No way, thanks. Firstly, it's a significant amount of work, especially with the new release model. I've got no idea how this is going to work in Debian really. In addition to that, stability definitely is *not* guaranteed when security fixes (sometimes very large patches) are being backported and adapted to a stale codebase by people who aren't as familiar with the code as the people who actually wrote it. Also, maintaining our own, ancient branch means we lose the benefit of all the upstream QA work, which exists to improve quality.
It also results in users finding other ways to install the latest browser, often breaking their machines and leaving us to pick up the pieces (eg, Ubuntuzilla) The web is evolving quickly. Distro's shipping ancient browsers holds back the web in exactly the same way that IE6 has done. And users actually want to be able to run the latest browser (the number of users who want the latest version far, far outweighs the people who request to stay on old versions). Ubuntu isn't going to achieve it's ambition of 200 million users by making them use an old, unmaintained browser for 2-3 years. Note, we also always ship the latest version of Chromium. It would be completely unfair to Mozilla to always ship faster and better releases of Chromium alongside an old, stale version of Firefox. The packages we provide can strongly influence our users perception of the relative quality of the 2 products, so it's important we put them on a level playing field (unless you are suggesting we backport security fixes for Chromium and cripple that too). -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/800637 Title: Firefox 5 shouldn't be a security upgrade to Firefox 4 To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/800637/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs