Re: It seems that Firefox is now at 115.0.3esr

[Mark H Weaver]

Hi,

chippy via help-gnuzilla <help-gnuzilla@gnu.org> writes:

> Hi everyone, I saw today that Firefox Esr is now at version 115.0.3esr,

Mozilla are currently supporting two ESR branches: 102 and 115.
According to their release calendar
<https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/Calendar>, they will
continue supporting version 102 until August 29.

History shows that IceCat tends not to be updated until upstream support
has been dropped from the older ESR branch.  One rationale for this
practice is that it gives more time for undesirable behavior in the
newer Firefox version to be discovered and for mitigations to be found.

> I also saw that there is no 'esr' in between 102.13.0esr and
> 115.0.1esr. What happened? Did Mozilla Foundation decided to skip some
> releases?

Yes, and that's how the ESR branches have always worked.  There have
only been ESR branches for Firefox versions 115, 102, 91, 78, 68, 60,
52, 45, 38, 31, 24, 17 and 10, as shown in the "past releases" section
of the Firefox release calendar that I linked above.

This approach is essentially the same as what the developers of upstream
Linux (the kernel) do with their long-term support (LTS) releases: not
every stable Linux release branch becomes an LTS branch.

> I tried to run makeicecat replacing the version numbers (and the
> checksum of course) but the patch "about-addons" unfortunately failed.
> I saw the file is sligthly changed, but it should be doable.

In practice, updating IceCat to a new ESR branch is a nontrivial job.
You can look at the history of the Gnuzilla Git repository to see the
kinds of changes that have been required in the past, but those changes
are different for each new release, so one cannot simply use history as
a guide.

I also consider it important to test each major new IceCat release with
a packet analyzer to detect any obvious attempts to "phone home" to
servers (e.g. at Mozilla or Google) that were not explicitly asked for
by the web site that the user asked to visit.

Having said all of this, if you'd like to get started on the process of
updating IceCat to version 115, please feel free to work on it.
Especially if you are able to get the point of building a mostly working
browser, even if it hasn't been fully tested or has some problems, that
would be a very useful contribution!

     Thanks,
       Mark