"ESR" means Extended Support Release.

Every now and then, a Firefox release is labeled as ESR, and it means they
promise to support it for longer than the other in-between releases.

There is no reason to switch from a standard release to an ESR release unless:

a) you like always running the latest release, and the ESR release is the
latest one

or

b) you are currently running a no-longer-supported release, you don't want to
update to the latest release, but there's an ESR release somewhere in between
which you are happy with.

Basically, do not run unsupported software.  If security vulnerabilities are
discovered, you may well run into problems and they will be nobody else's
fault.

So, either run a recent (supported) standard version, or run an ESR version
(which may be older, but has support for longer), but either way, update
before that version becomes unsupported.

The above is true for all software, not just Firefox.  Not all projects have
ESR versions, but many do - some are known as LTR - Long Term Release.


Antony.

On Wednesday 21 February 2018 at 23:58:42, Andrea Sherry wrote:

> What is this? Is it necessary to use instead of regular Firefox?
>
> Andrea

--
I don't know, maybe if we all waited then cosmic rays would write all our
software for us. Of course it might take a while.

 - Ron Minnich, Los Alamos National Laboratory

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