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The project started as a 64-bit version for Windows (was supposed to be faster). Then, when Firefox changed the add-on framework, it became the "Firefox" version you can use to keep all your old add-ons working. They are merging all relevant security issues quickly, as well as bug fixes.

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If people just wanted to use the old addon system then all that requires is changing a few options when building Firefox (in official Firefox builds, only moz can deploy such addons). So keeping up with security updates shouldn't be hard at all if that's the only difference.

Of course the old type of addons may break from time to time as the browser's internals change but that was always a problem with the old addon system.

If I understand [1] correctly, the XUL code that those old addons use as an interface into the browser is nearly gone. And that's the entire point of deprecating the old addons: to be able to refactor Firefox internals away from XUL towards pure HTML/CSS/JS-based UI.

[1] https://bgrins.github.io/xbl-analysis/graph/

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