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Comment by stackcollision | Hacker News Reader

I miss when Firefox did minor versions more often. This is just getting rediculous.

No, this is great. It will make version numbers not matter anymore. Either you use the latest version or you can't really complain about security, stability or feature issues.

I totally disagree with this philosophy. I do not want my software to be a living-breathing entity. My browser even less so. Security issues aside, I do not want to ever update until a new feature is released that compels me to upgrade. God knows how many times I've upgraded a perfectly good piece of software just to be greeted with unwanted bloat or regressions in features. I hate this trend towards removing the meaning of version numbers. Don't get me wrong, I understand the massive boon to security that this model will bring. But there's no reason why software can't auto-update just security releases.

As a practical matter, the more releases that have to be supported with security fixes, the less secure each will end up being, as there is less testing of each individual version, and divergent code bases may need different security fixes.

You should use the Firefox ESR branch then. Details here: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/

tl/dr; summary: 12 months of security only releases. Each year the ESR branch is rebased on the current version of Firefox. I believe Firefox 17 will be the basis for the next year of ESR releases.

Mozilla makes it very difficult to find the download page, but it is here: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/all.html

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