If Ubuntu wanted to, they could make it trivially easy, and upgrade everyone to Firefox 3.6 The reason they don't is because of their update policies. For exam

If Ubuntu wanted to, they could make it trivially easy, and upgrade everyone to Firefox 3.6 The reason they don't is because of their update policies. For example, Ubuntu 9.10 comes with kernel 2.6.31. If there is a bugfix or patch, they will update you to 2.6.31.whatever. They will continue those updates for as long as that release is supported. However, they will never upgrade you to 2.6.32 or above. They will just continue applying fixes to 2.6.31. This same policy applies to Firefox. With Ubuntu 9.10 you get Firefox 3.5. They will give you 3.5.9999, but never 3.6. To get 3.6, you will have to wait for Ubuntu 10.4. The reason for this policy is to maintain stability. They know that one package at version X is compatible with all the other packages at version Y, so don't upgrade anything and compatability will be maintained. This is reasonable, but I think they need to make an exception for something like Firefox. There is no reason that Firefox 3.6 won't be compatible. It just works. They are sacrificing the user experience in favor of some esoteric update policy that users are not even aware of, nor do they understand. User experience is priority one. People care more about Firefox than every other app on the system. Upgrade it Ubuntu!