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Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

> (although at the moment I'm still using Firefox 56)

There are unpatched security holes in Firefox 56. If you're really mad about the extensions change, downgrade to Firefox 52 ESR.

Running Firefox 56 and worrying about the security of your DNS data is a nonsensical threat model.

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There's really no good forward if you're stuck in where the author is.

Either you upgrade and lose several important addons, and functionality in other addons. These are often what makes Firefox a good browser (for you).

The second option is to downgrade to ESR, which will delay the need to upgrade for a few more months. This may invalidate parts of your profile. It also means you lose out on a number of significant performance improvements included in 56.

And the last option, of course, the author's choice (which recommend against): staying on 56. This is of course a bad idea for the reason you stated, plus you lose out on future performance improvements and possibly new web technologies. You will also keep getting nagged by Firefox to upgrade.

So, there is no good option, and you have to pick your poison: Upgrade past 57 suffer significant amounts of usability/efficiency, downgrade to 52 and lose parts of your profile and get significantly worse performance, or stay on 56 and risk the browser getting compromised.

I hate to victim blame, but he's entirely at fault for the predicament he's in. It was widely known that legacy extensions would be phased out it 56, and a few searches related to firefox 56 will tell you that ESR would be the only branch that supports both legacy extensions AND will recieve security patches past 56. So he should have switched over to ESR before 53 came out.

Make backup copy of your profile before you downgrade.

Unsurprisingly, older Firefox doesn't fully understand profiles from newer Firefox. (I don't remember the details, sorry!)

Can't stress this enough. Using outdates browsers is a liability. You're provoking harm to your network, your computer, your personal data.

Your comment is somewhat out of place in this case; Firefox ESR 52 is the current up-to-date ESR¹ release. Firefox ESR is kept up-to-date with security patches, just like the vanilla evergreen Firefox. The difference is that the ESR is branched yearly from the main-line, and leaves out all functional patches — only security patches get applied.

This helps organizations who want to test all their tools before moving to a new version. The next ESR release (Firefox ESR 60) will be this summer.

1: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/

I think that comment was agreeing with my comment, which was written with the understanding that 52 ESR would be better than 56 because the ESR is not out of date the way 56 is.

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