Mozilla Announces Long Term Support Version of Firefox 249
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.'"
Oh good. ANOTHER browser to support. (Score:0, Interesting)
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.
Not long enough (Score:2, Interesting)
Once per year is still too quick, IMHO. In my experience, 2-4 years (or more!) would better fit enterprise expectations.
Re:Enterprises Will Like This! (Score:4, Interesting)
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! (Score:4, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Good (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly!
In fact I think they only did the Firefox-LTS version because people got the idea to fork it [in-other-news.com], 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.