.