RHEL API/ABI stability and supportabilityĮven though Mozilla does not provide development packages for Firefox or Thunderbird to link against, they do provide a variety of APIs that are used on the Web. The upstream Firefox ESR release schedule is publicly available on. Development of web technologies is dynamic, the ESR release balances the need to support next-generation as well as much older web applications. Backporting security fixes to older versions within our SLA deadlines is impossible with the resources we have. A web browser is a very security-sensitive component and the volume of CVEs is really high (as many as 17 critical or important CVEs fixed in one update). There are two primary reasons for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution using the upstream ESR release as opposed to the faster-moving Standard Firefox release: That's also a window for us to rebase Firefox in all versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Mozilla releases updates of the previous ESR for another 3 months to give organizations time to upgrade to the latest ESR. Upstream LifecycleĪ new major version of Firefox ESR is released roughly once a year and gets security/bug fix releases every 4 weeks. This longer-lived release stream is available within the supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases. It provides a stable and predictable platform for enterprise web applications. Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR)Ī new version is released once a year, during the year Mozilla provides security and bug fixing releases every 4 weeks. This is the release stream which is available within the Fedora Project. Newer versions are released every 4 weeks, constantly introducing new features, ideal for home users and progressive web applications developers. Mozilla ships Firefox and Thunderbird in two different streams with different use cases. The following overview also applies to Thunderbird. Note, at this stage, nothing is going anything near production, the acceptances tests are running against servers either running locally or in a UAT environment.Firefox is the default and only supported web browser in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. So, really, the only option is to make sure a older version of firefox is available on your development machine, so you can run the acceptance tests.īut just to be clear, this doesn't mean I am sitting browsing the web with a old firefox browser, it simply means that to complete a build, I need to have a environment available on my machine that can finish a build (including the automated testing, which relies on seleniums webdriver, which relies on well, a older firefox ). Now, you can't just remove selenium from the build(that would mean stripping the acceptances tests for the UI), nor just randomly upgrade it, even if a newer version was there (there is a process for changing the build). Which means, if the machine running the automated tests have a firefox version newer than that, the build will fail. Now, selenium currently only supports firefox up until v20 ( … leaseNotes). These automated acceptance tests are done with various tools, and more often than not, one of these tools being the selenium web-driver. Usually, if any modules of your project has a web ui, a subset of the acceptance tests will be written against the UI. Most larger companies, who develop in a BDD or ATDD way, will have a very clear defined build, testing and deployment process. Hello again, I don't think I clearly explained the scenario, there is not really any mess for us to fix.