A marked change of stance from the following?

"Mike, you do realize that we get about 2 million Firefox downloads per day from regular user types, right? Your “big numbers” here are really just a drop in the bucket, fractions of fractions of a percent of our user base.

Enterprise has never been (and I’ll argue, shouldn’t be) a focus of ours. Until we run out of people who don’t have sysadmins and enterprise deployment teams looking out for them, I can’t imagine why we’d focus at all on the kinds of environments you care so much about."

http://mike.kaply.com/2011/06/23/understanding-the-corporate...

It looks more like this replaces the (now quite outdated) Long Term Support version of 3.6, which even got updated yesterday: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/3.6.26/releasenotes/

Part of this new ESR process is that 3.6 will go EOL in April.

I think its fair to say that Asa wasn't reflecting the view of the wider Mozilla community correctly when he made that statement.

There are various opinions inside Mozilla. You can hear them all because the debate is done in the open.

Asa's opinion there was never the official position nor the position of a majority in Mozilla AFAIK.

Proposed release schedule at https://www.mozilla.org/img/covehead/esr/release-overview.pn...: one year of support, with ~12 weeks to get to the next version.

Without the Windows version being available as a MSI, this still isnt going to get enterprise support. At least not support/migration from people deploying FrontMotion's Firefox MSIs.

I think this ESR is purely about extending the release schedule/security fix lifetime. Enterprisy features can be added in the normal releases just as well.

The thing is, enterprise users have been begging Mozilla for official MSI support for years now.

The fact that they still haven't done anything about it, even with a supposed enterprise version kind of indicates that they're still not taking the enterprise seriously.

Firefox is 100% open source, so even if Mozilla itself doesn't focus on making MSIs, other people can. There is at least one company doing just that,

http://bespokeio.com/

FrontMotion mentioned in the GP post is probably the most popular one I'm aware of. But it's absurd to have to rely on a third party for what's a basic matter of packaging.

MSI is the standard for packaging applications for deployment in enterprise environments for Windows. Mozilla's prolonged refusal to officially support it amounts to a tacit refusal to properly support enterprise.

This isn't a new issue, nor is it a minor one. The Bugzilla issue for this was opened eight years ago[1] and there still isn't a proper, official deployment solution (and this isn't even getting into the lack of centralized management support).

[1] - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=231062

It isn't a basic matter of packaging. You also need to do very exhaustive testing to make sure it works exactly as it should in all possible cases. Enterprise support is not easy to do.

Of course it isn't. But Google do it just fine with Chrome:

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/chromebrowser.ht...

Why is it surprising that Google can do it? Google has massive resources.

Mozilla brought in over 100 million in 2009.

>Enterprise support is not easy to do.

Sure, but other projects manage to do it just fine, without users having to yell to the heavens about it being a dealbreaker for nearly a decade.

Honest question: Can you give some examples of other open source projects (not ones run by massive corporations like Google, which obviously can afford to do enterprise support) that have full enterprise support?

But who are Bespokio?

I mean, we know who they are. But from the corporate perspective, you're downloading an MSI from a relatively unknown party (when compared to Mozilla). Not encouraging.

Is 12 months enough? Especially when you consider enterprise software vendors need time to test as well.

So that's what "ESR" stands for. I had almost convinced myself that it's in honor of "Eric S. Raymond".

No, this version of Firefox won't encourage you to buy guns and vote libertarian.