Each of the 3 systems you mention have reliable update mechanisms and a track record of not really breaking things on updates.

Especially for consumer PCs, there doesn't need to be anything to keep up with.

Sigh Yes about those three.. But really, I just used those three as immediate illustrations and they are by no means the only ones doing this! And I am really not interested in offering a big list of all the software on my PC, that all do this online thingy, but are not similarly reliable as those three.

>> let's say you want to load it up, [snip] but without contaminating your normal environment.

Add-ons don't necessarily survive every upgrade, and take some time to catch up with the new release. Many people that I know, (in the family and outside) would rather wait on a new release than have one of their add-on break on them.

So, whatever way you put it, I am firm in my statement, that an offline installer should be a de-facto proviso, rather than being buried somewhere else.

The automatic updater takes care of all of the use-cases you mentioned better – why waste time manually copying files around when your relatives could be running the update days before you make it over with that thumb drive?

That said, they do make the full installers easily available (google “Firefox offline installer”) should you need to update a ton of computers behind a slow connection.

In case, you missed it, the moot point in the parent thread as well as my agreement is this: "an offline installer should be a de-facto proviso, rather than being buried somewhere else." In other words, The fundamental issue in this rant of course is, "Why the hell should I do all that? Make it available in the front page!"

For sure, lycos/ddg/ask-jeeves/bing "Firefox offline installer" is an option that is not lost on us luddites :).

But did you also notice the parent comment: "Googling for things like "firefox standalone redistributable offline install" are a road to nowhere"? ;)

> he fundamental issue in this rant of course is, "Why the hell should I do all that? Make it available in the front page!"

They could make it more obvious but, really, the audience for that page doesn't really include people who are familiar with technical issues and have made the calculation that it would be faster to download the full thing & copy it around.

> But did you also notice the parent comment: "Googling for things like "firefox standalone redistributable offline install" are a road to nowhere"? ;)

I did – and part of the point is that that's an unnecessarily complex query. Removing any of the redundant words (e.g. "firefox standalone installer", "firefox offline install") produces the correct result as the first hit. ("redistributable" appears to be the problem as that term hits a bunch of spam download sites)

In other words, that search query was itself an attempt to micro-optimize something which turned out to be unnecessary – rather like the entire post.