you can see the releases of firefox here: https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/

Thank you for replying. Though the link doen't tell me how to check to see if it is a ESR version. for example this link gives a nice list http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_release_history has a nice list. for example 17.0 and 17.0.1 have both normal and ESR versions.

Firefox 17.0 and 17.0.1 were on the Release channel at time and the ESR channel continued as of 17.0.2 to the current 17.0.4.

The next Major version that will be in ESR support is likely not until Firefox 24.0

This is a Windows-hosted scripting tool, so you can read the registry and open text files?

You can piece together the path to the Firefox program folder using this key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Mozilla\Mozilla Firefox

provides the value CurrentVersion

For example: CurrentVersion=19.0.2 (en-US)

With that information, then, this key

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Mozilla\Mozilla Firefox\19.0.2 (en-US)\Main

provides the value InstallDirectory

For example: C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox

If you add "\defaults\pref\channel-prefs.js" to that you get a file with a line similar to the following:

pref("app.update.channel", "release");

That second value corresponds to the type of install it is. See: http://kb.mozillazine.org/App.update.channel

If that seems like a huge PITA, you could vote for this bug: Bug 726781 – No way to distinguish between Firefox 10 and Firefox 10 ESR via the registry. Note that you vote in the top section where it says Importance. It's not helpful to add "me too" comments at the bottom.

You can check the application.ini file in the Firefox program folder.

SourceRepository=http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-esr17

Thanks everyone for posting. I don't have an answer for my issue but I don't have many servers with Firefox installed so I will just have to manually check.