Of course, the Firefox 52 ESR was based on the old version of Firefox so WebAssembly was not enabled by default, and the super-fast multi-process handling engine (Quantum) was no present.
Nowadays, the latest versions of Firefox ESR (60+) only offer support for Adobe Flash NPAPI plugin. This proved to be invaluable for various international companies, at least for 2-3 years until they would inevitably have to move to newer versions of Windows.įirefox 52 ESR also offered support for Microsoft Silverlight and Java.
This was the pre-quantum era and, back then, Firefox 52 ESR (which is still available for download) offered support for both Windows XP and Vista.
The past Firefox 52 ESR – the latest version to support XP and Vistaīefore September 2017, the ESR channel was home to older versions of Firefox. These so-called point releases contain imperative security upgrades. ESR releases are maintained for more than a year with important “point releases” that usually follow the regular Firefox releases. To be more precise, Firefox ESR is an older version of Firefox with a deferred development cycle that aims to offer increased stability at the expense of the latest features.īe that as it may, the ESR line does not fully compromise security towards achieving this goal. For example, imagine a national school system having to change their entire browser system because a new release does not support some important outdated features (but relevant to the system in question) or worse because of a security vulnerability.įound under the moniker of Firefox ESR (stands for Extended Support Release), it’s a browser specifically designed for organizations that require extended support.
One of the main issues with mass software deployment within organizations can be the lack of extended support.
We’re not sure how useful this will be, but it’s near instant so there’s no real penalty, and overall it’s a neat extra touch.įirefox Download Tool is a free application for Windows 7 and later.It may be unknown to many day-to-day users out there that the Mozilla Foundation offers a product specifically aimed at medium to extremely large organizations (schools, universities, and other international businesses). Surprisingly, the program even uses the hashes to check the download with VirusTotal. Once the download is complete you’re able to view SHA1, SHA256 and MD5 hashes, maybe handy if you’d like to verify the downloads are correct. The program defaults to the latest version and default language, keeping clicks to a minimum.
You can do that by visiting Mozilla’s FTP site, but that’s awkward to use and requires you to know the code for the language you need.įirefox Download Tool is a 119KB Windows executable which enables selecting your preferred Firefox version, language and 32 or 64-bitness from a simple dialog. You have to follow an "other platform" link, maybe select a 32 or 64-bit version, or follow yet another link to work your way through a list of languages.Įven this step won’t help if you need to download an old version, maybe for testing. If you regularly need to download another build, though, life gets more complicated.