The thing is, even the ESR is only supported for about a year before being completely cut off in favour of a new ESR that has only been available for about 6-12 weeks at that point.
There are some large businesses out there who run the same software foundation for a decade or more, not least because just evaluating a new version of something critical like an operating system or web browser can be a huge exercise if you're running hundreds of in-house tools on top of them.
While I think it's unrealistic to expect an OSS browser to provide ongoing support for that long, if Mozilla want their product to be taken seriously by enterprise customers then I suspect they're going to need a lot more than a year of security fixes and a lot more than 6-12 weeks of overlap when they want to force an upgrade. It would be interesting to know whether in reality they have gained much from offering the first ESR (which is already coming to end-of-life) in terms of acceptance of the rapid release schedule in larger organisations. Maybe there is a certain size of organisation that is flexible enough to take advantage of a yearly update but can't take the overheads of stuff breaking every six weeks.
> The thing is, even the ESR is only supported for about a year before being completely cut off in favour of a new ESR that has only been available for about 6-12 weeks at that point. There are some large businesses out there who run the same software foundation for a decade or more.
For software like that, a web browser is not the right platform. Web browsers view a shared space which constantly changes and gets updated with new APIs and deprecated APIs and so forth.
If you want decade-long stability, use a platform that is tightly controlled and gives guarantees of backwards compatibility, for example Java or .NET.
For software like that, a web browser is not the right platform. Web browsers view a shared space which constantly changes and gets updated with new APIs and deprecated APIs and so forth.
You seem to be confusing the Internet with corporate intranets. Browsers installed in these kinds of organisations, and the tools they want to use long-term, tend to be based around the latter. Having stability is far more important than being able to use HTML5 local storage and add drop shadows to your titles in CSS. There is a reason that, despite the endless moaning of web developers, many places are still running IE6.
If you want decade-long stability, use a platform that is tightly controlled and gives guarantees of backwards compatibility
They are. Unchanged is about as controlled and backward compatible as you can get!
Anyone who wants to get a replacement browser into these environments for the long term needs to understand that. Anyone who wants to make cloud-based solutions that seek to displace well-established in-house tools needs to understand that, too. It sucks if you want to use the shiny new possibilities of bleeding edge web technology, but the grown-ups aren't interested in an anatomical measuring contest between browser makers about who can be first to ship the next non-standardised, subject-to-change-at-any-time, bug-ridden-anyway feature.
I think Microsoft does understand this, and that's why they are still dominant in large organisations despite appearing to be behind the curve. I think Google have figured it out as well, but when they stopped supporting IE6 in their web apps, it wasn't because they had successfully forced everyone to upgrade, it's because they realised that they never would.
The point is that a browser that can view the modern web is different than one that can run a 10-year old intranet app. These are very different things. I agree with you that corporations sometimes need both.
Since there are open source browsers, you can just save a very old version of them for intranet apps, if you must. But you can't expect a modern browser to still run your old intranet apps, you will need both a legacy browser and a modern one.
The ESR fits somewhere in the middle. It won't run 10 year-old apps, but it will update very slowly so your IT department does not need to constantly verify it (only once a year). Again, for 10-year-old apps, that won't work - you just need to install a 10-year old browser. If you just run it on intranet apps, security isn't a concern so that's fine.
There are some large businesses out there who run the same software foundation for a decade or more, not least because just evaluating a new version of something critical like an operating system or web browser can be a huge exercise if you're running hundreds of in-house tools on top of them.
While I think it's unrealistic to expect an OSS browser to provide ongoing support for that long, if Mozilla want their product to be taken seriously by enterprise customers then I suspect they're going to need a lot more than a year of security fixes and a lot more than 6-12 weeks of overlap when they want to force an upgrade. It would be interesting to know whether in reality they have gained much from offering the first ESR (which is already coming to end-of-life) in terms of acceptance of the rapid release schedule in larger organisations. Maybe there is a certain size of organisation that is flexible enough to take advantage of a yearly update but can't take the overheads of stuff breaking every six weeks.