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Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

Yikes. At what point will people start backporting security fixes to an older version of Firefox, to avoid the forced bundling of unwanted browser "features"?

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I realize that you are just making a snarky dig, but probably never. It would be a huge amount of work just to backport basic security fixes, and almost impossible to backport large architectural changes that are made in the service of security. Are you going to backport multiprocess Firefox once that is working?

It is much easier to flip a preference. If you wanted to get sophisticated, you could create an addon that disables all of the preferences you dislike.

> you could create an addon that disables all of the preferences you dislike.

That's a good idea. Another option is to patch the code to remove the new features, unless Mozilla has taken steps to deter unbundling.

Mozilla is very protective of the Firefox trademark. They don't even use it for their own nightly builds, because they want people to associate "Firefox" with stability. So they make it very easy to unbundle.

Will setting the about:config option to disable be preserved across browsers with firefox sync?

It will if there's a corresponding services.sync.prefs.sync.the.pref.you.want.synced.here pref set.

There's an opportunity cost to supporting older versions. Sure, there's always going to be a small group of people who are happy with what they currently have but most people are happy moving forward.

If there's a big enough market, perhaps some company will backport the security fixes. How much are you willing to pay? Another option is that you could volunteer and start the fork.

Of course, there's that other problem where developers are only going to support the latest browser.

A functional subset would not be a fork. If users were given a choice, we would find out which version they considered best aligned with the brand.

You aren't being clear. Do you think that older code that gives older functionality doesn't ever get changed? Patches will have to be created, etc. It's not trivial work. And as I mentioned, web developers aren't going to support the older CSS/HTML/JavaScript in your older browser.

Lack of clarity was due to sibling comment. Repeating here: an option is to patch the current code to remove unwanted new features. This provides users with current features, e.g. CSS/HTML/JS and security fixes, a "minimal build" of the browser.

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