The Firefox ESR (extended support release) is based on an official release of Firefox desktop for use by organizations including schools, universities, businesses and others who need extended support for mass deployments. Since Firefox 10, ESR has grown in popularity and many large organisations rely on it to let their employees browse the Internet securely.

We want to make customization of Firefox deployments simpler for system administrators and we’re pleased to announce that our next ESR version, Firefox 60, will include a policy engine that increases customization possibilities and integration into existing management systems.

What is the policy engine?

The Policy Engine is a project to build a Firefox desktop configuration and customization feature for enterprise users. The policy engine will work with any tool that wants to set policies and we intend to bring Windows Group Policy support as well. We’ll be initially supporting a limited set of policies but this will be evolving through user feedback.

More details on the policy engine can be found here.

Bug reference

What’s the plan?

In order to accommodate the group policy implementation, we are making Firefox 60 our next ESR version and will be following this plan:

May 8th – ESR 60.0 released (we’d love feedback from early adopters at that point and will be sharing a feedback form through the enterprise mailing list)

July 3rd – ESR 60.1 released

August 28th – End of life for ESR 52 and release of ESR 60.2.0. No further updates will be offered for ESR52 and an update to ESR 60.2.0 will be provided through the application update service

Also please keep in mind that Firefox 57, released last month, supports only add-ons built with the WebExtensions API. This means that Firefox 52 ESR is the last release that will support legacy add-ons. If you developed an add-on that has not been updated to the WebExtensions API, there is still time to do so. Documentation is available, and you can ask questions by emailing dev-addons@mozilla.org or joining the #webextensions channel at irc.mozilla.org.

If you are supporting users who use add-ons, now is a good time to encourage them to check if their add-on works with Firefox 57+.