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Ever since its adoption, Firefox’s current release schedule has remained a hot topic of debate. So much so that there’s probably nothing left to add. The nauseating levels of rapid-release-schedule talk aside, it’s a fact that enterprise users have had to deal with greater certification headaches due to the current release schedule. But that will no longer be the case.
Mozilla has announced that it will soon deliver an Extended Support Release (ESR) of Firefox. Aimed at enterprises, public institutions and other organizations with centrally-managed Firefox deployments, the ESR version of the browser will be supported for one whole year. Between any two ESR versions, there will be a number of minor “point releases”. They will be important only from a security standpoint, with no “changes to the Web or Firefox Add-ons platform.” There will be a new point release every six weeks to coincide with each new regular version.
“Mozilla will offer an Extended Support Release (ESR) based on an official release of Desktop Firefox,” reads the ESR proposal on the MozillaWiki site. “Releases will be initially maintained for nine release cycles (currently 54 weeks, which is close to the target of 52 weeks the proposal is attempting to hit), with point releases coinciding with regular Firefox releases.”
“To permit organizations sufficient time for testing and certification, the ESR will have a two cycle (12 week) overlap between the time of a new release and the end-of-life of the previous release. This will allow organizations who control updates (e.g. have disabled automated updates) to Firefox to qualify and test against Aurora and Beta builds for twelve weeks leading up to the ESR, and an additional 12 weeks to certify and transition to a new ESR.”
The first ESR version will be based on Firefox 10, which is scheduled to arrive at the end of this month.
Comments are closed on this article
kuebel33
January 12, 2012 at 1:48pm
As a long time firefox fan, I've actually tranistioned to chrome now.. partially because of these ridiculous releases... that and I haven't had a stable version of firefox since like 3.6...
bloodgain
January 12, 2012 at 9:34am
That timeline really shows how ridiculous this "rapid versioning" thing is. We're on Firefox 9, and other than a memory overhaul in FF7, there haven't been any changes that would have justified a new version number before last year. This is Google's fault with how they handled Chrome's version numbers (what version are we on now? I don't know, because I don't follow it -- I just update when there's a patch available). It's just plain silly.
If you want to change your development model for faster releases, you can do that internally. If you really feel like the version numbers don't fairly reflect the faster releases, why not adopt something that actually makes sense, like the YY.MM.patch versioning system?
In just over a year, we'll be on Firefox 20. My company (a very large company) is still installing FF3.6.x on new machines. I'm just glad we have something other than IE7 available to us, and it was still IE6 not all that long ago!
