Re: I am going to raise the minimal Firefox version for the next release and thoughts on the minimal version in general

[Michael McMahon]

I'm fine with bumping the minimum version to current esr 115 or previous 
esr 102. My thought process is that using an unsupported browser tends 
to add more vulnerabilities than our extension solves.

Best,
Michael McMahon | Web Developer, Free Software Foundation
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On 10/12/23 02:23, Libor Polčák wrote:
> Hello,
>
> see 
> https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2023/10/05/changes-to-android-extension-signing/. TLDR: We will need to add a key to manifest.json to support Firefox for Android. One comment claims that Firefox 60 and 68 does not handle that key well. Firefox 78 appears to load such extension fine.
>
> We have about 8 daily Firefox for Android users. We have likely a single 
> user using Firefox 71alpha using JShelter about once a week. Other users 
> use Firefox 78 or greater (in the last month). I am going to raise the 
> minimal version to Firefox 78 and add the Android key. There is no need 
> in rushing to release a new version so if you have objections, let me know.
>
> Also, I guess that we might need to raise the minimal version further 
> once we go for the changes in the extension to support Mv3. Giorgio, do 
> you know if the changes for Android that you plan to push soon will 
> affect the minimal supported version?
>
> Anyway looking at the stats from the last month, more than 91.9% of the 
> users were using at least Firefox 115 (current ESR) or above each day 
> with the median of 94.7%. These numbers go to minimum of 95.3% and 
> median of 96.9% when we count also Firefox 102 which was the previous 
> ESR version. I interpret the numbers that users gradually shift from the 
> previous ESR to the current one.
>
> Looking at the absolute numbers between 13 and 24 users were using 
> Firefox 114 or earlier (not counting 102 ESR) in each day with the 
> median of 16. 2 to 8 people used Firefox 101 or earlier in each day.
>
> So if we raise the minimal version to 102 we will affect only few people 
> (possibly less than 10). Also the affected users might update by the 
> time we raise the minimal versions.
>
> Best wishes
>
> Libor