I understand that Mozilla is ceasing support for Firefox 52.x ESR in the coming two weeks. PureBrowser is at 52.9.0. Unfortunately, I see no 60.0.x ESR or Quantum versions in Debian ‘buster’, only ‘unstable’. (I am looking here.)
Can someone at Purism please comment? I see a Task or two in Phabricator, but that does necessarily mean progress down the pipe I have come to expect.
Thanks.
On debian stable and testing firefox 60esr will be released in few weeks, i think pureos will follow it
Just to let you know, in the past it has taken a few months after an ESR stops being supported for Pure Browser to get upgraded. Pure Browser has to be recompiled to remove most references to Mozilla and Firefox and the build process is complicated.
If you need the latest security updates (which we all do), you may want to simply install chromium or firefox until the Pure Browser packaging becomes more routine.
Technically, a browser does not become insecure the moment (upstream) support is ceased. If a vulnerability is discovered, Purism could still patch it.
However, I’ve moved to Brave. There’s so much to love about it (as I wrote in the Howto).
And I think it is well aligned with the privacy and freedom goals of PureOS.
I was more interested in Purism’s process and timing, but I appreciate everyone’s comments.
I think it will take longer this time, because Mozilla is removing support for legacy add-ons in ESR. (Aside from security/privacy ones that have been moved already, I only like TabMixPlus.) That should make the browser simpler, but it may take a while to fix the build.
PureBrowser 60.1.0esr is released. Just updated to it with apt full-upgrade.
I see it this afternoon. Thank you.
It is interesting that this is different from what I thought the process was.
UPDATE 8/24: I installed the upgrade, and the webext packages caused a problem for me. I wound up with two HTTPS-Everywhere entries, one I could not remove. What is more, it seemed to add the HTTPS-Everywhere for PureBrowser to Quantum, which has its own directories! I finally just uninstalled PureBrowser and WebExts in order to fix this. (I have to sanitize PureBrowser anyway.)
Oh. The added HTTPS-Everywhere link had a date of 1979 on it. I was graduated from college that year, and I think that is wrong. 
(Yes, I have been doing computers even longer.)
This may not happen to you but be careful.
It sounds like all kinks in building PureBrowser have been worked out! (Maybe not all of them but they are getting updates faster now a days).
Way to go PureBrowser team!