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

[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

[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.

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!

[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.

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.