On Monday, October 24, 2016 at 3:12:31 AM UTC-5, Gervase Markham wrote: > On 22/10/16 10:16, [email protected] wrote: > > My concern is that by killing digital certificate updates and TLS > > updates, still in use machines whose main purpose is Internet access > > are essentially bricked. > > This is a feature, not a bug. If those machines shouldn't be on the > Internet, and things happen which keep them off the Internet, then hooray. > > Gerv
Like I've said in previous messages on this thread, I agree that XP and Vista should be placed on ESR 52, but I'm worried about those people who don't have access to tech support at home (friends, family, a tech store, etc.) to help them with the next steps of replacing their old machine. It would be good if Mozilla had some kind of message at the start of the transfer to ESR 52 stating that they have X amount of time to upgrade. I would feel less queasy about this process, if in the past Mozilla's efforts to gracefully wind down an old OS had been graceful. OS X 10.5 got decommissioned at Firefox 16.0.2 and never got put on ESR 17. Windows 2000, XP RTM, and XP SP1 got decommissioned at Firefox 12.0 and users had to downgrade to ESR 10 if they wanted support. Same story with OS X 10.6-10.8 as those OS's got decommissioned at Firefox 47.0.1 and users had to downgrade to ESR 45 for continued support. This is all further complicated by the fact that Mozilla doesn't like to have users cross channels (for obvious reasons like preventing bugs and messed up profiles). Mozilla has never to my knowledge moved a user base automatically from Release Channel to ESR Channel. Those who wanted continued support in the past had to downgrade on their own. Mozilla stores the ESR at the following non-obvious URL: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/. Also, Mozilla doesn't advertise the existence of the ESR Channel. I often feel that Mozilla treats its ESR like the red-headed stepchild of all its releases. Nightly, Developer Edition, Beta, and Release are all front and center and yet the ESR Channel is left in the background. I'm sure more people who want a slower release cycle would use the ESR if they knew it existed. Mozilla could even differentiate itself from other browser makers with the tag line "Firefox: Upgrades at Your Speed, Not the Internet's". Then again, Mozilla isn't the only one to pull that trick as apparently Microsoft won't let anyone but enterprise customers use Windows 10's slowest upgrade cycle. Beyond that, I don't like the whole tentative nature of security updates beyond the first year. I think Mozilla should follow Microsoft's example and have a definitive cutoff date. If that means stating that XP and Vista on ESR 52 will be supported no later than the release of ESR 66.2.0. Mozilla should state up front that it will support ESR 52 for XP/Vista for 2 years up front so that people can plan for its depreciation instead of being left in suspense. _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
