>Iceweasel and Chromium are both updated to the upstream-supported version
periodically (when the current version is no longer supported).
>The amount of churn between versions and the number of versions means that
it would be very difficult to backport patches.

Yes, certainly. My point was the Debian does not typically swap out
versions, but efforts backporting security patches to existing software. I
just find it odd that Debian has a differing standard for maintaining
browsers. It strikes me as a side effect of the popular "rapid release"
idea with both of Mozilla and Google. Debian clearly changed their rules in
order to take advantage of that, and this is the result.

I personally consider rapid release to be a terrible maintenance strategy,
that does more harm than good in the area of stability.

It is the same reason that I did not advocate using Jesse for Devuan 1.0 in
past posts. You end up compromising your principles to maintain sync with
upstream releases, as well as vetting your schedules by the schedules of
releases upstream.


T.j.