Maybe because you're ignoring his legitimate statement: "No one asked me about this switch. I was purposedly keeping that version."

Was the update option turned off?

If not, I would expect that after multiple notices which were sent to FF 3.5/3.6 users about their browser being EOL'd, it would autoupdate to a supported version.

If yes, then this might be a bug. Which would explain the oddity of why FF12 showed up here (and not FF14 stable or FF10 ESR).

No. I was asking for the reasoning behind it.

You have definitely never worked in a heavily enterprisey environment :)

Many times there are compatibility reasons behind the decision not to update a piece of software. That was the reason why IE6 kept its throne as the most used browser for so long: sysadmins couldn't upgrade because upgrades broke poorly-written websites (mostly intranet pages.)

So yeah, if there was a policy not to update Firefox, I'd be rather pissed about it updating on its own to a radically different version. Other than that, most users should get the upgrade.

I have worked in that type of environment so let me clear something up for you. It's your own damn fault! The code could have been tested on Mozilla at the same time, for example. I was there when people wrote that crap and people felt that running in IE was good enough. Companies should always have been taking the approach that a web browser isn't simply an app from Microsoft.

You either pay a little up front or a lot later. Time to pay up and fix that legacy code that no one wants to touch.

right, so people in the past are able to predict the future of software markets and sysadmins have complete control over where a company's development resources go. okay, got it.

You are generalizing quite a bit here. We are specifically talking about web browsers. Plenty of developers stuck with Netscape then Mozilla and wanted to support them. And sysadmins have lots of control at some level. "We can only support browser X, but not browser Y. As a firm we only support IE". Anyway, good luck getting off of XP and those old IE's. The rest of the world is moving on. When IE10 comes out, I'll email the link to my mom, etc and they'll be upgraded in minutes. Corporate America? Well, there are a lot of overpaid people working on it.

I have an install of Firefox 3.6 because an application I develop uses the version of Spidermonkey that shipped with 3.6.

It's nice to be able to easily test code and get a rough performance profile in the same environment.

I agree, and Mozilla is completely in the right here. Software security updates are like necessary vaccinations: you're not just inoculating yourself; you're creating a herd immunity. When you fail to do this, you put other people at risk because a compromise of your system is not isolated to you. Rather, your system is likely to be added to a botnet or in some other way used to attack other systems.

except that vaccinations are convenient and instant

and each computer is in contact with thousands

and browser infection almost always comes from servers

I don't see herd immunity working with browsers, and it barely works with operating systems.

Many legit reasons. For starters, he could be using Firefox as a test browser for Selenium, and upgrading would break some plugins.