[Bug 800637] Re: Firefox 5 shouldn't be a security upgrade to Firefox 4

Chris Coulson chris.coulson at canonical.com
Wed Jun 22 12:19:32 UTC 2011


No way, thanks. Firstly, it's a significant amount of work, especially
with the new release model. I've got no idea how this is going to work
in Debian really. In addition to that, stability definitely is *not*
guaranteed when security fixes (sometimes very large patches) are being
backported and adapted to a stale codebase by people who aren't as
familiar with the code as the people who actually wrote it. Also,
maintaining our own, ancient branch means we lose the benefit of all the
upstream QA work, which exists to improve quality.

It also results in users finding other ways to install the latest
browser, often breaking their machines and leaving us to pick up the
pieces (eg, Ubuntuzilla)

The web is evolving quickly. Distro's shipping ancient browsers holds
back the web in exactly the same way that IE6 has done. And users
actually want to be able to run the latest browser (the number of users
who want the latest version far, far outweighs the people who request to
stay on old versions). Ubuntu isn't going to achieve it's ambition of
200 million users by making them use an old, unmaintained browser for
2-3 years.

Note, we also always ship the latest version of Chromium. It would be
completely unfair to Mozilla to always ship faster and better releases
of Chromium alongside an old, stale version of Firefox. The packages we
provide can strongly influence our users perception of the relative
quality of the 2 products, so it's important we put them on a level
playing field (unless you are suggesting we backport security fixes for
Chromium and cripple that too).

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Title:
  Firefox 5 shouldn't be a security upgrade to Firefox 4

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