Firefox accelerated release schedule is causing compatibility problems with our intranet applications - where can I find the plan of this schedule including support termination dates?
We are a university use an in-house developed e-Learning application which makes use of a rich-client framework (ZK - www.zkoss.org). For reasons of compatibility with this application, as well as other general factors, we have standardized on FF 3.6 as the browser for all our desktops. We normally review our browser selection once per year and make compatibility changes/upgrades to the 3rd-party libraries we use, and our own code, in order to keep up with new developments in the browser market.
However FF's new release policy makes our life verify difficult. FF 6 came out only a few months after FF 5. For us to perform an upgrade we have to perform a systematic series of tests, adjustments, changes to regression tests etc. Due to the cost is not feasible for us to do this every 3 months! Therefore please can someone point us to a clear release plan for FF which shows, for each version:
a. Release date b. End-of-support date c. Release notes d. Compatibility in terms of HTML and Javascript/ECMAScript versions.
Chosen solution
https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease/Calendar
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Releases
New versions are going to be released every 6 weeks, so until Mozilla announces what they are going to do as far as support for an LTS version for enterprise "customers", you guys are left swinging in the breeze as far as being able to plan for the future with Firefox. I think that until that decision is made, support for Firefox 3.6 versions will continue. A 3.6.22 release is being worked on right now, probably for release this coming week.
As far as support termination dates, as each new version is released support ends for the previous version, except for 3.6.x. Currently Firefox 3.6.x and 6.0.x are the only versions which are getting security updates. Firefox 4.0 and 5.0 aren't "supported" any longer.
Read this answer in context 👍 3All Replies (2)
Chosen Solution
https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease/Calendar
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Releases
New versions are going to be released every 6 weeks, so until Mozilla announces what they are going to do as far as support for an LTS version for enterprise "customers", you guys are left swinging in the breeze as far as being able to plan for the future with Firefox. I think that until that decision is made, support for Firefox 3.6 versions will continue. A 3.6.22 release is being worked on right now, probably for release this coming week.
As far as support termination dates, as each new version is released support ends for the previous version, except for 3.6.x. Currently Firefox 3.6.x and 6.0.x are the only versions which are getting security updates. Firefox 4.0 and 5.0 aren't "supported" any longer.
Modified by the-edmeister
Thanks edmeister. So basically 3.6.x is the closest we have got to an "LTS" release - this does make it likely that we'll follow your advice and stick with this. Unfortunately we have also found "random" incompatibilities with specific 3.6.x patch releases. However I hope that we can engineer around these - once we have decided that it is worth investing the effort in sticking with 3.6.x.