Firefox ESR

It may be unknown to many day-to-day users out there that the Mozilla Foundation offers a product specifically aimed at medium to extremely large organizations (schools, universities, and other international businesses).

One of the main issues with mass software deployment within organizations can be the lack of extended support. For example, imagine a national school system having to change their entire browser system because a new release does not support some important outdated features (but relevant to the system in question) or worse because of a security vulnerability.

Found under the moniker of Firefox ESR (stands for Extended Support Release), it’s a browser specifically designed for organizations that require extended support. To be more precise, Firefox ESR is an older version of Firefox with a deferred development cycle that aims to offer increased stability at the expense of the latest features.

Be that as it may, the ESR line does not fully compromise security towards achieving this goal. ESR releases are maintained for more than a year with important “point releases” that usually follow the regular Firefox releases. These so-called point releases contain imperative security upgrades.

Before September 2017, the ESR channel was home to older versions of Firefox. This was the pre-quantum era and, back then, Firefox 52 ESR (which is still available for download) offered support for both Windows XP and Vista. This proved to be invaluable for various international companies, at least for 2-3 years until they would inevitably have to move to newer versions of Windows.

Firefox 52 ESR also offered support for Microsoft Silverlight and Java. Nowadays, the latest versions of Firefox ESR (60+) only offer support for Adobe Flash NPAPI plugin. Of course, the Firefox 52 ESR was based on the old version of Firefox so WebAssembly was not enabled by default, and the super-fast multi-process handling engine (Quantum) was no present.

Firefox fans surely know that version 60 marked a very big transformation for their favorite browser. Firefox went through a massive overhaul starting with its engine and finishing with its look.

In most part, Firefox ESR and Firefox share the same functionalities. There are however some notable differences. In the ESR version, Serve Workers are not supported by default, push notifications are disabled, and there’s also an option to disable add-on signature enforcements.

The Firefox ESR branch is something that really speaks for the level of commitment towards all types of users shown by the Mozilla Foundation. Firefox ESR was and will most likely continue to be one of the biggest “gifts” for administrators all over the world. In short, with the help of Firefox ESR, Mozilla gives organizations from all over the globe enough time to set up the mass deployment of a new version of Firefox and ensure that everything is in order.