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.'"

Re:Enterprises Will Like This!

[acoustix]

FrontMotion Firefox Community Edition [frontmotion.com] 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 [frontmotion.com]

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: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/ [mozilla.org]

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

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 [mozilla.org], but it is being planned.

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: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!

[broken_chaos]

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

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: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.