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by callahad 2541 days ago
Not exactly. I understand "EOL" to mean that all support has ended. An EOL'd project is dead, and if anything breaks no one is going to fix it for you. That is not the case for Firefox for Android.

Instead, think of Firefox for Android as a Long-Term Support (LTS) release, like you might see with projects like Ubuntu, Node, or Django.

There are no new features coming to Firefox for Android, but we will keep the 68 branch alive and maintained to ensure that everything keeps working and is secure on Android. We will do this for at least another year, to give Firefox Preview more time to develop and mature.

On desktop, we do something similar with Firefox's Extended Support Release ("ESR") versions (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/). Every year, we pick a version of Firefox that we commit to supporting for a very long time. Last year, it was Firefox 60. So even though Firefox 68 is available, we're still backporting patches and fixing bugs in Firefox 60. This year, Firefox 68 is the ESR version, so we'll support until at least late next year.
2 comments
aflag 2541 days ago
One year is a very short time. The fact is that we can't rely on having support to all our add-ons and browser experience in the near future (next 2-3 years) means we have to start thinking about what to switch to. Also, I wouldn't feel comfortable recommending firefox anymore for that same reason. When the time comes to decide whether to switch to fenix or chrome, fenix will need to really impress. It's a bold move from mozilla.

Anyway, I use firefox on Android because of the ad blocker and to avoid AMP. If the new firefox works similarly in that regard, then I might end up switching to that instead.

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toastal 2541 days ago
Avoiding AMP is a stance I wish Firefox could add a built-in, enabled-by-default toggle feature.
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mook 2541 days ago
Thank you (and the other Mozillians) for trying to engage the feedback! Please remember when planning that extensions need time to be fixed, which means there must be significant overlap between when extension support in Fenix shows up and when Fennec actually goes EOL.
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