Mozilla Delivering Firefox Extended Support Release

Six months ago, Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler — one of the original members of the team that built the Firefox browser — made it quite clear that the open source outfit wasn’t interested in helping businesses. Their only aim, he said, was serve individual web surfers. “Enterprise has never been (and I’ll argue, shouldn’t be) a focus of ours,” Dotzler said.

But things have changed. On Tuesday, Mozilla announced that it will answer the complaints of big business users, providing a new version of Firefox that it promises to support for a full year. This summer, the organization had switched Firefox to a six-week release cycle, and IT departments using the open source browser complained that they couldn’t keep up with the pace.

Mozilla calls the new version an extended support release, or ESR. The release will go through a 12-week testing cycle, and Mozilla says this will give businesses enough time to test early builds before deploying. The organization will then continue to provide support for the browser — i.e., security patches — for the rest of the year.