Four months after publishing the proposal for an extended service
release (ESR) for Firefox, Mozilla will be releasing the first Firefox
version that responds to business concerns that the rapid release cycle
has made Firefox difficult to maintain in corporate. Firefox 10.0 ESR
will enable companies to move from Firefox 3.6 to 10.
Firefox 10.0 ESR is scheduled to be released together with the
regular Firefox 10 on January 31. Mozilla will support its ESR versions
for nine release cycles of 54 weeks. Two release cycles or 12 weeks are
reserved as qualification period.
If everything goes according to plan, Mozilla will update its Firefox
10.0.x ESR in six-week rapid release cycles beginning with version
10.0.1 and phase it out with version 10.0.8 on February 12, 2013.
However, the updates will be limited to high-risk security patches as
well as off-schedule releases that address live security vulnerabilities
during that timeframe. Mozilla will not apply stability fixes or new
features during the 54-week lifecycle of a ESR generation. The next big
transition following 10 ESR, Firefox 17.0 ESR, will be launched
simultaneously with Firefox 17 and Firefox 10.0.7 ESR on November 20,
2012.
The first two ESR 17 releases, ESR 17.0 and ESR 17.0.1, serve as
qualification version to give companies time to update and prepare their
IT environments. The hard transition date will be from ESR 10.0.8 to
ESR 17.0.2 on February 12, 2013.
Firefox ESR releases are the result of criticism that Mozilla would not care about businesses as Firefox users. Following Mozilla’s statement that it would reconsider its approach to keep businesses on board, the developer announced in September of last year its ESR idea. Since then, Mozilla has
increased the maintenance cycle for an ESR release from 42 to 54 weeks,
based on feedback from its users.
The advantage of the ESR release for business is that the update path
is far easier to handle for large corporate environments and gives
companies time to adjust their internal structure for a new browser,
qualify it and update user manuals. However, the transition path for
users will keep much more dramatic updates (from version 10 to 17, for
example) and eliminates the software rapid release updates, which is one
of the biggest advantages of short term updates. Another downside is
the fact that the ESR releases will trail the adoption of HTML5
standards and features that will take advantage of enabling and managing
web applications. In the long term, business environments that are
focused on year-long support cycles will have to find ways to speed up
their qualification process.
While Mozilla clearly stumbled initially with its rapid release cycle
and has not ironed out all issues yet, the release of Firefox ESR is a
sign that Mozilla is listening to its users and fixes problems
relatively quickly. It is one of those characteristics that makes
Mozilla unique and one of the features Mozilla will need to stay
relevant.
Wolfgang Gruener in on January 05
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