Bangalore: For those who are tired and annoyed of the Mozilla Firefox updates every few weeks here is a reason that could probably help you stop frowning. Mozilla has announced to offer Extendend Support Release (ESR) for Firefox. Mozilla's Firefox 10 would be the initial basis for the first ESR which is expected to be released on January 31, 2012. Firefox 10 with ESR comes after the release of Firefox 9.

This Extended Support Release of Firefox is intended to target mainly the businesses, universities and other organizations with centrally managed Firefox deployments. The main feature of this ESR is that it would be updated once a year to new major version and security updates would also be provided simultaneously until the release of next ESR however ESR Will be a separate build from Firefox 10.

The initial ESR will be based on Firefox 10 and will offer more time (12 weeks) for organizations to test and certify new releases than the standard consumer version of Firefox. Each release will be maintained for one year, or the equivalent of nine release cycles as reported by readwriteweb.com.

Earlier Mozilla's open source browser could not manage to gather much of the hardcore fans especially among the IT managers who kept cribbing about the frequent updates that it brought along with it, and moreover at times Mozilla would just end support on a particular older version abruptly compelling the enterprise clients to switch to a new version. With this ESR new features and improvements are expected which can be utilized by the enterprises for a prolonged period but, the ESR will not cover thunderbird or Firefox mobile email client. More on implementation specifics of ESR would be provided on mozilla.dev.planning newsgroup sometime within this week.