Do you remember when tweets were 120 characters long, including any and all URLs?

Do you remember when magazines needed to put URLs, but the CueCat failed miserably and QR code Scanners were not prevalent yet?

Pepperidge farms remmeber.

Having said that, I agree with you, those were a security risk, and lest's hope they die sooner rather than later.

That's heritage from firefox. try to find a thunderbird "ESR" version in the downloads page.

https://www.thunderbird.net/en...

Nope. you will only find "Thunderbird", "Thunderbird Beta" & "Thunderbird Nightly"

Or, go to the release notes:

https://www.thunderbird.net/en...

where are Thunderbird 103 to 114? Or Thunderbrid 116 to 127?

While thunderbird is based on firefox ESR, thunderbird itself is just thunderbird.

You see, in firefirefox you have release (approx every 4~5 weeks) and ESR (approx every year).

But thunderbird has one and only one version per year*. there are no "release" versions every 4~5 weeks. So, this release is the newest release, BASED on Firefox ESR, but not an ESR ritself.

* Every 4~5 weeks there are patches for thunderbird, but it remains the same version (128 in this case) for the full year

Thunderbird depends heavily, and I mean HEAVILY, on FireFox (ESR), and Firefox has a ton of rust code as it is, and will incorporate more in the future.
So, from a technical point of view, using rust in other places inside thunderbird is a sensible decition.

It also helps that rust is a popular language which looks nice in a developer's CV, and that it is perceived as "equaly as performant but safer than C/C++"

TL;DR: No, is not political, is technically convenient.

Last time I checked (right when going from 2G to 3G circa 2005), everyone who knew a little bit about security was using DIAMETER (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diameter_(protocol)), and no one was using MD5 checksums anymore, all moved to SHA-256 (part of the SHA-2 family)...

Is sad to see people not running with the times.

Well if you want to keep using Win7 (and RADIUS with MD5 while you are at it) go ahead, no onee is stoping you, there are firefox derivatives that still support Win7, one of the advantages of FOSS

Also, remember that, between FF115 and FF128 a year of development has lapsed, who knows if anything in the codebase changed that made the browser incompatible with Win7, is not "one more version" more like 13 "incrementals"

Some other people want to to keep their computing systems secure, starting with the foundation (the OS), and moving upwards (browsers, porotocols and APPs)

May I remind you that Win10 (and 11) introduced additional security protections and APIs not present on Win7... and may I remind you that Win7 not seen a security patch sionce Jan 30, 2023?

I guess that getting support from Jan 2023 until Sept 2025 is better than nothing, and certainly much betyter than the support you got from the OS manufacturer's browser. And FWIW, I use FF ESR as my main browser, and, for the last 3 years, never encountered a site complaining about ESR beaing an old version. Yes, four or more years ago it was a big problem, but nowadays, not so much.

Original poster here. Firefox STILL supports Windows 7, and supported it long after MS and Google stoped. Early june last year, all users of firefox on Win7 (and 8 and 8.1) were put on Firefox ESR 115, and will be supported until ~sept this year. Much more time than MS or Google gave.

https://support.mozilla.org/en...

Something similar happened to older version s of MacOS (particularly, mojave).

And this is a confirmation of the importance of the ESR in the Firefox ecosystem

Because those non-techies will eventually come to you for technical matters.

Be it as family, as customers, as providers, as friends, as students, as teachers...

You will have to deal with them, so better have a small grasp of the current trends in non-techie land.

If you feel that a 1000 sample is too low, use the (in-)famous Student's T distribution to do your calculations.

But, as other comenters have said, 1100 is more or less good enough

Will not argue with you on the excesive polling nowadays.

When Netflix was winding down their DVD/BD-by-mail service (late april 2023), Redbox wanted to buy it. But Netflix would not budge.

https://entertainment.slashdot...

It was a good idea (for Redbox) then *, and probably they could have found the financing to do it.
But Alas, ALL of Netflix's Disk-by-mail people lost their jobs, and now the Redbox people are at risk of losing theirs too.

And again, is "Chicken Soup for the Soul" media the one in chapter 11, not Redbox alone. Maybe is the print biook division the one in trouble, or Crackle (they own Cracle too).
Heard of Crackle trying to go against all other free streaming with advertising businesses? Yeah, tought so.

When the chapter 11 plans are published (or when the company goes to chapter 7 and is dismembered) we will know which division were doing OK (if any), and which divisions dragged down the company the fastest.

* Why? Glad you ask. Among others:
1.) More negotiation power leads to less licencing costs to be paid to holly/bolly-wood studios.
2.) A review of all the distribution/operation centers leads to closure of some of them, leading to a more efficient supply chain, leading to less expenses and faster service.
3.) Ditto for redundant personnel.
4.) Redbox had two main revenue sources (DVD rentals by kiosk + Used DVD sales), this brings another (DVD by mail).
5.) The customer data from Netflix leads to a bigger customer DB, with retention and cross-selling opportunities (and that favors the Cracled streaming service too).

and was financially well compensated, I am fine with the Artificial Inteligence generated voice doing the reels...

If people like how the artifical voice sounds, and if their opinion in tainted by them knowing the fact that it is Artificial, that's another issue entirely.

They are iniconsistent already, there are thing you can do on mac that can not be done on phone or tablet, there are things done on tablet that can not be done on phones, and there are things done on the latests and greatest phones that can not be done on older phones.

If anything, this is an "equalizer of sorts"... All devices have AI device side, but more inderpowered the harware, the less 'I' in your AI

Unlike the Bigger LLMs like chatGPT, smallish LLMs like Meta's LLaMa family can run "device side", which is a plus for Apple, both for user privacy, for marketing and public/brand image, and to make use of the NPUs of the older iPhone models, NPUs underpowered by today's standards.

So, is not inconceivable that the full phat OpenAI models run on the cloud and selcted macs, slimer OpenAI models run hardware side on the mac and selected iPads, the full fat LLaMa runs on iPads and selected iPhomes, and the smallish LLaMas run on older iPhones, iPads (and even intel macs if possible, pretty please, with sugar and DP-4a on macs with AMD cards ;-) )

The real usefullness of ReactOS is NOT being able to run windows Apps on a FOSS framework (wine and derivatives is good enough for that). Is to be ableto use Windows DRIVERS for old/obscure/specialized hardware that simply does not have FOSS Drivers.

As for MacOS,most of the blumbing is FOSS (and most of that is BSD for historcal reasons) but the really interesting bits (like the UI and most of the "kits" are closed source.