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Comment by esfandia | Hacker News Reader

As a user I also now need to keep up with the updates more frequently. Either deal with a more frequent risk of getting an update I don't like, or get nagged more frequently with annoying pop-ups to update if I don't want to, or turn off everything and miss out on the critical security updates.

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No you don't. You had automated updates before, and you'll have automated updates now. Same with Chrome.

That is already addressed in the parent comment, "deal with a more frequent risk of getting an update I don't like"

This isn't going to significantly increase the speed at which new features are developed, just the speed at which they're released. The overall risk of you encountering a new feature you don't like won't be higher.

Whoever spends some fixed amount of time evaluating the release will now spend more than 50% time than before.

I’m one of those. If I’m only one of 200 (as in, 199 don't care) and if Firefox has 200 million users, Firefox will waste millions of hours of user’s time per each additional release.

Sounds like Firefox ESR is for you then.

It's not necessarily the number of features but the process of preparing oneself for changes likely to be surprising, unpleasant, require workarounds or length research as to workarounds, etc.

Even if it's just a matter of reading the release notes, having to do that twice as often is a non-zero burden.

Of course there is Firefox ESR but I seem to remember Mozilla's website basically explicitly recommending against it with language along the lines of "This is only for people whose corporate policies require it, don't install it unless you have no other choice."

> process of preparing oneself for changes likely to be surprising, unpleasant, require workarounds

Do you actually do this? Do you think the percentage of users who do exceeds 1%? I mean, I do read the release notes for new web features but that’s because I know from the stats that almost all of our users will be updated shortly after release.

There are two questions you should ask: will this change the odds of a new feature I don't like being developed, and will an extra few weeks mean that they'll do anything other than complain? History suggests the answer to both is no, which means there's not much value discussing it.

Just switch to ESR if you don't want constant updates?

Firefox ESR still receives updates on the same schedule as regular Firefox. The ESR updates are just limited to security fixes, so ESR will still download minor updates but you'll only see big changes once a year for major updates (like Firefox ESR 60.8 -> 68.0).

Yep, this is exactly the reason they exist.

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