After the outcry from enterprise users on the new fast releases of Firefox, Mozilla is planning Extended Support Releases similar to what Ubuntu does with its LTS releases. They will also be doing the same thing with Thunderbird.
Read More: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise/Fir ... t:Proposal

Seeing how many people are still on 3.6.x I wonder if this will help. From their diagram it looks like Firefox 3.6 will be supported until Firefox 9 is released. Now that IE9 is a decent browser, I'm wondering if its too little too late for enterprise users.

Personally I think Firefox should save the major version numbers for changes that significantly affect addons, themes or page rendering. I wish somebody would create a fork of Firefox that fixes the real issues like memory leaks, instead of trying to keep up with the cool kids in version numbers like Mozilla is doing.

Mozilla should rethink their strategy.
Also they need to add support for Active Directory policy's to restrict some settings, then it will favor more System Adminstrators to use it.
And they need to add the 3.x interface back in.

Personally I agree with the version numbering, Firefox should still be on 4.0, but then on 4.0.5 or something, since firefox 4/5/6 are not different much.

Firefox has enterprise users?

Exactly what I'm thinking. Who in the right mind uses bloatware for their systems?

How is Firefox Bloatware?

For those of us who use Firefox everyday.

I wouldn't consider it bloat. Comparing it with Chrome is apples vs oranges because Firefox has a lot more user customizations that can be added. If you know what you are doing, you can literally change anything you want with the UI, etc. It's hard to give up the freedom of having everything exactly the way you want it in order to gain a bit of speed. Firefox 7 has cut down the memory usage a bit, I find it to be lower than the latest stable Chrome build in my testing with several tabs open. With only 1 tab open Chrome still does a bit better but I have several Firefox addons.

Here's what Lifehacker's tests show:
http://lifehacker.com/5844150/browser-s ... 9-and-more

I don't see what Failfox has that Chrome have doesn't in my opinion. I've installed a few addons in Chrome with no problem

I'm talking about things like being able to rearranging buttons, userchrome.css, and applying themes that use custom button images instead of just color tones like in Chrome for example. I know it's not a huge deal, especially for most people, probably part of the reason Chrome can keep their memory footprint down.

Each to their own I suppose, but I don't see why you'd need an enterprise version of a browser if you know what I mean.

I wouldn't use it, and haven't had any issues with the version number changes once I installed Addon Compatibility Reporter which will force addons to run on newer versions. This is only really an issue with the less popular addons or discontinued ones.

Enterprises that have in house web based content like to test on each new version to make sure everything works for some reason. I think IE gave them this notion since as it tried to become more standards complaint, it broke non standard compliant sites that were built to work with it.

Well I've had no issues either and I'm running Firefox Nightly 10.0a1 as its relatively easy to force the addons to work via manually editing the install.rdf files in each addon.

Most of them work that way also the new alpha is a bit speedier now.

As for chrome ooo do you mean that slow piece of junk?

Thanks for the tip for editing files to get addons to work, I just assumed that I had to wait for new versions.

And chrome is horrible, I don't get why people say its good, I can hardly customize it, I don't like the layout, and its no faster than Firefox or Opera (actually, both of those beat Chrome substantially in my opinion).

You don't have to wait for new versions just grab a copy of 7zip so that you can open up each addon you download (if it says its not compatible right click n save as it) then mod the install.rdf with notepad. Look for the max version of firefox aka control F then type max.

This is really handy if you run Nightly cause u can set the version to 10.* or 11.*

I like having a menu for my browser.

cant u just install "Add-on Compatibility Reporter"
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... r/?src=api

So much simpler... no messing needed.

Well I could wait for the addon in question to get support or I could just mod it to work whenever I want which will likely result in the said addon working much faster then waiting for the support to be added.

Well with apparently no AD support, it probably won't ever.

AD is pretty much the entire reason Enterprise runs on Windows.