Mozilla Announces Long Term Support Version of Firefox

mvar writes "After a meeting held last Monday regarding Mozilla Firefox Extended Support Release, the new version was announced yesterday in a post on Mozilla's official blog: 'We are pleased to announce that the proposal for an Extended Support Release (ESR) of Firefox is now a plan of action. The ESR version of Firefox is for use by enterprises, public institutions, universities, and other organizations that centrally manage their Firefox deployments. Releases of the ESR will occur once a year, providing these organizations with a version of Firefox that receives security updates but does not make changes to the Web or Firefox Add-ons platform.'"

Comments

Good

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a nice solution to the problem everyone has been complaining about.
I really see no complaints to this move.

(inb4 shill)

Re:Good

[freedumb2000]

I hope they will do the same for Thunderbird.

Re:Good

[deadsquid]

The Thunderbird team is talking about an extended support released on their mailing list. There's more info on the Mozilla Wiki, but it is being planned.

Re:Good

[Hadlock]

ESR's support is only for a year though, it seems? It might take institutions 2-3 months to decide it's worth upgrading to. A 2 year solution seems like a better, long term plan. In 2002-2009, having your web browser being a year out of date meant losing out on a lot of features and security fixes, but in the last 2 years innovations have really slowed down and I think 2 years support (as opposed to 1) would give institutions a lot more reason to stick to Firefox. Think of it - the many 4 year undergrad students (perhaps the less technically inclined student) would only have to experience one change in the web browser in their college career in school computer labs, etc. By changing this yearly, you're just adding another thing to the pile of the "annual make sure it all works together without crashing checklist".

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox was at version 3.5 in 2009.
Even FF 3.6 (2010) was much slower than FF 9 is now. I'm glad I upgraded and didn't stick with the old one.

From http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/3.6/releasenotes/

Support for new CSS attributes such as gradients, background sizing, and pointer events.
Support for new DOM and HTML5 specifications including the Drag & Drop API and the File API, which allow for more interactive web pages.

Many interesting stuff also in http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/4.0/releasenotes/ and http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/5.0/releasenotes/ and the next ones.

Re:Good

[_0x783czar]

Agreed. This is a smart move for the Mozilla foundation and should only bring greater reliability to the platform. As an active user of both Chrome and Firefox, I'm glad to see Mozilla making moves to keep their product a viable solution for companies and organizations in the long run.

Re:Good

[BZ]

Er... Browsers are adding security improvements and features at a much much faster rate now than in the 2002-2009 timeframe. This is true at least for Microsoft, Mozilla, and Google.

In the specific case of Mozilla, it has about 60x more employees now than in 2002 (and 3x what it had in 2009). It would be _really_ odd if improvement rate were actually slower as a result, since the codebase was already quite mature in 2002.

Re:Good

[couchslug]

Enterprise customers who aren't ACs may think differently as later posts indicate....

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a nice solution to the problem everyone has been complaining about.

Standards-compliancy? I've only heard those complaints from MCSEs.

Re:Good

[Hadlock]

I would assume LTS would include security fixes, but would be a feature freeze with only security updates (improvements)? Did I mis-read the blurb when it said "providing these organizations with a version of Firefox that receives security updates but does not make changes to the Web or Firefox Add-ons platform"?
 
Honestly I could care less about most new features, 99.99% of the time features add extra clutter and are better executed as plugins anyways.

Re:Good

[hairyfeet]

I don't think its "improvements" folks are complaining about friend, its the constantly breaking shit. For example I have 9 tabs open in Dragon (Chromium based) ATM AND a video downloading on a 1.8GHz Sempron nettop and I still have a good 30% CPU free. I USED to be able to do the same on FF but once it hit FF 4 I found FF was completely unusable on any AMD short of a dual core and at FF 9 its barely functional at all. Oh they improved, if you call going from 100% to 95% CPU with one tab an improvement, but I don't.

Mozilla has been all over the place with regards to QA and don't pretend like you don't know what i'm talking about as you ALL do, the Linux version? Its okay. The Windows version? Shite on a crusty roll. If they just want to be the browser for Linux not a problem just say so but when I gain 30% battery life on my AMD netbook just by switching away from FF to quote the old K's Choice song "Something's Wrong". Now i'm not a coder so i can't tell you why but I CAN tell you that using AnVir Task Manager to monitor CPU and memory usage FF runs better with less resources on a first generation Pentium 4 than on a brand new AMD multicore which tells me they have a problem in their build somewhere. The 3.x versions weren't like that, they seemed to be about equal, but something they did after 4 made FF take a massive dump on any non Intel CPU and I've been told they don't use the Intel cripple compiler but it sure as hell don't act like it. Opera, dragon, Safari, I don't see this weird CPU preference with ANY other browser I've tried, just FF.

As someone who was on FF before it was called FF and the Moz suite before that I vainly try each release hoping they'll fix the problem but so far its been 5 versions and no dice. In the same period Dragon went from version 8 to version 16 and the only change was it actually uses less memory now...oh and the little Dragon Eye button is on the left instead of the right. Man I miss NoScript so I truly hope things get better but I'm not tossing a machine just because the browser is a piggy, not when it works perfectly fine with more than a half a dozen tabs open in dragon and opera.

As for TFA businesses won't use FF after they got burnt with their number jumping stunt and they still can't get proper GPO support except through a third party which just won't cut it. you have to give admin rights to Mozilla and good luck keeping the users from installing any damned thing they want in FF, so I doubt we'll see businesses use it. The business market will be split between IE and Chrome which gives GPO support and doesn't need admin rights. Sadly the numbers don't lie and if FF was on the right tracks their numbers wouldn't be taking a nosedive.

I really wish the devs would just sit down with some focus groups and ask their opinions instead of aping chrome, if I had wanted Chrome I would have been using Chrome, yes? Cut out the bling, strip it to the bone and let the USERS decide through extensions what is in there and what ain't, and work to be the fastest, lightest, most nimble browser out there, remember when that was your mission statement? Back before you went nuts with adding crap and trying to copy chrome, back when you first split off from the suite, remember? Come back Mozilla, we miss you and don't want to see you crater okay? there are many of us that would be happy to come back if you'd just make a product we could use, so come on back Mozilla and start being the best Firefox you can be instead of a Chrome ripoff.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you care less?

How much less could you care?

How important is this topic to you?

Personally I couldn't care less, even if I tried. I have no interest.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Man I miss NoScript

Cut out the bling, strip it to the bone and let the USERS decide through extensions what is in there and what ain't

You mean just like Chrome does(n't)? You were saying about NoScript...?

Re:Good

[Billly Gates]

Oh please.

If your organization takes 2 -3 month just to *think* on whether to upgrade then you have problems. IE thr darling of enterprise users has an anual release cycle now. Its the new norm and with browsers following standards it shouldnt be that much of a problem like it was leaving IE 6 when apps had to be rewritten. Think of it as a security update and not a different release of IE with a different set of bugs?

I suppose it doesnt matter as enterprises have all downgraded to IE anyway. Those MCSEs look liked geniuses for sticking with IE 7. Grr. No corporation will touch FF for a long time after last year.

Re:Good

[pavon]

It might take institutions 2-3 months to decide it's worth upgrading to.

They will continue to offer security patches for the old ESR 3 months after the new ESR is released. That is enough time to test and deploy the release. It isn't enough time to wait for third party web apps to fix their shit, but based on how long it took them to fix their IE6-dependent shit, no length of support will be long enough for them.

Think of it - the many 4 year undergrad students (perhaps the less technically inclined student) would only have to experience one change in the web browser in their college career in school computer labs, etc.

Actually more than half of students are running chrome or firefox, and upgrading frequently, even the less technically inclined.

By changing this yearly, you're just adding another thing to the pile of the "annual make sure it all works together without crashing checklist".

All the universities I have attended have had FF installed on all their machines, and didn't have trouble keeping up with the old release pace. Firefox 3.5 came 1 year after 3.0, then 7 months later 3.6, and 14 months later 4.0 came. The 3.5 and 4.0 releases had bigger changes in them than the ESR releases will, and there was more crufty non-standards websites around to break as well.

In my 15 years of hanging around campuses, I have heard lots of gnashing of teeth about upgrades to Blackboard and class registration software, and none about upgrading Browsers.

Re:Good

[petermgreen]

Agreed

According to the actual proposal they plan to support them for 54 weeks with an overlap of 12 weeks.

That is very little overlap between releases in which to plan your upgrade policy and since the changes won't come at any particular time of year it will be difficult to tie it in with other upgrades.

Re:Good

[Kjella]

It might take institutions 2-3 months to decide it's worth upgrading to.

2-3 months? Try 2-3 years, if you let them. I remember back in 2009, when there was a huge campaign to kill IE6 here in Norway, like a majority of the news sites in the country including all the top ones, government sites, our version of eBay and such had banners saying you're using an outdated browser, upgrade now. It just became one big flash mob, it even hit slashdot. Now IE7 was released in 2006 so this had been coming for years. But at a client of mine I talked to a guy in IT and he was embarrassed to work there. Why? Because they had just recently deployed a big new system image, that they promised would bring them up to modern platforms and standards and all that blah blah. As you've probably guessed by now, it still shipped with IE6 because they had some troublesome internal apps. So the first thing that happened when people got this wonderful new image and went to check the headlines were huge banners saying "You're horribly outdated, upgrade now!". Or well the message was a little nicer, but that was the gist of it. Without that much egg on their face, they'd probably use it another few years...

Re:Good

[BZ]

The LTS would include critical security fixes. It wouldn't include all minor security fixes or general architectural improvements that improve security-in-depth, because typically those have visible effects and the whole point of the LTS is to avoid such effects. Or put another way, "does not make changes to the Web or Firefox Add-ons platform" excludes a wide range of security improvements.

To be more specific, fixing an exploitable crash is LTS material. Adding JIT hardening or process separation or something like HTTP Strict Transport security or UI changes to improve the ability of users to make informed security decisions are all not LTS material.

Re:Good

[RoLi]

Exactly!

In fact I think they only did the Firefox-LTS version because people got the idea to fork it, not because they really listen to their users. Maybe somebody could threaten to do a Thunderbird-fork...

However, Thunderbird is not as profitable (important) as Firefox. Firefox brings in AFAIK 100 Million/year while Thunderbird probably brings close to nothing.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

are you out of your mind?
browsers evolve faster than ever. there's new requiered "html5 " stuff to support every 3 month or so. mainly because Google implements it server side and client side while owning most major sites.
if you don't at least update once a year you will loose access to important features.

as much as id prefer to agree with you, 1 year is a good.compromise at today's pace.

Re:Good

[hedwards]

I like Firefox, but all the constant short freezes are really aggravating. Despite what the trolls say, Firefox doesn't use that much RAM on a typical desktop and is reasonably quick, but those regular freezes are really annoying and ought to be something that they can be fixed, those weren't a problem before Mozilla switched to this asinine release schedule.

I honestly have no idea whether it's just a coincidence or there's a causal relationship, but it is really annoying.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

If they do t-bird, I wish they'd offer a customize option that makes it look and act like a real mail tool, NOT an Outlook clone.

Side note: I have to be amused by the acronym. I'll have to email ESR this evening and ask how he's going to support FF....

                  mark

Re:Good

[rubycodez]

there are no problems when a company seriously tests and certifies all the softwares it uses to work together, to specify exact versions. A two year or longer cycle is more appropriate for a browser in mission critical / financial business environment. Such users don't need new features or eye candy to do their job.

Re:Good

[Hadlock]

You've got to draw the line somewhere though. I would be very nervous to have a bunch of untested updates running around on my network, especially if my job/performance review/bonus depended on the quality of someone elses' untested code.
 
I'm not especially keen to answer my boss about a security exploit in a new feature that ruined the company by saying "yeah we just let it update itself, i don't really get involved in all that. it seems to work ok most of the time, I'm sure we'll catch it in time NEXT time". At least in the real world if something happens you can fall back on "we're using the secure version that we've tested against known exploits; this new exploit was out of our hands. Since we're familiar with the software we have, we were able to reduce the damage by X".

Re:Good

[LingNoi]

It's not the users that need them it's the developers that are tired of supporting old browsers because some asshole like you thinks not updating a browser is a life and death decision for a business.

Re:Good

[BZ]

Oh, I understand perfectly why a managed deployment environment might want an LTS release, both to ease deployment and for the practical "well, we tested it against the things we knew about" bit.

My point was that not updating your browser for 2 years right now will leave you with a browser that's considered hopelessly insecure by the standards of the day (not preventing entire new classes of attacks, etc), even if you patch actual exploitable security holes that come up.

Re:Good

[TheRealGrogan]

Yes, it's about time too. I'd consider going back to Firefox in that case. (Been using Chromium)

I stopped installing Firefox on customer computers too because it got to be too much of a nuisance. Anything that causes me to get time wasting phone calls has to go. I have actually been leaving people alone and just letting them use Internet Explorer. Most people like it better. I have to admit that. (It's not the best thing for them, as I do get more calls for $ervice with IE users)

Some people have Google Chrome that's been foisted on them and they let it become the default. Some people like it (and I praise them for it), but others are grateful to have their default changed back to IE. Chrome is too weird for them... like trying to operate a brick or something with the well hidden user interface elements.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

It is, and its mostly the fault of the people who make browsers... all they need to do is to refuse to render pages that are not strictly complaint with W3C standards and the problem will disappear in a few years.

Re:Good

[Darinbob]

Typically supported software won't include new features but will include bug fixes. So it really depends on what Mozilla considers an improvement versus a bug fix. Ie, if they reduce memory leaks I would call that a bug fix that should be available to any supported version rather than being used as a feature so that people are encouraged to upgrade.

Re:Good

[BZ]

Supported software doesn't get all bug fixes. Certainly not if it's supposed to not change outward behavior. For example, the ESR would pretty much by definition not get HTML/JS/CSS/etc spec compliance bug fixes.

It would also not get memory leak fixes if those affect extension compat or involve a new GC architecture or anything else major... Simple self-contained memory leak fixes might get backported, of course.

Re:Good

[RebelWebmaster]

There's a lot of work underway now to improve cycle collection times, which is where many of the pauses come from. Also, work is underway for both Generational and Incremental GC, which should improve things on the GC side. At least with a rapid release schedule, those improvements will ship when they're ready rather than waiting for other things to finish up first like they would have in the past.

Re:Good

[BoberFett]

If my Time and Attendance web based software stops working because the browser decides to upgrade itself and my thousands of employees are unable to clock in and out, then yes, it is a life and death decision.

You little kiddies and your narrow POV from your mom's basement are amusing, I'll give you that.

Re:Good

[__aasdno7518]

I like this idea .I like the long term releases in the 'buntus and this should be just as pleasing to use.

Re:Good

[Synerg1y]

Somehow, I can't help thinking that everybody will probably switch to this version if it's even a little more stable. Not a fan of freezing ff at google.com, not at all...

Re:Good

[rubycodez]

I am a developer, and any necessary data entry / validation / upload / download task can be done on any browser made in the last ten years.

It's assholes like you that make bloated crapware, because you think you need to use every gee-whiz feature that comes with a software library and IDE.

Re:Good

[iggymanz]

Developers of enterprise software should not be mandating versions, they should be TOLD what version of browser they will support. Tail does not wag dog, you devs are TAIL.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a nice solution to the problem everyone has been complaining about.
I really see no complaints to this move.

"Long-term" support is only for about 15 months, with a three-month overlap between LTS versions.

The company I work for releases a new version of our software in mid-summer, so it can make its way up the publishing chain in time for the fall university semester. Decisions about what features will be in the software (eg. official support for specific browser versions) need to be made several QA cycles before that so that bugs can be fixed; features that require new code need to be decided on even further in advance. This basically means that if we're going to support a version of Firefox in September, it needs to be in our hands by May at the latest; if the LTS version is released every August, we can never support it.

This schedule isn't something that we can change, either, because it's tied to the US collegiate school year and the needs of other companies.

Re:Good

[hairyfeet]

Its not trolling Hedwards its different arches. I bet you are on Intel, yes? For some reason memory and CPU spiking is MUCH worse on AMD and is different even on different sockets. For example socket 754? runs like shit, socket 939? Little better. socket AMD2? Shit, socket AM2+ or AM3 chips? Better. Their build quality is frankly all over the place and its quite maddening and since version 5 a first gen Pentium 4 will often do better with FF than the latest AMD chip. That is the reason why i had to switch all my users over to Comodo Dragon, as i got tired of the "Hey now my PC is acting slow and jerking!" which is what you call the freezing problem.

BTW launch task manager or get AnVir Task Manager or any other manager that will allow you to monitor CPU and mem load in real time and launch FF and watch what happens. Those 'freezes" are FF slamming the CPU at 100% and causing the whole system to stall as FF grinds the hell out of the CPU, which considering it'll sometimes do it on pages that are pretty plain jane and boring I have to wonder WTF is FF doing that it needs 100% CPU time just to process a static page. Maybe its their JS engine, maybe they have a parser issue, fuck if i know but I can tell you that even typing in a textbox I can watch the CPU jumping like a frog on a hot plate with FF.

Re:Good

[hairyfeet]

You seem to be an insider so answer me something: WTF is it with FF and AMD CPUs? Are they using the ICC? Are they using Intel based profiling in their builds? Because in my own tests I've found you get more consistent performance on a first gen Pentium 4 than you get on the latest AMD which makes me believe its something in the build process. I've found it to be particularly bad on AMD single cores and the bobcats as it'll spike at 100% CPU on page load and just seem to hang there for quite awhile. I put the exact same version of FF on a 2.3GHz Intel Celeron and I don't see that, same OS, same RAM, only difference is the CPU.

Re:Good

[andsens]

Yup, I think he needs to watch this

Re:Good

[Billly Gates]

My hunch is if it runs in FF 3.6 then it is standards compliant and should run fine in newer versions unless it uses HTML 5 which is still in draft where implementations might change between versions. It is not like it is an IE 6 app where it needs to be rewritten for IE 7 and each subsequent version of IE.

I know you are a professional developer as I read your comments and I am an amature just learning the horrors of learning IE 6 for a project I am working on, but I assume certifying for a newer release of FF is more akin to upgrading Office. Not as big as a deal as a whole platform upgrade like Windows or IE is. Maybe it not that simp,le?

Many corporations did use FF for internet access and IE for intranet access. Many now just force everyone to use ancient versions of IE and bring their phones and computer from home to do internet stuff work related as IE 6 is useless on the WWW. I had a client where it was that bad as they refuse to upgrade beyond XP SP 2 which means IE 6 and no security updates.

IE 8 is ok but its age is certainly showing. I am rebuilding my image on a home PC and before downloading other browsers I popped out IE 8 under win7 and went to maps.google.com and sattelite view was INCREDIBLY slow! I downloaded FF 3.6 and google maps too was TERRIBLE with the old javascript interpreter. I got spoiled from JIT ajax in IE 9, firefox, and Chrome. As clouds take over older browsers will be painfully and obsolete. IE 10 will be coming out in a few months and IE 11 next year. IE 6,7 should not be used and I certainly do not want to use IE 8/FF 3.6 by 2013.

Once a year is not bad if things do not break or have to be rewritten. Lets hope by 2017 in 5 years that this will be a reality as the code is standards compliant and not hack specific per one version compliant.

Re:Good

[surveyork]

You might be interested in "Bug 490122 - Firefox periodically becomes unresponsive/freezes: video jerks/pauses/halts; links, tabs, menus stop responding" https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=490122

My experience is the opposite: I used to suffer many short pauses since 3.0 to 3.6. Then, I completely uninstalled and reinstalled Firefox (deleting even the leftover directories) when Fx 4 was released and voila -no more pauses. It was a bit of a hassle, since I only recovered my bookmarks & history, but it was worth it because I no longer experienced the annoying pauses. If you think this bug fits your problem, consider voting for it. Cheers.

Re:Good

[jc42]

In the specific case of Mozilla, it has about 60x more employees now than in 2002 (and 3x what it had in 2009). It would be _really_ odd if improvement rate were actually slower as a result, ...

It wouldn't surprise me. One of the long-standing rules in software development is "Adding people to a late project makes it later". The more people working on it, the longer it'll take.

Management never seems to understand this, though in my experience, all their data supports it -- at least when you have >2 people involved in any component. Two people have a chance of communicating; 3 or more people make a committee, and we all know what happens in committee meetings.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

May I ask why you don't use the NoScript equivalent for Chrome ScriptNot? Is it missing some necessary feature? A memory hog?

Re:Good

[BZ]

I think you underestimate the number of components a web browser has. Most Mozilla code has 1-3 people who actually deal with it on a regular basis, as far as I can tell.

Re:Good

[RebelWebmaster]

Not an insider, just a community member who reads a lot of bugs :-). Windows builds are done on MSVC 2005 with profile guided optimization enabled. Mac and Linux builds are done with GCC 4.2 also with PGO enabled. No clue about AMD CPUs, though, sorry. First I've ever heard of someone having problems like that.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a nice solution to the problem everyone has been complaining about.
I really see no complaints to this move.

(inb4 shill)

Too little, too late. It's nice to see they are finally starting to slowly pull their heads from their asses, but as for the company where I work... well we've already spent a considerable amount of time, money, and effort moving off Firefox as a platform and we're not going to move back just because they're promising some Warm Fuzzy feelings.

But let's get to the meat of the problem. The current rapid release versions really should be considered Beta software, and the extended support version is the actual Gold or Final release. They intentionally avoided using such terms, because most users would get upset if they called their Beta versions Beta instead of calling them 'rapid release'. But I see that more and more often with companies these days who refuse to admit up front that they're releasing unproven code into the wild, and are inventing new words for the same old thing.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you care less?
How much less could you care?
How important is this topic to you?
Personally I couldn't care less, even if I tried. I have no interest.

You had enough interest to come on here, dig through the comments, and find something to bitch about. So it appears by your actions that yes, you do indeed care, which also means yes, you could care less.

Re:Good

[DaVince21]

When I opened this article, I wasn't particularly thinking about "new features", myself. And since that's the thing (s)he couldn't care less about, I don't see a problem here.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

They did it because business users voiced their strong feelings against rapid release. An "idea to fork" is not exactly novel.

Enterprises Will Like This!

[americamatrix]

This will be good news for Enterprises that want(ed) to deploy Firefox but didn't because of Mozilla's release schedule.

Now if there was only a way to control/deploy this through group policy, then Firefox in the Enterprise will really take off.


-th3r3isnospoon

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[grahamlee]

Then, at some point in the future, Mozilla will run a campaign explaining that 10% of the interwebs is on Firefox 11 ESR, but there have been loads of new features and enhancements since then so we should all tell people to upgrade to Firefox 17. Friends don't let friends use IE 6^W^WFF 11.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[acoustix]

FrontMotion Firefox Community Edition has a MSI version that can be pushed out via GPO and also has adm/admx templates available.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[SteelZ]

Now if there was only a way to control/deploy this through group policy, then Firefox in the Enterprise will really take off.

Run "Firefox Setup.exe -ms" to do a silent install or if you must have a .msi, download it from these guys

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[Hatta]

This will be good news for everyone who just wants to browse the web and doesn't need their browser to change every other week. In other words, just about everyone. I expect most users will be on ESR before long.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[deniable]

Only a year? No thanks.Even Ubuntu gives two years for LTS. Add me as a second for FrontMotion.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[Lennie]

Even Microsoft said they will create a new version of IE every year soon.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[Luckyo]

Not only this, but mozilla officially stated in their blog that they will actively work to prevent people from getting ESR version, so only the corporations have access to it "because it shouldn't be the fix for add-on breaking problem".

Basically, "you will have the problems we shove down your throats and you will like them", once again.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[deniable]

They still support their old versions. Making new ones isn't the problem. Dropping the old ones that mission critical apps depend on is the problem.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[deadsquid]

It actually says "The ESR is specifically targeted at groups looking to deploy it within a managed environment. It is not intended for use by individuals, nor as a method to mitigate compatibility issues with addons or other software. Mozilla will strongly discourage public (re)distribution of Mozilla-branded versions of the ESR." Mozilla software will remain freely available. The ESR is not targeted at individuals, and the changes to addon compatibility (compatible by default) and updates (silent/background) in the next 18 weeks will hopefully address a lot of the issues people have with the regular release. In the end, it's up to the individual to choose, but the installers will be available to download if you really want them.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[Chaos Incarnate]

"In the next 18 weeks" is about eight months too late for them to fix those problems. They needed to have all that worked out before Firefox 5.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[MDillenbeck]

Depends on when they are releasing the LTS versions. After all, it doesn't do me a whole lot of good if it comes in middle of the semester - and I agree with other posters, 2 or 3 years might be nice to have. Oh well, at least Firefox is easy to sequence for App-V.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[bigrockpeltr]

This year will be the year of Firefox in the Enterprise!

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[BZ]

This would be somewhat bad, because the ESR will almost certainly be less secure than regular releases. It'll get fixes for critical security bugs, but will _not_ get architecture changes designed to improve security in depth, pretty much by definition.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[DrXym]

It'll still change every other week if there are bugs or security issues that warrant an update.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[owlnation]

Absolutely correct. However, I wonder why Mozilla is trying to prevent the ESR version from having widespread access.

There's no commercial gain in so doing, it's built anyway -- so people may as well use it, it won't affect support particularly -- just move questions perhaps. So where is the harm in giving people freedom of choice? Is freedom of choice not intrinsic in the philosophy of open source software?

I suspect the only reason for limiting the ESR version is vanity and arrogance. FF's arrogant developers know fine well that the ESR version would quickly become the default version of FF out there. It is exactly what everyone wants, a stable version of the software without new, worthless, feature-bloat ever two weeks.

FF developers, why not just have balls to admit you fucked up? Give people a free choice between ESR or the rapid-deployment constant-flux FF versions. See which people prefer -- and then run with that, and concentrate more on that version.

Really, what is the fucking point on forcing your idiotic ideas on users who really want something else? That's why you are too cowardly to make ESR freely available. And we know it.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[icebraining]

No, the problem is developing mission critical apps tied to a single Firefox version (or to Firefox, period). Supporting older FF versions is just putting make-up on the pig.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[pla]

Friends don't let friends use IE 6^W^WFF 11.

Out of curiosity, on what bizarre system do you have ETB mapped to the BS/DEL-like action?

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[jdgeorge]

The reason for limiting the ESR version as much as they propose is almost certainly resource (people) limitations.

By the way, insults to the actual developers who work on code for software that you evidently like (or presumably you just wouldn't care about this issue), only discourage those developers from being interested in your opinion.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[Anonymous Coward]

Dunno why you're modded Troll. I agree and moved to Chrome because of this. (Heck even IE9 *felt* faster, and when your extensions keep breaking in FF, IE9's lack of extensions were less of an issue!) The browser usage stats agree. Goodbye Firefox, it's been fun.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[Anonymous Coward]

"The reason for limiting the ESR version as much as they propose is almost certainly resource (people) limitations."

So, then take the resources from the version no one wants (the quick release) and put them to the ESR. Problem solved.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[unixisc]

I know that you're (probably) being facetious, but why would enterprises go back now? Particularly the ones that had moved to 4, and suddenly saw version numbers being changed on them before they knew it? The damage is done - those who put a lot of effort in migrating to 4 and suddenly found themselves high and dry would by now have moved to something else - be it Firefox, Chrome or Safari, and wouldn't bother spending the time & money in going back to Firefox. And of the others - people would probably either be happy w/ IE, or w/ Chrome. In fact, if they are on XP and IE, the last upgrade they'd have to do is IE8.

Even on Linux where Firefox previously had a bit of a monopoly, now there is Chrome, in addition to Opera, Konqueror and Epiphany. Yeah, I know companies probably won't go w/ the latter, but they can certainly go w/ Chrome as far as Linux browsers go.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[hairyfeet]

What you are advocating is basically the "shit sandwich" approach to programming, where someone lays a hot steaming turd sandwich on your plate and says 'Don't complain because its free!" which kinda ignores the fact its...well shit. if the ESR gets massive downloads while nobody touches the "regular" release, doesn't that tell you something? Like maybe the DEVS ARE ON THE WRONG TRACK and aren't listening to the users? This seems to be a real problem with FOSS in general, just look at KDE 4 and Gnome 3 and how many are working to keep the old version working because hey! Its vetted and solid and not buggy as shit, who'd a thunk it?

in the end numbers don't lie and after years of steadily increasing numbers FF has been nosediving for nearly two years now and I'd argue it AIN'T because of Chrome, because i can tell you supporting consumers 6 days a week we humans are lazy creatures and don't like to change unless we have to. No their numbers have been bombing because the devs are going off on a track where the users don't want to go! The new UI sucks and feels like a chrome ripoff, I don't know if others are seeing the same but in my case FF runs like shit on AMD CPUs, the memory usage if anything is worse, CPU spiking has gotten a tiny bit better in 9 but not much and it still slams the CPU when opening new tabs, but since the devs don't listen to the users its all "itch scratching' and "fuck you because we're going THIS way" and the numbers show what the result of that attitude is. Its not like the bad old days when we had IE or a shitty broken netscape, we have a myriad of choices now, Chrome/Chromium/Dragon/SWIron, QTWeb, Safari, Opera, Kmeleon, IE, just a ton of choices so if the devs don't listen we vote with our feet. I'd say the numbers do the talking better than I ever could and if they were on the right track they'd be going up instead of down.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[93 Escort Wagon]

The reason for limiting the ESR version as much as they propose is almost certainly resource (people) limitations.

That makes absolutely no sense. Are you seriously suggesting the readiness of the software will depend on limiting how many people use it?

Either the software is usable or it's not. The code has no way of knowing how many people are using it.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[grahamlee]

On the "bizarre system" (or perhaps "bazaar system") called GNU. http://www.bigsmoke.us/readline/shortcuts

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[Anonymous Coward]

well you do have the choice. its just not recommended.

if you wanna know the fuck up has been.going rapid release without being prepared.
the manager who enforced that left for google sshortly after. conspiracy theory? not so much l guess. harsh reality. now mozilla is fixing the damage.
you can look this up btw.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[idontgno]

Moz' approach to product improvement is like clearing a minefield. Not by careful detection and painstaking removal. By herding livestock through the field.

Giving sheep the option of staying in fields which have already been cleared of mines is counterproductive.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[hedwards]

The problem with it is that it has little to do with the actual programmers and everything to do with the dumbasses that are running the project. The changes seems to be having adverse effects and rather than recognizing it and doing something about it, they're continue to chase version numbers without understanding why they're getting blowback.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[godztempus]

Most bash systems have ^W as backward-kill-word.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean like frontmotion?

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[broken_chaos]

Uh, Chrome's even worse than Firefox when it comes to forced upgrades...

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[bendodge]

a chrome ripoff

That. I wish I could buy a billboard in front of wherever Mozilla's people work and put up:

If we wanted Chrome, we'd use Chrome. Bring back Firefox.
Sincerely,
Everyone who used Firefox before the versions numbers went haywire

in MASSIVE text as a daily reminder of the old glory days.

Seriously, I shouldn't have to rearrange and twiddle with everything to get Firefox as much like 3.6 as possible every time I install it. What true UI improvements have we had since then? I can think of two: tabs that don't resize while I'm hovering on them, and tab groups. Why was the rest of it randomized?

Also, what's with the stupid launch defaults? I close Firefox when I want a clean slate, not a glorified minimize. "Restore my windows and tabs from last time" is antithetical to the whole idea of closing all the tabs! Can you imagine if Windows restored all your programs and junk from last time? People would come unglued.

Also, we live in an age of large LCD displays. I can spare a few pixels of screen space to keep the bookmarks and buttons I use all day long visible instead of burying them somewhere underneath gloss and shiny.

One last gripe: Tools > Add-ons should take me to Extensions, not the "Wonderful World of Stuff You Could Bloat Your Firefox With." I go to Add-ons to remove extensions other programs installed without asking far more often than I feel the urge to add bloviated toolbars. Speaking of which, can we finally make Firefox ask before allowing programs (like nearly every AV, Skype, whatever) to hang their useless (or worse, Google-search-invading) lampshade in Extensions?

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[Nimey]

From a third party that nobody's ever heard of. Sure.

Nothing doing until Mozilla releases their own MSIs and group policy stuff.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing says "Enterprise Support" than Community Edition.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[steelfood]

Well, there's also the chance that since something's going to be up to a year behind in terms of security fixes, the browser is inherently less secure than the regular version.

In a corporate, tightly managed, closed environment, where few have administrative privileges and there's a huge firewall blocking everything but port 80 and 21 access to other machines, as well as constantly monitoring communications, I suspect it's ok to use a less secure browser. However, on a home user's machine, where pretty much anything goes, the version with the most up-to-date security patches would be the preferable one to use.

Or, it could be what you just said, that FF management is too arrogant to admit they were wrong. Frankly, I think the fact that the ESR is inherently less secure because they only do security updates once a year is more indicative of that than the publicity, but that's just my interpretation of the events.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if you don't want to download it from their website, you can download it from mine. At least you have heard of me, I have over 5.8 million hits on Google. Just reply to this message with your email and I will send you one. You can trust me, after all, I am a Nigerian prince.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[acoustix]

And what kind of "Enterprise Support" are you expecting by using Mozilla's free Firefox browser in the first place?

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, the FF 9 release just broke jQuery (at least one recent version of it), an Ajax API that runs a significant portion of the web. We don't tie mission critical apps to "one version of FF" but we do tie them to 1 version of our APIs and for good fucking reason. When FF goes and breaks it by fucking up their Javascript engine that's a problem for us and our users, that's what we're complaining about.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[Anonymous Coward]

And devs who constantly insult me by blinging out their browser with useless shit and making it harder to use, just like apple and microsoft, discourage me from being interested in their browser.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[BoberFett]

I'm pretty sure these articles said that critical security updates would be done through the year, but that other updates would happen once per year.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[MooseMuffin]

Not sure where all the hate comes from with regards to the faster release schedule. I run firefox on the aurora update channel (updates daily) with addon compatibility checking disabled and nothing ever breaks. Been running this way for nearly a year as my primary browser at home and at work.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[thsths]

> but will _not_ get architecture changes

I wish they would not change the architecture ever 5 weeks...

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[BZ]

There are lots of parts to "the architecture". New GC algorithm? Arch change. Changes to how selector matching works, another arch change.

Browsers implement a several dozen specifications and in-progress specifications. If you figure there are major improvements to support for each one once every two years or so, that comes out to 2-3 such improvements per month.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[hairyfeet]

I hear ya brother and I'd be happy to donate to the "Give FF devs a clue' billboard fund. one of the things that got to me (besides the "FF uses twice as much resources on AMD" which drove me up a fucking wall) was the "Hey we'll just let anyone drop anything in FF and not say shit" problem which I'd say is a symptom of a much larger problem which is FF doesn't know jack shit when it comes to permissions. I don't know how many times I've fired up FF only to find I'd be Binged or Google toolbarred and have to go get that shit out of there. You should look up "Firefox low rights mode" for a giggle, there on one of the FF forums is a step by step which simply disables low rights mode protections for Firefox which just shows their permission management is a bad joke when the only correct answer is make FF an admin. I mean for the love of Pete there is NO reason why a browser, the source of 90% of the malware out there, should have to run at HIGHER permissions than the user!

So while I fire it up with every new release in the vain hope things will get better, the UI won't be a mess, the CPU spiking and memory issues on AMD will be gone, etc I now use Comodo dragon for my day to day which if you haven't tried it is quite nice. i've gone from version 8 to version 16 and there has been NO wild UI changes or wildly varied consistency when it comes to CPU or memory usage, in fact the only real "change" is the dragon's eye option button is now on the left instead of the right, big whoop. Oh and on the performance front its actually managed to get LIGHTER and more responsive with each release NOT less. i can now open 8 or 9 tabs while having a video downloading on a Sempron 1.8Ghz that I use for a nettop at the shop and still have a good 30% CPU free! Hell I can't manage more than 3 in FF and that is if I don't open any video tabs, I open even an SD flash video in FF and its go make a sandwich because the CPU is just gonna grind. Its not flash player either as I have both dragon and FF using the same flash install, its just lousy management on behalf of FF.

I miss Moz but it looks like they got infected by the same disease that infected the Gnome and KDE guys, the "We know better than you so STFU" disease. kinda funny how LXDE and XFCE usage is growing like crazy just like how Moz's numbers are falling like a stone, guess them users just won't STFU and take it huh?

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[dbug78]

Also, what's with the stupid launch defaults? I close Firefox when I want a clean slate, not a glorified minimize. "Restore my windows and tabs from last time" is antithetical to the whole idea of closing all the tabs!

I've just spent 5 hours experimenting with customizing the installer for a company deployment and so I've repeatedly uninstalled and reinstalled Firefox, deleting %appdata%\Mozilla each time. Every time I started it up, it would open about:home and nothing else. It puts a button at the bottom of that screen to restore your last session, but that's it.

Also, we live in an age of large LCD displays. I can spare a few pixels of screen space to keep the bookmarks and buttons I use all day long visible instead of burying them somewhere underneath gloss and shiny.

The bookmarks toolbar? Click the Bookmarks button and check View Bookmarks Toolbar. In the time you took to whine about it, you could have turned it on and off 20x.

One last gripe: Tools > Add-ons should take me to Extensions, not the "Wonderful World of Stuff You Could Bloat Your Firefox With."

Again, based on my work with the installer today, it only defaults to Get Add-ons if you don't have any already installed. If you have extensions, it goes there by default. If you don't, what would the point of going there be?

Speaking of which, can we finally make Firefox ask before allowing programs (like nearly every AV, Skype, whatever) to hang their useless (or worse, Google-search-invading) lampshade in Extensions?

This was added in 8.0.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[CAIMLAS]

I think you're a tad bit cranky.

I used Firefox since before it became Firefox - back when Mozilla was pre-beta. It sucked, but it was faster than the alternative. I used it until around Chrome 7, when the speed and (more importantly) responsiveness far outweighed sticking with Firefox anymore.

I didn't like the UI at first, but since I'm principally a keyboard user and a mouse user only out of necessity, it didn't take me long to warm to Chrome. I don't see much of a point to all the plugins/extenions in firefox: default Chrome comes close to what I want already, and adding mkundootab, adblock, and flashblock is 99% of the way there.

The minimalist UI in both Chrome and Firefox are very welcome. I don't want to have to worry about all those buttons: if I want them, I can add them back, thanks. Most people never even use them. (I can't remember the last time I actually referenced my Bookmarks file, though at one point I know it was well over 3MB before switching to Chrome.) Still: different strokes for different folks.

Firefox is coming back around. It's improving. But it still doesn't do multiprocess, and it still buckles under heavy javascript (largely due to not being MP capable).

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[Lennie]

The other thing isn't good either: 34 versions of IE, 20 versions of FF and god knows how many versions of Webkit with 2 different types of javascript engines.

All these browser organisations are trying to find a good middleground of stable (don't break stuff) and get new features out there so people can test/use them.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[lennier]

And what kind of "Enterprise Support" are you expecting by using Mozilla's free Firefox browser in the first place?

Perhaps at least as good enterprise support as we get from using Microsoft's free Internet Explorer browser?

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[lennier]

> but will _not_ get architecture changes

I wish they would not change the architecture ever 5 weeks...

This. Isn't "architecture" supposed to be something you do once, do right, and then leave the heck alone? If it was supposed to change rapidly, it'd be "fashion". And your architecture should have been designed to accommodate extensions (not fundamental rewrites) from the beginning. If you have to rebuild your foundations every six weeks in a way that breaks existing stuff, that's an admission that you got the design totally wrong.

No, don't say "but we have no way of testing whether our fundamental underlying design is correct! we have to just extremely iterate it until we crowdsource the eyeballs!" That just means that we shouldn't believe you when you tell us that you've got it right this time either. Go back to school until you can learn how to do it once, do it right, and then leave it the heck alone. You've built a platform, now build on that platform, don't keep yanking it away. There's a word for what happens to real architecture when it undergoes rapid forced change: disaster. Try not to take earthquakes and tsunamis as your development model for software, hmm?

(That's probably something the entire software industry needs to do, sadly, not just Mozilla. Go back to school until we actually have a formal science of software engineering that can detect Titanic-sized disasters before they're shipped to the entire Internet. I'm not hopeful it will happen before botnets turn us into a smoking crater though.)

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[lennier]

Browsers implement a several dozen specifications and in-progress specifications. If you figure there are major improvements to support for each one once every two years or so, that comes out to 2-3 such improvements per month.

Or, a dozen changes per year, all rolled up into a single version increment, which is much more sane and manageable.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[lennier]

Supporting older FF versions is just putting make-up on the pig.

Why did they ship a pig to start with? Do they have no pig-detection algorithms in their compile and test suite? Or are the new tweaks to HTML just that, tweaks, and not some fundamental revolution?

There's a point where you have to say "this is no longer an experimental toy, it's a real information-handling tool which real people are using to store information for decades to centuries, and it needs to remain stable so we can continue to access important documents more than six week old." Human language changes on a far slower scale than HTML, and yet we somehow seem to get by with using an alphabet designed by the Romans and numerals built in ancient India.

Innovation is also destruction, and sometimes what we need is continuity, not manufactured slash-and-churn.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[BZ]

I was talking about the rate at which changes are made to the codebase. The frequency at which you tag, branch, and release is somewhat independent of that.

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[icebraining]

The pig is the web app, not Firefox.

There's a point where you have to say "this is no longer an experimental toy, it's a real information-handling tool which real people are using to store information for decades to centuries, and it needs to remain stable so we can continue to access important documents more than six week old."

And it's also a place of innovation where new developments enable us to do things we've never done before. And unfortunately Mozilla doesn't have infinite resources, primarily non-volunteers.

But who are those using FF has to "access important documents"? Mostly companies. So why don't they get up from their asses and together pay for a small team of developers to support an LTS release of Firefox? It'd cost a thousandth of what they benefit by having an excellent platform for developing such apps.

Bitch and moan, is all people do. They get an Audi delivered to their house for free and complain it's not a Mercedes. And they call file sharers entitled. Sheesh.

Human language changes on a far slower scale than HTML, and yet we somehow seem to get by with using an alphabet designed by the Romans and numerals built in ancient India.

Wrong analogy. Of course low level change much less frequently; we're also still using TCP/IP and even HTTP hasn't changed that much.

But you can be sure our vocabulary is evolving every day. Do you also complain when old documents have to be rewritten due to unfortunate changes of meaning?

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[Anonymous Coward]

With 100 million in yearly revenue from Google alone, I expect a fair bit of consistency and dependability.

What about the Native Android Firefox?

[Anonymous Coward]

That won't exist until Firefox 11, so will people be stuck on the non-native Firefox 10 on android for a year?

SWEET!

[idbeholda]

Does it come in a fun-sized package?

Who is paying?

[G3ckoG33k]

Who is paying for Mozilla products?

Do they have any paying customers in Europe or Asia?

Re:Who is paying?

[meow27]

Mozilla needs a high market share in order to convince search engines to give it a better contract.

meaning Mozilla will try to get a larger userbase for firefox, so that the next round it needs more money, It can ask for more money from bing/google/yahoo or whoever is willing to pay for the defualt browser spot for firefox.

so do they have paying customors outside north america? no, it doesn't matter, its the market firefox is trying to expand into to get money later

Re:Who is paying?

[Anonymous Coward]

google pays atleast 80 percent of their income. In fact, all browsers that have a significant market share are paid by google.

Re:Who is paying?

[bkaul01]

IE is paid for by Google? I mean I know Android vendors are paying Microsoft for patent licensing rights, but that's a stretch ...

Re:Who is paying?

[larry bagina]

They just needed to say the magic word (bing!) to triple their google gold.

Re:Who is paying?

[deniable]

IE isn't significant, it's just very large.

Re:Who is paying?

[gman003]

No. Firefox is, at least for now.

Search engine companies frequently bid on being the default search provider for a browser, with the exception of IE and Chrome which, as they are made by companies that also make search engines, don't offer themselves up to the competition.

If a browser has higher market share, they can get more money from the search engines, because they're worth more.

Re:Who is paying?

[bkaul01]

Yes, of course, but he said:

In fact, all browsers that have a significant market share are paid by google.

IE certainly has significant market share, and isn't being financed by Google.

Can't wait!

[Anonymous Coward]

... to see how Slashdot complains about this.

Re:Can't wait!

[gshegosh]

Oh, here you go... So, now Mozilla will have to increment version number by 10 every release, so they keep up with Chrome version numbers?

Eric S. Raymond's personal Firefox?

[Anonymous Coward]

And here I thought ESR would be using a more recent version. Then again, The Jargon File is the very epitome of extended support releases, eh?

Re:Enterprises?

[Anonymous Coward]

No it hasn't, that's ridiculous and you have no means to back that up.

ESR?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to keep reading this as the Eric S. Raymond release.

Re:ESR?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to keep reading this as the Eric S. Raymond release.

My thought exactly.

Re:ESR?

[schwaang]

Yes, the Firefox team is finally going to release ESR after all this time. It proves that Mitchell Baker can be very unforgiving if you forget the safe word.

[I came all this way looking for an ESR joke. C'mon people, throw me a bone here.]

Re:Enterprises?

[gshegosh]

Can you point us to a report that backs that up or we're just supposed to believe an Anonymous Coward? ;)

Oh good. ANOTHER browser to support.

[Anonymous Coward]

One one hand, this is what enterprises want. On the other... it's way old-school thinking. Shouldn't Firefox instead concentrate on not invalidating Addons for EVERYONE? If the "web rendering" is being frozen for specific versions of Firefox, isn't that just going to cause MORE fragmentation? Wouldn't Chrome's silent updates work better, assuming FF doesn't screw things up? Maybe allow a switch to force a specific addon or theme in environments to alleviate the "OMG MY INTERNETZ LOOK DIFFERENT!" fallouts.

As a developer for the general web, I do not look forward to being asked to support a "non-standard" version of Firefox on top of the "public" FF, Chrome, three versions of IE, Safari, PLUS all the various mobile platforms.

Plus, any clients affected by this will just know "I use Firefox", at most.

Re:Oh good. ANOTHER browser to support.

[Anonymous Coward]

"OMG MY INTERNETZ LOOK DIFFERENT!" fallouts.

More like "omg, the shitty web app our employees depend on to do their job no longer works and we are losing thousands of dollars an hour" fallouts. This is (one of) the reason enterprises tightly manage what is on workstations. New major versions of software need to be tested to ensure that they do everything they need to do to keep the business running. This is of course time intensive, hense why "long term support" versions are desirable.

Re:Oh good. ANOTHER browser to support.

[Lennie]

1. It is only one version to support and you can run it next to the latest version of Firefox. I would think this is a good thing if it keeps the people that do not what all those changes on the same older version instead of, some users on 6, some users on 7, some users on 8.

2. What you are looking for is called the "Add-on Compatibility Reporter":

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compatibility-reporter/

It was obviously meant for a different purpose, so with that name it makes it kind of hard to find.

Re:Oh good. ANOTHER browser to support.

[deadsquid]

The ESR is going to be based on Firefox 10 (which, incidentally, changes addons to be compatible by default), and most of the core rendering will not be affected. It is Firefox, but it won't get new features. It'll be "standard", but new additions will not be available, and that's a compromise that corporate deployment groups ere willing to make. Chrome's silent updates present the same problems to these orgs, in that the browser is changing rapidly and orgs have problems with testing and certification on the schedule.

Re:Oh good. ANOTHER browser to support.

[BZ]

> Shouldn't Firefox instead concentrate on not
> invalidating Addons for EVERYONE?

That change is in Firefox 10, shipping in less than 3 weeks.

But "enterprises" (which includes schools and libraries, not just corporations) care about things other than extensions; they have all these intranet apps to worry about too, which normal users do not have to deal with. And intranet apps have a tendency to be coded like it's 1999 (heavy dependence on browser bugs and nonstandard features, targeting only one browser version, etc, etc)

I agree that for the general web this is suboptimal; that's why Mozilla didn't want to do it initially...

On the other hand, it's hard to say which is better for the general web: libraries and schools being able to use Firefox ESR or there being no ESR version of Firefox but libraries and schools being stuck on IE8.

Re:Oh good. ANOTHER browser to support.

[samael]

Version 10 no longer invalidates addons.

Version 12 (I believe) will do silent updates.

Re:Oh good. ANOTHER browser to support.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why web apps should follow standards. Almost none of the "breaking" crap. If you're targeting browser versions, you're doing it wrong.

Re:Oh good. ANOTHER browser to support.

[Anrego]

That's all fine and dandy, unless of course you are living in reality.

One of the chief reasons IE6 persisted so long is the extreme prevalence of amazingly terrible “wow, we pay what for this” web apps at the heart of so many businesses. Fixing the problem of constant major browser versions is a lot simpler than fixing the "we'll take the cheapest option you have" business mentality problem.

Re:Oh good. ANOTHER browser to support.

[steelfood]

Heh, there's an add-on to detect add-on compatibility? What happens when the add-on campatibility reporter becomes incompatible? Stack overflow?

Re:Oh good. ANOTHER browser to support.

[Toonol]

At home, I'm running Firefox 3.6 on one machine, Firefox 9.0 on another, and Opera on a third. Silent updates ensure that I'll be moving the second machine to Opera.

Groovy! Finally, sanity is back!

[ArsenneLupin]

Welcome back, sanity! Finally, we'll again be able to use extensions!

Re:Groovy! Finally, sanity is back!

[Anonymous Coward]

Starting from Firefox 10 all extensions will compatible by default

Re:Groovy! Finally, sanity is back!

[BitZtream]

No they won't.

They'll be making some changes to their absolutely fucking retarded version control system for plugins, that won't make plugins compatible by default.

They API under the hood changes as well, that breaks things, which was the point of the way the retarded versioning system works for plugins, to ensure those changes don't allow plugins to run that are broken.

The problem is that Mozilla doesn't understand that not everyone else on the planet wants to chase them around while they dick with API's repeatedly rather than sit down, come up with an intelligent design, test it, then implement it once and for all. Mozilla calls development builds 'releases'. They don't know what an actual release pattern looks like.

1 year is not long term.

Long Term?

[timmy0tool]

one year is now long term?

Re:Long Term?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, compared to 6 weeks... yes.

Re:Long Term?

[timmy0tool]

Long term is relative... When there are browsers out there with support for 10 years, this still seems very short sighted.

Re:Long Term?

[jlebar]

Long term is relative... When there are browsers out there with support for 10 years, this still seems very short sighted.

I'm sure you'd agree that the 11-year (so far!) support cycle for IE6 has been a boon to consumers and web developers; Mozilla is indeed short-sighted not to want to replicate that rousing success!

Re:Long Term?

[BitZtream]

IE6 has been unsupported by Microsoft for a while.

Re:Enterprises?

[ArsenneLupin]

Can you point us to a report that backs that up or we're just supposed to believe an Anonymous Coward? ;)

And even if there were "reports"... nothing is easier than to set up a small spiderweb of blogs referencing each other claiming whatever you want in whatever "flowery" and buzzword-laden language you want.

Heck, he web is full of reports that claim that horde-blinkers are good for websites or other such nonsense.

Not long enough

[MetalliQaZ]

Once per year is still too quick, IMHO. In my experience, 2-4 years (or more!) would better fit enterprise expectations.

Re:Not long enough

[deniable]

As long as managers make developers do stupid things with browser interfaces a year is going to be way too short.

Re:Not long enough

[Lennie]

Microsoft said they will also move to one release per year.

Re:Not long enough

[deniable]

And those will be for Windows 8. A lot of shops are still rolling out 7. IE 8/9 will be supported for quite a while. XP won't drop out of support for another couple of years so IE 6/7/8 will still need to be supported.

Re:Not long enough

[Anonymous Coward]

I know you're just trolling but there is more to the enterprise than just MS.

Re:Not long enough

[couchslug]

"Once per year is still too quick, IMHO. In my experience, 2-4 years (or more!) would better fit enterprise expectations."

It's a gesture to quiet grumbling on sites like this. It's obviously not intended to work.

Re:Not long enough

[plover]

The real problem is the dependency management the customers have to do.

A longer release cycle will provide organizations more time to build up dependencies on the existing software. If support increases from 1 year to 2 years, that means organizations will build up two years worth of problems. When they finally are forced to upgrade, it will be more than twice as painful.

For example, let's assume that an average of three packages need to be upgraded for each year that passes. If they sat on the same release for 2 years, they'd have to upgrade six packages. Depending on the software, that might mean coordinating a release with six different companies simultaneously, which is a lot harder than coordinating a release with three companies. And unless you're willing to break something, you can't upgrade until all six of the packages are completely upgraded.

The only saving grace is that they'll only have to run a regression test once per release.

The cure is for these companies to stay on top of their apps, making sure they're staying current with the new version of FF even if they aren't planning to roll it out. That way when the forced upgrade cycle catches up to them, it won't be as painful. And if you're diligently keeping everything current, why not ride the most recent FF version anyway?

Re:Not long enough

[Anonymous Coward]

2-4 years?! That's like 2-3 generations in tech time. 2-3 generations for cars is like 10-15 years. When's the last time you've seen a car lot selling brand-new cars that were 10-15 years old models?

Re:Not long enough

[Billly Gates]

Year is fine.

Most intranet apps are IE 6 or IE 7 based and have to be rewritten for any other browser including IT itself!

If it is used for standards compliant web browsing and intranet apps the only thing management has to do is certify it and it will just work unless there is something really funky in the code of the odd intranet app. A 12 week window to do so between releases is fine. If it is still having issues then use IE (which everyone supports) and upgrading FF for internet needs.

You and management is still in IE 6 fear mode from the dark days last decade. That is coming to an end.

Re:Not long enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you considered the cost of back-porting security fixes from rapidly evolving code to code written 4 years ago in your rant?

Did they fire Asa?

[xenoc_1]

This is still reactive damage control to foolish arrogance by Asa "we don't give a crap about enterprises" Dotzler.
That's what you get why you hire a fanboy to become the voice of your company.

Re:Did they fire Asa?

[Rogerborg]

Sadly no, the ADHD Kid is still jumping up and down and shrieking about how great it is that there are (at least) 4 major versions currently on the go. I only wish I were joking about that.

Re:Did they fire Asa?

[jginspace]

This is still reactive damage control to foolish arrogance by Asa "we don't give a crap about enterprises" Dotzler. That's what you get why you hire a fanboy to become the voice of your company.

Indeed. Let me provide a link to go with your insight.

By the way is the about box still showing the version number?, I'm still on 3.6.

Re:Did they fire Asa?

[Anonymous Coward]

And the idiots who are constantly bitching around because they can't divide the major version number by 10 and add this to 3.6 are much better I suppose.

Re:Did they fire Asa?

[Tridus]

Yes it is. It also still falsely tells you it's up to date if it can't check: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=679742

Re:Did they fire Asa?

[Anonymous Coward]

What are the alternatives then?

IE release every 2-3 years
Opera every 2-3 months
Chrome every 1-3 months

So if you want every 2-3 years that leaves IE.

Honestly I have been upgrading from 4 to 9.0.1. The difference seems minimal to me. It is a bit snappier and they rearranged the buttons. I seriously do not see why people are getting in a twist about it? It really better reflects what is going on. They are releasing faster. The version number conveys the information I need. "this one is newer than that one". This has been a argument from the beginning of version numbers. What constitutes bumping the "big" number. They have decided it is every 4 months when they release. With minor points if something breaks. Also anyone who bothered to upgrade to 8 will probably not stick to it.

What is the version of windows you run? Bet without going to a command prompt and typing in ver you have NO idea other than 'its vista/xp/win7'. But service packs and hotfixes do mess with that number. But you have the information you need 'its newer than the other one'. You use probably hundreds of libraries and packages every day and probably do not know what the version number is. Yet somehow this one is magically important.

Think about this they have since the release of 4.0 improved javascript nearly 40%. We would still be waiting on that. They have a new engine coming. What are the chances we would even get that 40% and not have to wait longer because of the new engine? They have done that before. I would rather have the feature when it is done.

Re:Did they fire Asa?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why 3.6, by the way? The current version (9, I think) is faster, uses less memory, and you have to dig to find a non-updated addon.

Re:Did they fire Asa?

[jginspace]

Why 3.6, by the way? The current version (9, I think) is faster, uses less memory, and ...

The last I used was 8 or 7. I was tempted to try it because of the promised dramatic reduction in memory use. I didn't find any reduction, plus I found some pages scrolled with lots of lag (I persisted for two or three weeks but it was just too painful). I tried version 4 too, along with many betas and release candidates - I used to monitor the latest alphas, betas and release candidates but I quit that when they started putting out betas for general release.

Re:Did they fire Asa?

[PresidentLogan]

Bull. Shit.

I wish Ubuntu would let us install Firefox 3.6 rather than slavishly bundling the most recent version with each Ubuntu release.

Re:Did they fire Asa?

[pionzypher]

Which reminds me of a quote ....

listen up. Respect your users or you will lose them. With Firefox, the user is no longer just a spectator, he's a participant. Play nice or face extinction. Seriously.

Imagine... Firefox used to advocate listening to their users.

Re:Did they fire Asa?

[mister_playboy]

Sounds like you should be using a different distro. Check out Debian.

Re:Did they fire Asa?

[Billly Gates]

Actually IE is now at an anual update cycle as well. This is a good thing as it is at least standards compliant now. An IE 9 app should run through future releases fine unlike the horrors between IE 6 to 7 to 8 that caused many enterprises to issue 5 - 10 year browser standard rules.

Like you said things are innovating so fast that none of them can even be implemented until 2015 on desktops leaving the new web on your phone only. IE 7/8 is holding everyone hostage and FF 3.6 too. Things need to move faster but not break in the process.

Re:Did they fire Asa?

[Ramin_HAL9001]

So now Firefox has a runaway version numbering scheme, and in the end they chose to do a long term support scheme. Instead of just sticking with an ordinary yearly release cycle, upping the major number every 2 years, and minor number every 3 months, now they just increment the major number and expect us to remember which ones are long term support releases. I stopped keeping track of what version they are on after Firefox 3.6.

SSL Security Ignoring version?

[Anonymous Coward]

I will pay money, seriously, for a version of firefox that ignores SSL warnings and comes with a java that does the same. It must not ask me to confirm I wish to continue, yes, I trust this site, yes, I trust this app, yes I trust this authority and so on. No popups, no clicking, no mucking about. Just load the website and load the java app without ANY warnings. 50 pounds, waiting. Paypal gift. I don't care what platform - linux, mac, windows. This is a legitimate request, I spend all day on our internal network accessing devices with invalid SSL certificates and each java is self signed.

Re:SSL Security Ignoring version?

[deniable]

I'd be happy if I didn't have to permanently trust every site that has a minor SSL issue. I'm not banking with them, I just want to see the page.

Re:SSL Security Ignoring version?

[omnichad]

Why don't you import the keys used for signing into Firefox? That should take care of it.

Re:SSL Security Ignoring version?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you import the keys used for signing into Firefox? That should take care of it.

How would I get the key that's used for signing for the https page for an HP ILO? There are 1,700 of them currently, I have another ~400 to install. And that's just the SSL page for the ILO, not counting the Java ones.

Re:SSL Security Ignoring version?

[tepples]

How would I get the key that's used for signing for the https page for an HP ILO?

Presumably from HP.

Re:SSL Security Ignoring version?

[Anonymous Coward]

How would I get the key that's used for signing for the https page for an HP ILO?

Presumably from HP.

Exactly, which ain't gonna happen. So, as I say, I'll have a version of Firefox that doesn't care about SSL problems.

Re:SSL Security Ignoring version?

[Anonymous Coward]

How would I get the key that's used for signing for the https page for an HP ILO? There are 1,700 of them currently, I have another ~400 to install. And that's just the SSL page for the ILO, not counting the Java ones.

Admittedly, I haven't used HP ILO in many years, but can't it generate normal certificate requests and get them signed by an internal certificate authority? Is HP that dumb?

Dell's OpenManage system makes it easy to replace the self-signed default certificates with signed certficates.

Then just import your internal CA into firefox as a trusted CA, and into the trusted java certificate store, and all your problems go away.

Re:SSL Security Ignoring version?

[icebraining]

Just use sslstrip locally as a proxy; as the name says, it'll strip the SSL from the connection (while leaving it encrypted from the ssltrip software to the server), so Firefox and Java will only see unencrypted HTTP.
Don't forget to disable the proxy (there are nice addons for 1-click toggling) before browsing the big bad web.

Now, can I have my fifty? Oh wait, Paypal. Thanks, but no thanks.

Re:SSL Security Ignoring version?

[tepples]

So, as I say, I'll have a version of Firefox that doesn't care about SSL problems.

Or next time you can choose ILO systems from a vendor that implements TLS properly.

Re:SSL Security Ignoring version?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be happy if I didn't have to permanently trust every site that has a minor SSL issue. I'm not banking with them, I just want to see the page.

Firefox doesn't know how important the website is to you. Firefox tries hard to protect users from their own stupidity.

And frankly, it costs about USD $20 for a cheapo GoDaddy SSL certificate that is trusted by all major browsers. If a web host can't figure out how to buy & install that, they probably aren't smart enough to be on the internet.

Re:SSL Security Ignoring version?

[icebraining]

Why don't you just uncheck the box that says "Permanently store this exception"?

Re:SSL Security Ignoring version?

[Anonymous Coward]

How would I get the key that's used for signing for the https page for an HP ILO? There are 1,700 of them currently, I have another ~400 to install. And that's just the SSL page for the ILO, not counting the Java ones.

Admittedly, I haven't used HP ILO in many years, but can't it generate normal certificate requests and get them signed by an internal certificate authority? Is HP that dumb?

Dell's OpenManage system makes it easy to replace the self-signed default certificates with signed certficates.

Then just import your internal CA into firefox as a trusted CA, and into the trusted java certificate store, and all your problems go away.

Ah. Interesting. I'll see if I can do that.

Re:SSL Security Ignoring version?

[itsme1234]

In fact is even worse than importing thousands of keys to FF, this used to work "just fine" with the oldish firefox (6 months?). Now it's MUCH worse, sometimes the certificates get regenerated (I'm not sure if it's when you reconfig the box or when you lose power or if it's only limited to really old hardware). I don't have the box in front of me but it's a known issue.
Anyway what happens is that you can't "add exception", "get certificate", etc. The workaround is just to remove all certificates AND then add the certificate that changed! And of course all the others once you start using them.
At least Chrome and IE just complain "not safe" "get me out of here" and other visual signs but in the end they work without any intrusive "under the hood" intervention.

In the end poorly managed https is no worse than http and last I checked this was still (relatively) working in FF. The only danger is that people might assume it's https(=SAFE) when it isn't really as safe as well managed https. Just give clear feedback about it and get the heck out of the way.

Re:SSL Security Ignoring version?

[omnichad]

I haven't verified this, but I found this tip online:

Go to Tools > Options > Advanced > Encryption Tab

Click the "Validation" button, and uncheck the checkbox for checking validity

Re:SSL Security Ignoring version?

[deniable]

Because the last time I tried it, it didn't do anything.

Re:Enterprises?

[deniable]

Mostly because the newer IEs got their act together, not because Firefox is worse.

Hope they are serious

[linebackn]

I just hope they are actually serious about this extended support version. Their other "enterprise" efforts in the past have mostly just been talk.

And then there is still the problem that even if you, the company, are now on the new long term supported version, the beta testers^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h general public will be on newer versions that potentially may do things differently. If your corporate application is also public facing then you still have a problem.

Personally I would encourage regular users to stick with the long term supported version as well.

Re:Hope they are serious

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe you guys should suck it up and test versions faster. It can't take that fucking long can it? Stop slacking.

Re:Hope they are serious

[Anonymous Coward]

Trying to appear seasoned and skilled by using 12 ^h?

First, it's ^H. Second, ^W removes whole words.

But nice try anyway. Now get off my lawn you fucking wannabe.

Re:Hope they are serious

[BZ]

Then you would be hurting those regular users, since the ESR will almost certainly be less secure than the regular version; the longer into its year of life you get the more this will be true.

Re:Hope they are serious

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize the will be releasing security updates as patches right?

Its not as if the entire thing will not be supported. ESR (read extended SUPPORT release)

Re:Hope they are serious

[RebelWebmaster]

You do realize that you're replying to a core Firefox developer, right?

Re:Hope they are serious

[Anonymous Coward]

FTFS:

Releases of the ESR will occur once a year, providing these organizations with a version of Firefox that receives security updates...

So: no, really no.

Re:Hope they are serious

[Anonymous Coward]

So, then the ESR version is useless? And it's a vaporous move to quiet complaining but not actually provide a real service?

"ESR will almost certainly be less secure than the regular version"

Isn't the purpose of a long-term support version of a piece of software to provide version stability WHILE back porting important fixes/fixing bugs in that version? Huh..

Re:Hope they are serious

[RebelWebmaster]

bz pointed out elsewhere in this thread that while ESR releases will get critical security updates backported to them, they won't be receiving any major architectural updates/refactorings that inherently improve security. So in that respect, ESR releases will be more limited security-wise than the mainline release.

Re:Hope they are serious

[RebelWebmaster]

It doesn't make a lot of sense to backport big architectural overhauls to long-term stability releases, no.

Re:Hope they are serious

[Anonymous Coward]

It's highly unlikely that any important security updates would require major architectural changes. That argument is a grasping for a reason to not allow the ESR a common release. In addition, any "major architectural changes" will likely introduce new security holes anyway, which will be fixed, but over time.

If this is the main argument, then it is *technically* true that it may be less secure, but practically, not much of a difference. When making the pragmatic use vs security decision, the slower update pace is far more worth it to both ordinary and corporate users.

Re:Hope they are serious

[Anonymous Coward]

If BZ is a core developer I hope he's not responsible for application security. That was a vapid statement on his part.

Re:Hope they are serious

[RebelWebmaster]

See bz's post and subsequent reply: http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2615802&cid=38664528

Re:Hope they are serious

[Anonymous Coward]

And again, "When making the pragmatic use vs security decision, the slower update pace is far more worth it to both ordinary and corporate users."

Re:Hope they are serious

[Anonymous Coward]

The ^H is quite old and lame pun anyway.

Re:Hope they are serious

[BitZtream]

Seriously?

You guys are such douches.

What the fuck is the point of an ESR version if you aren't patching it in a timely manner?

Are you just going to create an install with a 'ESR' tag, put it on the server, forget it and call that 'extended support' to shut people up?

I can not possibly imagine why you would call it an Extended SUPPORT release if you aren't going to actually support it.

Are you implying that your infrastructure for the software is so broken that its going to require multiple major overhauls in order to catch up with everyone else?

Re:Hope they are serious

[BZ]

The ESR will get security patches.

The ESR will almost certainly not get new security _features_. Especially because these often break some websites, and the whole reason for the ESR is so large organizations have a way to deploy something that won't break their intranet sites.

I'd hope the difference would be clear. But apparently it's easier to call people names than to think.

Re:Hope they are serious

[BZ]

One more note. Chrome doesn't do any sort of extended support. MSIE does extended support, but only for critical security bugs. They don't backport security features and infrastructure improvements to old releases. So IE9 is in fact more secure than IE8, which is more secure than IE7, which is more secure than IE6, even though all four are supported and all get security fixes.

Is there a reason you think Mozilla should be held to some sort of higher standard here? Do you hold yourself to such a standard for the software you ship?

GP Integration?

[Troke]

Don't get me wrong, love Firefox for smaller sites but the lack of Mozilla handled Group Policy integration (I know there's an add-on somewhere) makes it a no no for me in my larger environments. Perhaps the use of ESR will force the change when they realize more enterprise environments begin to use Firefox.

Re:Enterprises?

[Smallpond]

Are there really that many enterprises using Firefox? In recent times Firefox has become ALMOST as bad of a security risk of Internet Explorer.

Firefox seems more focused on adding features (and new versions) rather than fixing bugs.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9140582/Firefox_flaws_account_for_44_of_all_browser_bugs.

Individual use "strongly discouraged"

[Anonymous Coward]

From https://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise/Firefox/ExtendedSupport:Proposal

"The ESR is specifically targeted at groups looking to deploy it within a managed environment. It is not intended for use by individuals, nor as a method to mitigate compatibility issues with addons or other software. Mozilla will strongly discourage public (re)distribution of Mozilla-branded versions of the ESR."

Fuck you, Mozilla.

I've been a loyal user and recommended FF to everyone I know, up until this crazy constant-update business started. ESR looked like perhaps a nice way to accommodate both your "vision" for perpetual updates AND people who don't want to have a new browser downloading (and breaking extensions) every time they turn around. But I guess that's only for "large enterprises" and the rest of us need to just suck it.

Your arrogance is astounding, and seals the deal: Safari and Chrome have their issues, but I'm done with Firefox.

Re:Individual use "strongly discouraged"

[modernzombie]

I moved to Chrome 3 months ago for regular browsing and it was amazing how much fast things seemed to load. I still use FF for development becuase Firebug works much better than Firebug Lite on Chrome.

Re:Individual use "strongly discouraged"

[Anonymous Coward]

At least on google properties (youtube, google.com, gmail, google docs, blogspot and god knows what else) that could be due to the "SPDY" extension to HTTP Google pushed out.

While the spec was apparently a bit vague in places, Firefox did add support. You can try it in Firefox 11 alpha or Firefox 12 nightlies.

It still has to be enabled in about:config - not on by default.
Search for spdy.

Re:Individual use "strongly discouraged"

[couchslug]

I stopped recommending it long ago. I recommend Chrome instead.

Reasons do not exist to run FF without add-ons.

Add-ons are its only virtue, and competitors would do well to note that.

Offer a STABLE browser with many add-ons which duplicate the functionality of those for Firefox, and users can move away and not look back.

Re:Individual use "strongly discouraged"

[RebelWebmaster]

Firefox 10 defaults to addons being compatible by default, FYI.

Re:Enterprises?

[imakemusic]

Are there really that many enterprises using Firefox?

No, because there isn't currently a LTS version.

I find

[dmacleod808]

Most addons I use just need a min/max version fix and they work fine.

Re:I find

[plover]

You have to admit it's a pain to edit a dozen XPIs every time there's a new release. And I'm still not sure why they felt addons need to be tied to "application version numbers" instead of "interface IDs." That's a 20 year old lesson completely wasted on them.

Re:I find

[RebelWebmaster]

For the umpteenth time stated in this thread, Firefox 10 defaults to addons being compatible.

Re:I find

[Anonymous Coward]

For the umpteenth time stated in this thread, Firefox 10 defaults to addons being compatible.

Good, I suppose. But it should never have been a problem to be fixed. Also, Firefox 10 isn't out yet, so what it will or won't do is nice to know, but not really relevant to today.

Frontmotion

[Anonymous Coward]

The mental hurdle for some is that this is SO long overdue. They can't /not/ do it, but for me, Frontmotion has filled this gap for some time. While I have read the odd complaint here and there about it, it's always worked for me and my small orgs to simply deploy an alternative browser to the users. For additional control, they even provide the group policy templates. Also, I think the vast majority of admins would be more concerned about something they can deploy and manage more than long term support. Mozilla wouldn't need an ESR version if they had simply supplied Firefox in MSI format (w/ ADM/X templates) as has been talked about since v4. At this point I will stick w/ Frontmotion, unless he decides his services are no longer necessary.

Re:Enterprises?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice of you to mention that article is over two years old.

Version number madness

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla, just because Chrome is doing it doesn't mean you have to follow suit.

Are .1, .2 or .5 not sexy additions to version number anymore?

This is a good first step

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a good first step away from trying to be Google Chrome.

There is already a perfectly good browser that does the job of Chrome very well - it's called Chrome. Firefox should stop trying to emulate it.

1 year is too often

[Anonymous Coward]

My (very large) org just rolled out IE8, and is in the process of moving 20,000 users from Office 2002/3 to Office 2010 (including Outlook). Release annually if you must, but don't be surprised when Enterprise cusomers skip every other release.

Re:Enterprises?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a pharmacist for a large drug store chain. We are using Firefox 2.something on all our computers. I never really use the web at work, so it doesn't bother me too much.

major versions are not for minor releases

[Anonymous Coward]

I love mozilla and I use FF and TB but I decided a while ago not to upgrade until they get their head out of their collective asses and stop with the major release insanity.

The idea of keeping it locked to the gecko engine version only makes sense to the internal developers (I asked some of them)

This LTS version should be the only version and it should be for everyone not just corporate IT departments.

I'm still at FF7 and I refuse to upgrade until they improve this mess. Safari and Chrome are looking better every day but I'm still holding out hope that sanity wil return to the mozilla releases processes.

Re:major versions are not for minor releases

[RebelWebmaster]

So you're going to switch from one browser that rapid releases to another browser that rapid releases, over......rapid releasing?

Supported Lifetime?

[asdf7890]

As important as the release schedule is, another important factor for Enterprise users is the time it takes to test new releases against all their standard environments and internal apps: if each ESR is only supported its year plans a couple of month this will still deter enterprise use.

I would suggest that 30 months be the minimum support window: two full years since release plus some overlap time between release N being available and version N-2 dropping off security patch support. Like to Ubuntu's LTS support windows server-side (two year release cycle, support for 2.5 cycles). Longer might by advisable (our biggest clients, two of the largest banking organisations in the UK, only upgraded to IE8 late last year: more than two full years after its first non-beta availability - going by news I get from other people I know in relevant positions, I'm pretty sure this is a common situation elsewhere in corporate circles rather than just our clients) though I accept that longer than 2.5 years may not be at all practical for Mozilla (who would fund the tail of such a long support window?). In fact, if it were my decision I'd probably go for a longer release cycle as it would make a longer support cycle more practical: say releasing every two years and supporting each release for three or three-ana-half.

And so doth the market ...

[Rambo Tribble]

... deliver clue to those who would presume to supply clue to it.

Ubuntu LTS

[yakovlev]

Actually, Ubuntu LTS is supported for 3-5 years. They release every 2 years, but have an ENTIRE YEAR of overlap to allow for deployment.

This makes the yearly release with 12 weeks overlap seem downright rapid. (It's only 24 weeks if you count alpha and beta releases.)

While I admit this is significantly better than a release every 6 weeks with the prior release completely unsupported, this only moves from "completely broken" to "barely adequate" for enterprise use.

I kind of like Mozilla fumbling...

[HBI]

My reasoning is as follows: I don't want to be using what the mass of the Internet is using in terms of browser. I want something with strong plugins and the ability to filter out dynamic code embedded in pages. That means Firefox.

When it looked like Firefox was going to gain 50% share, I was worried. First, my browser gets targeted. Second, people would be motivated to detect and block those using the script and ad blocking plugins I use. The decline in FF market share is pretty good news to me.

Keep at it, Asa!

Re:I kind of like Mozilla fumbling...

[RebelWebmaster]

You'll be happy to hear that Asa isn't the only decision maker at Mozilla, nor is his opinion held at any higher esteem than anyone else's there. Nice troll, though.

Re:I kind of like Mozilla fumbling...

[Anonymous Coward]

You'll be happy to hear that Asa isn't the only decision maker at Mozilla, nor is his opinion held at any higher esteem than anyone else's there.

I'm pretty sure you're wrong. His title includes the word "manager" and I think he's product manager for Firefox.

couchdouche the troll runs from a challenge? LOL!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2603836&cid=38588550

couchdouche the troll runs from a challenge? LOL!

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares what YOU recommend moron: You can't even back up your b.s. on things technical in computing -> http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2603836&cid=38588550

couchdouche runs from a challenge? LOL!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2603836&cid=38588550

Entitlement

[Beelzebud]

It's sad how the enterprise users posting here act as if Mozilla owes them something. They give you a free browser you're using to make money on. If you guys want the perfect browser, develop one...

Re:Entitlement

[rubycodez]

mozilla is making money off the users using their browser. if Mozilla wants to continue to have users, they better fucking well start to listen to them....

Re:Entitlement

[Beelzebud]

Oh you mean the same users that made IE6 entrenched for a decade past its prime?

Re:Entitlement

[Billly Gates]

Yes actually

Many are not happy about choosing a non compliant browser and being fucked over and want their new intranet apps to support open standards so they can never be locked into a single browser again.

People like ME who do not want bugs, crashes, addons breaking, and security risks. FF is the shitiest browswer today while IE 9 and Chrome are the best. Yes even IE is decent and less buggy than FF and that is sad.

Many businesses who the CFO and accountants demand to keep IE 6 in 2012 need another browser for the rest of the world outside their intranet app and FF was making some serious enterprise headroom before March 2011 when all hell broke lose with FF 4.0. It is not like you can have multiple versions of IE without expensive VM software or citrix terminal emulation. But that is very stupid just ro turn a fucking browser. I mean come on!

Re:Entitlement

[lennier]

It's sad how the enterprise users posting here act as if Mozilla owes them something. They give you a free browser you're using to make money on.

So does Microsoft, if you hadn't noticed. Our bosses are perfectly happy for us to continue using Internet Explorer, because it comes for free with Windows, it's got great Group Policy configuration support, it gets security updates every month like clockwork while keeping major version updates to every couple of years and non-mandatory, and generally Just Works.

Some of us in the Enterprise world would like to run Firefox instead out of the misguided sense that by doing so we're giving back to the community, promoting the use of a more "standard" browser than IE. We think our using it actually helps the open source project. It gives Mozilla and Google eyeballs and clicks and therefore, indirectly, funds, and it keeps OSS in the public eye.

But if you think that by using your browser we're just being a burden and being a bunch of greedy slobs, and you'd rather we stopped using your precious free product and contaminating it with our strange requests like "please make it secure and stop breaking our tools", well okay. Our bosses would be very happy for us to just forget this whole OSS thing and kick Firefox to the kerb, and run straight back into the welcoming arms of for-pay commercial software. Microsoft loves us and is ready to forgive us for this strange "freedom" obsession of ours, and since you guys don't seem to want us after all - maybe we should just come home to our corporate masters, shut the door and never stray again.

It's up to you, I guess.

Don't believe your abuser

[Culture20]

"It'll never happen again. You know I love you baby. Just come back home to me. I won't beat you that badly ever again."

Re:couchdouche the troll runs from a challenge? LO

[jo_ham]

You know, that campaign would probably work better if you logged in.

Just sayin'

PPC port?

[TClevenger]

Cool. Now that you don't have to monkey with it every two months, can we get PowerPC support added back to LTS? Some of us are stuck in the past with no way to a secure browser.

sanity at last

[Tom]

I know this is going to be the Firefox version that'll be running on all my private machines. I'm tired of updates that don't serve any purpose that means anything to me. Getting security fixes, but none of the newest idiocity change-things-just-because-we-had-a-cool-idea-after-too-many-beers sounds like the best reason not to switch to some other browser I've heard in a long time.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Too little, too late.

[Anonymous Coward]

I already switched to Chromium....

Nightly

[Anonymous Coward]

Ive been using Nightly for a few weeks and it rocks. I've almost given up on Chromium-browser

They should use the IE method

[Anonymous Coward]

Update the main browser once a year, but have "platform previews" in between so people can test new HTML techniques but still get a stable browser that they can use until the next version is stable. That being said I feel we should send Mozilla a clear message by getting as many people as possible using the LTS version

Mozilla Firefox 88.0.1

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank GOD! Finally, I can stop doing this routine:
Fire up computer
Check weather, news, e-mail, /., and new Firefox version.
Yay, one less thing to do every day.

Re:Mozilla Firefox 88.0.1

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm curious what planet you're posting from that one day takes six earth weeks?

Eric S. Raymond is the man

[surveyork]

Nerd appeal? http://www.flickr.com/photos/pkdouyk/241484893/

Stopped using firefox when they axed the statusbar

[Anonymous Coward]

I stopped using firefox over a year ago when the decided to remove the statusbar completely. (Note: the addon bar/extensions are just not the same)
The have been debaucherizing the firefox browser since then and its _disgusting_.

  I only use LunaScape, opera, safari, kmeleon, and SRWare's Iron browser now.

Re:Enterprises?

[Billly Gates]

Yep I prefer IE 9 over FF for security and stability reasons.

It is a complete opposite of the 2000s in regards to IE vs Firefox. Chrome I tried but the minimalist and lack of an arrow to pick frequently used sites in the addressbar (have to type EVERY TIME) drive me insane!

Re:Enterprises?

[Billly Gates]

Actually I know many who run FF 3.6. School districts and corporations who have intranet apps stuck in IE 6 let employees use FF for general internet. FF was great before 4