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Comment by GlitchMr | Hacker News Reader

Updates are delayed to give add-on developers time to update their add-ons to be compatible with Thunderbird 91 if changes are necessary.

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Was there a separate release for 78 to fix the iirc four potential code execution vulnerabilities? (On a phone atm so I haven't checked myself, but since people are saying no update available for their 78, it sounds like no?!)

It looks like 78.13 is this month's security update for the 78 branch, the direct update from 78 to 91 just isn't allowed yet.

[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2021-3...

Why? Isn't that what alpha and betas are for?

There was a pretty significant departure in how the plugin/add-on ecosystem worked iirc. Not just a case of switching out a few deprecated function calls.

Plugin developers don't bother testing on the betas. They wait until an update breaks things and then work based on user complaints.

And who can blame them really, no one pays them to work on these plugins. If you wanted to make sure your plugins worked before an update than you should go test them on a beta yourself.

Unfortunately delaying an update doesn't really solve the problem as developers still wait for the "its broken" reports before fixing things.

They should have done the same with Firefox Mobile... still only about 12 addons available... almost a year after release. I still use Fennec for this reason.

I won't hold my breath. I'm still waiting for a couple of my favourite plugins to be updated to support version 78.

Update to 78 is a bit different as it removed an entire API.

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