Full blog postWe are pleased to announce that the proposal for an Extended Support Release (ESR) of Firefox is now a plan of action. The ESR version of Firefox is for use by enterprises, public institutions, universities and other organizations that centrally manage their Firefox deployments. Releases of the ESR will occur once a year, providing these organizations with a version of Firefox that receives security updates but does not make changes to the Web or Firefox Add-ons platform. We have worked with many organizations to ensure that the ESR balances their need for the latest security updates with the desire to have a lighter application certification burden.
No real surprise as to why they're doing it -- their rapid release plan isn't popular with enterprises, who place long-term stability above being on the bleeding edge the entire time. The way I see it, it's going to work out similar to Ubuntu, who releases a new version every six months but release a LTS (long-term support) version every two years.
The guys who are sick of dealing with broken addons every time a new FF version is released will like this too, as now it will be a less frequent problem (if they stick to ESR versions).