Scott Silva wrote:
I'm almost sure it was a logistics change and not policy. They probably hit a wall in backporting patches to 1.5 tree of Firefox. So if they had to jump, jump with both feet out!
Just a personal preference but I liked how Debian approached it myself -
http://wiki.debian.org/Iceweasel
(specifically the part about back porting the fixes to the included version of Iceweasel rather than upgrading to a new major version)
It seems kind of scary that upstream would change major versions like that in a point release. They certainly have more resources to be able to back port stuff vs other distributions. Though I suppose since most of their installations are on servers it may not be such a big deal. All of my RHEL/CentOS systems are servers, none run any X11 apps, for that I use Debian or Ubuntu(for newer hardware) typically. My company's SSL VPN software for example doesn't work in Firefox 3. Though we are running an old version of the VPN software, our last update attempt resulted in the device losing it's configuration, haven't yet tried again. I can imagine the headache that would ensue in such an environment where things are controlled/tested, then a new major version gets installed automatically..ouch. Fortunately it's not something I have to deal with :)
nate