Two forks diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one that had free beer

(* which is odd since I don't drink, but it seemed better)

It's official: Firefox 10 will be the Extended Support Release, basically Mozilla's new legacy release, and will mean the end of Fx3.6 support on April 24, 2012 (assuming current release schedule).

The ESR will mean, finally, a stable base for long term maintenance. This is of great personal relief to yours truly, because keeping up with the Mozilla treadmill ("making the hippo dance") is not a lot of fun sometimes. It is also quite possible that Mozilla will use the ESR to cast off support for OSes they don't want to support anymore (even though more progressive elements are resisting this), and I would not be surprised to see 10.5 users forced onto the ESR along with other undesirables such as Windows XP SP1 and Windows 2000.

Right now the TenFourFox 10 port is mostly done and I have a debug build mounted which appears to basically work. I have not tried getting AltiVec builds up yet; I'm planning to lock myself in my office and do that this weekend when I'm not on call. Other than some annoying trivial internal changes, the biggest reason this port was delayed was that Mozilla changed most of their legacy NSPR booleans (viz., PR_TRUE, PR_FALSE and the PRBool type) to C++ booleans (viz., garden variety true and false). This invalidated around two-thirds of our patch sets and required a lot of manual adjustment. There was also a bug in plain methodjit that this unearthed and yielded several days of fruitless rooting around in the code until I found a working solution earlier today. The tracejit seems to basically work, but I won't be able to fully test it until I get opt builds running, so I have not made a decision about whether people will be forced to use JM+TI in this release (if tracejit has minor problems, I will try to fix them; if it's unacceptably crippled by Mozilla's type inference changes, however, it's probably not worth repairing). I have decided that we will use methodjit for the chrome, because this will cut back on memory and the chrome code is obviously not changing; the tracejit decision relates specifically to Web content.

Once 10 is kicked out to the unwashed masses, development becomes bifurcated. Unlike the regular ESR, which will only get high-level security and stability fixes much as the moribund 3.6 gets now, our stable branch (based on the 10 ESR) will get other fixes and possibly even new minor features. Most users will get this release and receive point updates to it, which should be reassuring to our change-averse general audience. If a major feature needs to be backported, there will be a regular beta-and-RC cycle.

Development of the main Firefox channel will still continue in the background on the unstable branch. Let's make this clear now for you pedants in the audience: the unstable branch is not intended to make release-quality builds, just betas and test builds. There will almost certainly be bugs and minor ones will not be fixed on any particular timetable; the point of the unstable branch is simply to keep the port viable in a general sense (and to give me and the other contributors a well-deserved break). Only beta builds will emerge on the unstable branch, not RCs. I may sit out 11 to give myself a break, and pick up with 12.

The next scheduled ESR will be Firefox 17. I think it's unlikely we get that far, but hey, I said we were dead in Firefox 5 and Tobias got the linker working; I said we were dead by Firefox 11 and Ben showed up with the macroassembler. So don't rely on my picks for the NFL postseason if you want to keep your money. If we make it to Fx16, then Fx16 will get a regular beta-and-RC cycle, and the stable branch will move to 16 and then settle again on 17. It would be a miracle if we made it to Firefox 24, though (it's doubtful Mozilla would still even support 10.6 by then, and we're not going to make a "Lionized" TenFourFox because that would make me nauseous), but we would still do security updates, of course.

There are a few other things I'd like you guys to think about. I have had some internal discussions with Mozilla and TenFourFox is currently their draft recommendation for Power Mac and 10.4 users still on 3.6 (always subject to change, of course, but this seems like their intent). Right now we piggyback on SUMO, Mozilla's support system, but this doesn't seem fair when Mozilla won't support PowerPC at all. Instead, we're going to need to start up our own user support and triage network like I already have set up for Classilla ("Report-A-Bug"), just on a much larger scale. I'm soliciting for someone or a group of someones to head up triaging user reports and helping support the influx of new users we will likely receive, translating user reports into bug reports as appropriate. Please E-mail me or nominate yourself in the comments. You will get free beer if we ever find a bar that would serve our PowerPC-using riffraff kind.

The second thing I'd like people to consider is what to backport in case we don't make it to Firefox 17 (or when we don't make it to Firefox 24), i.e., when we drop to feature parity. We would need to implement important CSS and layout features from later Mozilla releases to keep the browser core reasonably current, possibly new JavaScript features, and definitely some important extension-like functionality to incorporate into the interface and maintain ourselves (the QTE, adblock along the lines of Camino's, user agent switching to mimic later browsers, etc.). This is not a Christmas list and Christmas has already left the building; it is a "need to have or we lose significant functionality" list. I'm not soliciting for this list yet because we're still at source parity for the time being. If it looks like we fall off the wagon, we'll need to powwow.

I'm shooting for 10 beta next week. I'll post if there will be a significant delay.