You mean it gives you more time to answer, and deal with it when you think it's a priority. Conversations frequently allow for rapid clarification of interpretation, as well as resolution of an issue/question/clarification/whatever in 5 minutes. I'll take that any day over a 45min text session that's required because one of the parties refuses to pick up the fucking phone.

It actually says "The ESR is specifically targeted at groups looking to deploy it within a managed environment. It is not intended for use by individuals, nor as a method to mitigate compatibility issues with addons or other software. Mozilla will strongly discourage public (re)distribution of Mozilla-branded versions of the ESR." Mozilla software will remain freely available. The ESR is not targeted at individuals, and the changes to addon compatibility (compatible by default) and updates (silent/background) in the next 18 weeks will hopefully address a lot of the issues people have with the regular release. In the end, it's up to the individual to choose, but the installers will be available to download if you really want them.

The ESR is going to be based on Firefox 10 (which, incidentally, changes addons to be compatible by default), and most of the core rendering will not be affected. It is Firefox, but it won't get new features. It'll be "standard", but new additions will not be available, and that's a compromise that corporate deployment groups ere willing to make. Chrome's silent updates present the same problems to these orgs, in that the browser is changing rapidly and orgs have problems with testing and certification on the schedule.

The Thunderbird team is talking about an extended support released on their mailing list. There's more info on the Mozilla Wiki, but it is being planned.

No, it will not. Without re-hashing too much, the Debian case was different, in that the changes involved incorporating software patches (code) that had not been reviewed and accepted into the Mozilla code base, and the maintainers wanted to be able to include those patches at their discretion, independent of Mozilla's review and approval process. The Ubuntu change is a configuration change, where the default Yahoo! open search plugin and the default search order will be changed, but the application executable will not. Canonical/Ubuntu, as stated in the comment above, does have a distribution agreement in place with Mozilla. Part of that agreement is that any changes to code and/or config that differs from the default will be reviewed by Mozilla, and will not be included in a Firefox-branded product without Mozilla's permission (http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/trademarks/policy.html). Canonical believes this change is in the best interests of sustaining the Ubuntu project, and Mozilla has given permission for that change to be made.

The intent is to get to a place where we can do just that. The challenge is creating MSI's that can do that without relying on the registry for configuration changes (Firefox keeps all of its configuration directives - with the exception of some plugin registrations - in the appdir and user profile). It's a solvable problem that requires some concerted effort, and I'm always interested in hearing what kinds of configuration options the provisioning groups within an enterprise are looking for.

We've thought about this a lot, and the rules for customized versions of Firefox that are distributed publicly are quite different. We limit changes to those editions - especially anything that directly impacts the user experience - as the type of behaviours you describe are exactly what we want to stay away from. Changing the start page to a corporate site adds very little value, where adding a bookmark to a support or product page can, as it's there when the user wants it. Those are the types of changes we encourage, and we do our best to stay away from changes that don't add value to the user.

If you do come across distributions of Firefox that exhibit the type of behaviour you outline,we'd like to hear about it.