1406737 - ESR: extended support for a Firefox 56.x release

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Release Engineering :: Release Requests, defect)

Description

[Graham Perrin]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; FreeBSD amd64; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0
Build ID: 20171003170248

Steps to reproduce:

Future branch dates
<https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease/Calendar#Future_branch_dates>

Whilst wishing to use Firefox 57 or greater, make _essential_ use of add-ons where both: 

a) extended support releases 52.5–52.8 of Firefox will fall below minimum requirements; 

and

b) release 57 will be incompatible

– with the possibility that 58–60 will be similarly incompatible. 


Actual results:

Lack of support for a compatible version (56) of Firefox during what will be, for a significant number of end users: 

* a period of upheaval 

– before a satisfactory, holistic transition to 57 or greater. 


Expected results:

Please consider extended support for Firefox 56. 

Whilst an extension for 56 may be contrary to the norm, according to points of reference such as these: 

Release Management/ESR Landing Process - MozillaWiki
<https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/ESR_Landing_Process>

Firefox Extended Support Release FAQ — Mozilla
<https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/organizations/faq/>

– there are and will be, I believe, strong cases for an exception to the norm. The transition to 57 is both extraordinarily wonderful and extraordinarily _complex_.  

For starters: whilst aiming for compatibility with 57, some developers of extensions for versions _less_ than 57 have necessarily made use of APIs/features that are not available in 52 …

Comment 1

[Graham Perrin]

Cross reference
===============

222859 – continue to port and maybe package www/firefox 56.x for some time after 57 is released
<https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=222859>

Comment 2

[Liz Henry (:lizzard) (relman/hg->git project)]

Seems to me like we committed to support ESR52 for a particular time period, so we can't replace ESR52 with "ESR56". We'd have to add in a new, simultaneous extended release and maintain it until after we release ESR59 (Summer 2018). So far, everything Mozilla has planned to do has centered on asking users who haven't made the transition to web extensions to use ESR52.     

Graham are you hitting specific problems, missing APIs, is there anything that particular dev teams might be able to help with?

Comment 3

[Graham Perrin]

> … are you hitting specific problems, missing APIs, is there anything that particular dev teams might be able to help with?

Yes, thanks for asking. 

Generally: 

Concern about WebExtensions exclusive strategy from add-on authors and users - Mozillians - Mozilla Discourse
<https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/-/13310?u=grahamperrin>

– join me there, if you like (it's off-topic from the understandable WONTFIX here) but please note that it's _very_ generalised, not the place for a full list of the specifics. 

tl;dr I expect to use 56.x until the August 2018 release of 62.

----

Comment 4

[Robert AB]

(In reply to Liz Henry (:lizzard) (needinfo? me) from comment #2)
> Seems to me like we committed to support ESR52 for a particular time period,
> so we can't replace ESR52 with "ESR56". We'd have to add in a new,
> simultaneous extended release and maintain it until after we release ESR59
> (Summer 2018). So far, everything Mozilla has planned to do has centered on
> asking users who haven't made the transition to web extensions to use ESR52.
> 
> 
> Graham are you hitting specific problems, missing APIs, is there anything
> that particular dev teams might be able to help with?


Can you replace FF60 ESR with FF56 ESR? (build based on FF56, time schedule based on FF60)
Our other alternative is Waterfox 56.

Comment 6

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

Sorry but that won't happen. 56 is already deprecated. As of yesterday, we shipped two releases (57 & 58) which are already containing a bunch of security fixes that 56 doesn't have (including the one for spectre and meltdown).
List here:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities/firefox/#firefox58
Moreover, preparing a new release of ESR requires a significant work which has to be planned earlier.

In order to mitigate the impact, we have also extended the ESR52 support to give more time to migrate to the ESR60 version.

Comment 7

[Robert AB]

(In reply to Sylvestre Ledru [:sylvestre] from comment #6)
> Sorry but that won't happen. 56 is already deprecated. As of yesterday, we
> shipped two releases (57 & 58) which are already containing a bunch of
> security fixes that 56 doesn't have (including the one for spectre and
> meltdown).
> List here:
> https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities/firefox/
> #firefox58
> Moreover, preparing a new release of ESR requires a significant work which
> has to be planned earlier.
> 
> In order to mitigate the impact, we have also extended the ESR52 support to
> give more time to migrate to the ESR60 version.


That is why I have switched to FF56 ESR called Waterfox 56. Spectre, meltdown and other security updates are included. And I can use my Session Manager without any problems.

Comment 8

[Graham Perrin]

(In reply to Sylvestre Ledru [:sylvestre] from comment #6)

> … extended the ESR52 support 

52.9 noted with thanks at <https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease/Calendar#Future_branch_dates>

(Edition, 2017-12-20: <https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=RapidRelease/Calendar&diff=next&oldid=1184274#mw-diff-left-l39>)

> to give more time to migrate to the ESR60 version.

----

Back in September 2017: 

>> tl;dr I expect to use (Firefox) 56.x until the August 2018 release of 62.

As things turned out, I switched to Waterfox ESR 56 (when the port to FreeBSD was added). I'm not averse to a future switch back to Firefox, but it'll probably be later. 2019, maybe.

Comment 9

[zakius]

this *has* to be resolved properly, looking at roadmap we won't be getting even reasonable API over the next year at least and until that happens we are stuck with Waterfox 56

and please, don't jump in with all the "it's unsupported and will be dangerous" stuff, it was your decision to not provide basic API before flipping the kill switch, it was your decision to not provide proper ESR for worthy extensions and it was your decision to flip the kill switch for the outdated ESR too

when the time (and proper API) comes I'll gladly switch back to Firefox (unless Otter or Vivaldi will take me over), but for now it's just impossible due to artificial limitations

Comment 10

[zakius]

so, 4 years later it's still impossible to create mouse gestures or keyboard shortcuts extensions that work properly, that's nice