Slashdot Mirror
Firefox Struggling to Compete as Corporate Browser
ericatcw brings us an article describing some of the obstacles Firefox is facing while competing with Internet Explorer for business use. Quoting Computerworld:
"Now nearly three-and-a-half years old and nearing the release of Version 3, Firefox no longer can be accused of being callow. And while many IE-only apps remain, plenty of others have been overhauled to support Firefox as well. However, other obstacles to broader adoption have emerged. Mozilla thus far has neglected to develop tools to help IT departments deploy and manage Firefox, and it doesn't offer paid technical support services to risk-averse corporate users. Janco Associates Inc. in Park City, Utah, currently gives Firefox a 16% usage share among visitors to 17 business-to-business Web sites that it monitors. Janco puts IE's share at 67% while giving 9% to Netscape and 3% to Google Desktop."
Already, IT people who use or promote IE are considered bitches, and everyone knows it. Is there any more powerful incentive to use Firefox?
But more importantly, who cares? It's not like Firefox's stockholders are going to revolt.
expandfairuse.org
IT people (especially CIO type of crap) being complete tards...
No, really, these kind of people spend millions of dollars in anti-virus, anti-spyware and other kind of crap that doesn't work when they could use FF and solve 90% of their problems.
And in my personal experience, most of the sites that don't work on FF are not work-related ones, so...
how long until
Certainly Firefox is more secure than IE, so many people use it. There may be a difference between corporate and home users, depending on how particular the IT folks are at your business.
And I haven't ever had the urge (or need) to call Firefox tech support. For one, I've rarely had problems I couldn't solve on my own with a little tinkering. And even if I did, I could google it. I've always thought that support forums can often times be a lot quicker and then you can bypass talking to someone from India...
Doesn't Firefox do that by itself since 2.0 ?
Granted using an internal repository might be more rational in a large organisation (although that's presumably hackable) but from what I've seen Firefox just updates itself (In Windows and Mac OS at least IIRC).
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
from personal corporate experience
firefox in corporate environments faces this issues (in no particular order):
*no activeX
*not backed by a huge company so perceived lack of support
*legacy web applications produced in ASP and older ASP.net that break horribly in firefox (and even latest IE7! yes ive seen it happen)
*it depertments are slow to change and adapt and are very conservative
*users complain of the fonts and sites looking/feeling different than what they are used to
IME medium and upwards sized firms are used to a certain way of working and if anything doesn't fit the model, it has zero chance of being used.
1. Is it secure? TICK
2. Does it work in our environment? TICK
3. Do they have guaranteed response times on support calls? CROSS
OK, forget that one. Next?
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
16% seems pretty good to me given the utter dominance of Microsoft in the corporate world. I would categorise 1 in 6 business users as struggling. If anything, it seems far higher than I would have expected.
There are plenty of tools capable of deploying firefox. I think the biggest problem in adoption is the number of enterprise applications that have IE specific functionality. Things are getting better, but too often I see applications that only support IE - sometimes because their javascript isn't cross-browser capable, sometimes because of ActiveX extensions, etc. Sometimes it's just because the software vendor didn't want to incur the support costs for adding another browser to the list of supported platforms.
What Mozilla needs to do is create their own operating system and incorporate Firefox into it in such a way that it cannot be uninstalled =P
Failing that, I think the ideas pointed out in the article are legitimate reasons that IE, albeit an inferior product in most reguards (or maybe all reguards), is dominating the corporate market. I think just the fact that it is a free product hurts them on some level. From my experience in the public sector, the brass always gets a little nervous when you start using the F-word of economics. They would rather dish out a couple grand to have a support and maintenance contract, if not only for the accountability aspect. I can't say that I've ever used FirefoxADM, but as a third party product, it looks like it suffers from the same lack of a guarantee for support and maintenance that the browser does.
I think the application compatibility is becoming less of a problem. A lot of GUI developers have already been throwing in browser checks for years because of Netscape, so I don't see Firefox as being that big of an issue. I haven't used any webpage IDEs in a while, but I'm willing to bet they already have that integrated as well. I can't recall in the past couple years that I've had a problem loading a page in Firefox.
Needless to say, I think Mozilla has their work cut out for them. Even if they do end up offering a superior enterprise class product, I think it's gonna be hard to get a lot of companies that have been partnered with M$ for years to move away from IE.
Capitalism: When it uses the carrot, it's called democracy. When it uses the stick, it's called fascism.
That, right there, is probably the number one reason more folks in the corporate world don't deploy FF. As far as I know, there is no easy way to push FF out to a desktop regardless if it's Windows, Mac or Linux.
The other reason is this narrow-minded mindset that some folks higher up the food chain than the IT department have about anything that isn't Microsoft. I know of one place where I worked that the CIO all but had an apoplectic seizure when she found FF was being used by some of the IT folks (fortunately, after I left). She then ordered that only IE will be used.
I, and several others where I currently work, use FF. The only thing we have to do is make sure we keep up with the updates as per our Bureau head. In fact, the only time I use IE is when I am on our intranet. For external sites, it's FF all the way. Never had a problem, not even on Microsoft's site when pulling down patches or updates.
If those two issues can be resolved, easy way to deploy and breaking of the mindset, you would see FF's usage climb. Granted, you'd still have to deal with people who don't know what a browser is but that's a whole other issue.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
has been ongoing for a long time. Microsoft is a widely-known brand, even among non-computer users, hence why company heads are reluctant to stray from the flock. Firefox hasn't been around nearly that long, and for the first years of its life was regarded as a "rebel's" product--- something you use just so you're not using an MS product. It hasn't been but for the last few years that Firefox has come into its own and widened its base, instead of being seen as some "hippy crap." Give it time, people will come around. Branding isn't a sprint, it's a marathon. As more and more security flaws pop up that are caused by Outlook and IE, people will start seeing the light.
No portion of this post may be rebroadcast without the express, written consent of Major League Baseball.
At work I use Maxthon because many of our internal sites work only in Internet Explorer. I, and most everyone else in my department have admin rights our computers, so just about everybody uses Firefox for everything else. I use Opera because I'm crazy I guess.
The rest of the company would have to call Help Desk and ask them to install anything besides IE6. Good luck with that one.
I've downloaded Google Desktop. I didn't know it was also a browser. Well, you live and learn.
I currently deploy Firefox to our corporate workstations, however there are definitely things that Mozilla could do to make Firefox more corporate friendly.
1. No first part MSIs. The majority of our workstations here are Windows XP. Mozilla doesn't put out an MSI build. There are a few groups that do, such as Frontmotion, but there is always some delay for them to rebuild.
2. Management through group policy, or some other way to lock it down. IE does this very well, Mozilla's default install really doesn't offer anything, Frontmotion's build has some options, but it's not as good.
3. Better support for restricted users and roaming profiles. We turn auto updates off, but our users still manage to try to run it occasionally. If they do Firefox downloads the update, fails to install due to lack of permissions, and then gives them an error until someone goes into the user's profile and deletes it. There can be some wackiness for people moving around between workstations as well.
Well, I see this much more as an opportunity then anything else, some buisnesses should just get into the band wagon and supply what other buisnesses need, isnt that what the free market is all about? :-)
Or does the free market not work?
If Mozilla wants to be a factor in corporate deployments, they need to make it easier for IT staff to actually use Firefox. Mozilla is a real company that makes pretty good money -- there's no excuse for that.
At my workplace, we did some testing of Firefox and found that it worked fine, but had a number of problems, including:
- Lack of a good, scriptable installation system
- No patches, only automatic downloads which pull down full installations that take place seemingly every other day
- Lack of documentation for the rube goldberg installation mechanisms.
IE 7 really sucks, to the point that my big corporate environment was willing to give it a shot. Too bad it's downsides for deployment were so bad.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I've been a Firefox user since version 0.8, right after it (AFAIK) switched from being Phoenix/Firebird. At the time, I was a corporate IT staff using an unlicensed browser in an IE-Only world. I had long previous even given up using Netscape, simply because it was slower and not as nice as IE 5 or IE 6. In fact, the lack of a good browser was one hindrance to my personal adoption of Linux and later advocacy at the office.
Now, four years later (just about), I'm a solid Firefox user and only use IE through the IE tab function (when on Wintendo) and Wine/VMWare (under Linux). IE 7 doesn't even work as well as firefox, IMO, in most circumstances.
Yet, the corporate adoption problem still remains. I am now a division manager over IT development and deployment for a 1,200-person department in a large County organization. Our official policy is "IE-Only." Do I run Firefox? Yes. Do I have staff which runs firefox? Yes. Are they officially allowed to run Firefox from the CIO? No. The problem is - Firefox doesn't come bundled with Windows XP/Vista and therefore isn't even on the minds of most non-IT folks in my organization. As it is, recent applications I've overseen are more Firefox-compliant, but still run "better" with IE or at least the IE-tab.
You can forget about running Linux on the desktop where I work. The CIO thinks Linux is a four-letter-word. (They freak out whenever I trot out my new HP laptop which had Vista and was upgraded to openSUSE.)
In any case, the article has some good points - no Mozilla-developed.msi file for rapid deployment, no central support function from Mozilla(yes, we do yell at Steve B. once in a while), and no corporate push from Mozilla.
One thing it doesn't mention - the CIO's of the world which I know are generally not that tech-savvy. They've been out of the trenches for so long that they tend to lose sight of the "latest and greatest" while paying attention to those who have the most marketing dollars.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
Not two days ago I had a meeting with some guys that want us to help them with their web application. It is guaranteed to work only on Firefox, in a strange twist of events. This is an internal site, but the have an external version they want us to overhaul and make look a lot nicer... it's only guaranteed to work on IE.
No, I'm not kidding.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Its superior spellchecher?
We've started to use Microsoft's SharePoint product, which is not particularly user-friendly. In one case, a coworker was getting JavaScript errors whenever she tried to edit a web part. I switched over to Firefox to try and debug and it turns out it worked perfectly without any errors.
Sadly we have a lot of web-based vendor products that don't work with Firefox, but I love breaking it out for these sorts of things. It's also great for validating Internet pages, making sure they'll work with other standards-based browsers.
I'm curious. How much does paid technical support for Internet Explorer actually cost? And what do you get with that level of support?
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
I work for a relatively large government contractor and there are just some DOD and Navy sites that require the use of IE, so Firefox is a no go. There is also the issue of allowing users to do what they want and supporting more than one browser that may negatively impact productivity. I don't see what the draw is to switching in a corporate environment. However, I have recommended the use of Firefox to users trying to access our Webmail using IE on Vista from their home computer. There's a weird ActiveX glitch that doesn't allow users to send e-mail and using Firefox fixes the issue. There's also a MS Exchange hotfix to alleviate the issue, but tell that to the non-existant Exchange admin :)
Hey, big and juicy doesn't necessarily mean unattractive. J-Lo can rub her sweet ass on my face any day of the week!
Besides the obvious reasons folks have already mentioned, there's also the issue that a lot of companies have developed in-house software that has web-based front ends and these only work in IE because that was the only browser anyone was even allowed to use internally in the first place. So what you end up with is a bunch of software people have grown to need that would need to be rewritten to work with multiple browsers. That's a big time and money investment, and it can also be a serious risk.
So at times you might have not only pressure from the "higher-ups" to stick with IE, but even from the devs who could otherwise be stuck rewriting JavaScript and CSS and whatever else for a while.
I like basketball!!1!
Where I work at the moment, there is an official policy of supporting only IE - using anything else is 'a sackable offence'. Still looking around, most people use Firefox. I think there is a huge difference between what the CIO and his minions define as IE usage based on policy, and actual usage.
There are of course the usual technical neandertals who boast that IE is a much better tool for them to use, and Firefox is too complicated - even though (a) they've never used it and (b) IE7 has ripped most of the features off already. They're sticking with the 'proper' browser.
They are completely right of course: I wouldn't let a 5 year old play doctors with a scalpel. Remember, Microsoft is to computers what Fisher Price is to surgery.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
I'm not sure this matters. My personal crystal ball shows the following future: Microsoft will continue to be the choice for large enterprise desktops for at least the next decade. The home user and smaller business market will however become increasingly diverse, with Apple and Linux gaining share and Linux becoming more and more popular in gadgets and devices. Eventually Microsoft's hold will crumble, but not until there is such a gap in innovation between the enterprise market and the home/small business market that it is inevitable.
I was a ff fanboy, and was personally responsible for gettting friends, family and every computer at my small biotech company to have fire fox - and a lot of people thanked me (I also get a lot of thanks for the wierd utilitys I install, like screenhunter)
then ff became the enemy, google: they pay their ceo more then they spend on rnd and they are now a google captive, that will NOT be net neutral but will help google sell ads
no more ff for me,until it forks into something reasonable.
maybe this is the way of all successfull companies: they have to abandon their early base of wacko fanboys to grow into a mature company
ps: I have worked at 3 small biotech companies in the last 6 years, and i have asked the ceos and it people about linux/ff, and they look at me like i am crazy
the cost of MS is simply so low, and the "problems" are PERCIEVED as so unimportant, that switching to linux/ff is just not even on theradar screen
It's pretty simple really. 50% of what I do on my internal network involves opening files. I haven't found away to open files stored on the internal network through FF. So I end up using IE for everything internal, and FF for everything external. From other experiences I would say that using IE7 is unavoidable. Weather it's the occasional website that only supports Active X or the occasional need to run windows update tools. Integrating FF just adds an unnecessary level of complexity.
New! Device Legs: These legs will help your poor OEM installed product escape any hamfistedness it may encounter. Ava
At my previous employer (one of the top IT telecom software cos. worldwide) I was called in by the CTO and questioned for almost 2 hours for reasons such as using a Bookmark syncing Addon with FF and having links to a few email and social networking sites on my FF Bookmarks Toolbar! The morons just don't want a cent's worth of bandwidth being used for something not directly related to the official work. Apart from the update issue, its the power that FF with all its addons, security and other razmataz, gives to its users, which is unbearable by the IT guys.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
this is no wonder, when companies like linksys actually manages to ship a switch with a stripped ssh interface, and a web interface that only work in IE (and IE6 too). My jaw literally dropped when I saw it. No more linksys until they get their act together on the webview side, or better yet - proper ssh control.
Doolittle :
Bomb no.20 : To explode of course.
For you clueless fanboys that didn't read the article and proceed to berate IT managers for being clueless, it is you that hasn't a clue.
When the task at hand is the controlled deployment of hundreds or thousands of automated installations, it's a fair bit more complicated that a user self installing on their gaming rig. Corporate PCs are locked down and users are not given administrative access to their machines. The "clueless" IT departments must test each application, configure the ideal settings and then push out the application to each desktop. They have to be able to handle installation problems like errors, partial installations, complete failures, etc. from a central location. They must also be able to mitigate and recover from these issues. They also need to be able to configure/reconfigure any and all settings in the application from a central location, preferably from a pre-existing management system like group policy. Finally, they need to be able to test updates for reliability and compatibility before distributing those updates to the clients. Relying on users to perform updates or even automated self updates is not an option in a corporate environment.
Firefox offers none of the tools/capabilities to do these things. There are a couple of third parties that attempt to package Firefox with the necessary enhancements but, the integration is far from seamless and their support is very spotty and usually lags a fair bit behind Mozilla releases.
The article is EXACTLY right about Firefox and why it still isn't widely deployed in corporate environments. Firefox is not designed for a managed corporate environment at all. It's management design seems more like that of shareware from the early 90's.
Get a clue before you spout off. Oh wait, I forgot where I was.
I know a lot of people on here are IT Professionals, but judging from some of these comments--quite a few are not.
IE vs. Firefox in a corporate environment is significantly different from IE vs. FF in a home user environment. Under a corporate environment (assuming a couple of hundred employees or more), you're already in control via things like proxy servers, top end firewalls, group policy management, and a host of other solutions for network security.
At the end of the day, you might also be migrating to Sharepoint which doesn't get along too well with FF (I've been with 2 companies now using Sharepoint Portal Server heavily).
IE comes with all default rollouts of the system, as well.
At the end of the day, IE is a much better choice than Firefox, and I've known this for quite a while. Anyone who denies such things is just a fanatic.
PS: ActiveX can be forcefully disabled for users in a business environment if needed.
PPS: See also: Network Access Protection/Network Access Control
Just this week, they started pushing IE7 out to our computers and advertised it at the cafeteria computers "Try IE7 and Office 2007 Today!"
I don't even have IE7 at home but once I got the message that they were forcing IE7 on me this week I decided to make a change. Now I'm attempting to use Firefox exclusively at work. Before I was using IE6 for the intranet and Firefox for the internet. I'm also discovering that a lot of internal sites do not work with Firefox, just a moment ago I found out our timekeeping site doesn't work. Seriously, the timekeeping site! This site isn't even restricted to corporate IPs, I can access it from home and I'm not allowed to use a standard browser.
Thankfully, some things do work with Firefox, but I need to figure out who runs these sites so I can send them emails...
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Corporate users (well me, anyway) want a tool to make it easy to deploy and I haven't found anything all-inclusive. Sad to say that a lot of hosted business apps run as active X controls or other BS that needs IE. What I need is a way to deploy firefox with specific settings, deploy ie tab with it, then have a list of sites that are always used for ietab. I need to configure this through group policy at least. I could have firefox on 500 machines tomorrow if I had this and I knew it worked perfectly. It should also be easy to deploy upgrades.
I have been tinkering with this myself but.. busybusy and I haven't made much progress.
A lot of applications we use require ActiveX. This is probably true in a significant number of big businesses.
Firefox doesn't support ActiveX. The ActiveX plugins available don't fully support ActiveX- they're just set up to run embedded media files.
Some of the applications run using add-ons like IE Tab, but you still have to have IE installed, which means support for two browsers instead of just one - in which case Firefox gets dropped.
Perhaps if there were essential applications or environments that Fireox supported but IE didn't, then we would see a shift in numbers in Firefox's favour.
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
My immediate office and domain of responsibility is now about 55 users (started around 45). When I started in July 04, all but two users used IE. And over 80% of systems had a wide and various host of viruses, backdoors, and trojans. Within two weeks, installing Netscape 7.2 and FF .9, and an aggressive training schedule coupled with long hours after close of business, I was down to under a dozen problematic systems.
I installed FF1.0 when it came out, and have been able to keep users up to date pretty easily. Some of the savvy ones do it themselves; others need a little handholding. Which I don't mind, it gets me off the phone ;) More recently, I was praised by one of our netop managers in NYC for doing so, because the virus/spyware etc problems in my office are 9/10ths of other offices he oversees.
But I do agree with the article. One of the things holding back some of my sister offices is the very fact that, with 100+ users, it's inefficient or dangerous to have (certain) users as full desktop administrators, especially when they can't figure out which mouse button is the "right" button. So finding a way to easily deploy FF would make a lot of techs happy, in my corner here, if not necessarily the intraweb coders. :)
I think the attitude of most people is IE works and is already there. Loading Firefox needlessly introduces another variable. Added variables yield more risk and more work. They don't see there as being a sufficent payoff for the added risk and effort.
In my experience, I'd tack it to Sharepoint. Firefox *works* with Sharepoint technically, but not as well as IE, and I've had to tweak the about:config to pass the Windows authentication to make it work seamlessly. And you still lose the integration with MS Office. If you have a corporate Sharepoint-based intranet that is mostly what people use, sure, you'll see IE usage over Firefox.
. . . and for the most part that's for small in-house apps written (badly) in asp.NET with ActiveX controls (bleh!)
Of course, if I have to develop a web app, I test it in IE, because it's still the main browser, but I make sure it runs in Firefox too.
I think there's a great future for Firefox as more and more developers kick the .NET habit.
What?
The much more surprising stat isn't about FireFox... its the 3% that Google has from their _desktop_ software.
Here is a Slashdot story submission that helps explain why corporations have not adopted Firefox. The submission was rejected: "008-01-09 02:36:24 Mozilla gets a new CEO (Features,Mozilla) (rejected)".
Many people depend on Slashdot to help them learn about important events in computing. But this event hasn't been covered, and apparently is being ignored: It appears that Firefox does not have more market share because Firefox development has been very poorly managed.
Here is the Slashdot story submission:
Winifred Mitchell Baker has given up her position as CEO of Mozilla.
Firefox is now partly a profit-making effort. There has been considerable discussion about the possibility of Firefox issuing stock and becoming a public corporation. Firefox made a profit of $47,000,000 on revenues of $67,000,000 in 2006.
That enormous profit percentage that raises a question: Why did Firefox take in $67 million, but only spend $20 million? What is happening with the rest of the money?
Firefox development has been glacially slow. For example, in 6 years the CPU hogging and memory hogging bugs are still not fixed (although there has been considerable improvement).Thunderbird development has been abandoned. Opera is able to restore sessions, but the Firefox session restore feature throws away URLs if response is slow. Why is that, when millions of dollars are spent on development each year?
Firefox makes money when people use it to visit ads. Google pays because Firefox uses Google as the default search engine. It seems likely that a profit-making Firefox will eventually prevent add-ons like AdBlock Plus that stop the display of ads which many users find annoying.
The former CEO, Winifred Mitchell Baker, has no technical knowledge. She is a lawyer. She took the job when no one thought there was money in development of Netscape/Firebird that became Firefox.
Will the new CEO manage better? Or will Firefox development begin to be unfriendly to the user so that it will make money?
In addition to the ActiveX nonsense, the major hindrance to Firefox acceptance is the lack of support for certain Windows-only authentication method(s). Somehow IE is able to pass the Windows-user's credentials securely to an intranet server, while firefox can't...
My understanding is, the method(s) aren't entirely secret, and it may even be possible to patch/rebuild your own firefox binary to support the method. But of the quoted 17% of the business users, how many would even be willing to (much less — capable of) pulling it off?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Yeah, the guys here surely think like you; luckily I've manage to infect some dozens of computers with Firefox Portable so people can have an alternative.
And if you still wonder why, you may want to ask Secunia.
My 0.02 cents
Until Firefox supports roll out & control via group-policy, few businesses are likely to switch.
There are few people adding this support (FrontMotion comes to mind) but then charge you for the ability to bundle plugins.
Ever since I convinced the boss to make the switch to Firefox, it's been the biggest headache ever. No upgrade is simple, it's impossible to add plugins. I use Firefox everywhere else, but as an admin for a windows network, I'd prefer IE.
I beg to differ. Check out the Firefox Client Customization Kit (CCK).
The CCK project will produce a set of tools that help distributors customize and distribute the client. Support is provided for creating CD and download installers. Wizards are provided to simplify customization, installation, and ISP signup.http://www.mozilla.org/projects/cck/
Many IT department that are powered by Microsoft software have no interest in something that would reduce the value of their investment in Anti-Virus, Anti-Malware and security software and cuts manpower needs. This violates the TCO and ROI assumptions that they based their purchases on. Firefox may expose some anti-malware infrastructure as the useless rube goldberg that it is.
Additionally, the extensibility of FireFox presents a problem where users can easily add on to Firefox, and OH MY GOD change the way their GUI looks.
-- $G
It won at the place I work. When I started Firefox was "not officially supported" on the internal site because...well it was internal and we were allowed to be jerks about it. Not anymore.
However there has been an alarming increase in the (mis)use of Microsoft products of late. We seem to be stuck with Sharepoint now, which does not play nice at all with Firefox.
I'd rather use a wiki.
Question everything
Our problem is compatibility with IE7 not with FF+CCK We have all sorts of IE6 only apps chugging along.
As an IT director I had to make this decision for my 400 person company. Firefox may be more secure than IE but so many things bundle IE for rendering and presentation that one must still consider it from a security point of view. Therefore installing Firefox doesn't eliminate that problem.
When writing and deploying internal web apps we don't need to be spending the time (i.e. money) to make them work on multiple browsers and multiple versions. IE of some form is installed on all the desktops by default. This eliminated development time and saved the company money.
Firefox was installed on most desktops but there were always a few that didn't have it for some reason. IE is always there.
For security reasons most users are not given admin rights on their desktops (so they can't install every spyware and trojan loaded gizmo on their systems.) This means the firefox updates cannot be installed by them. While we certain could have come up with a solution to do this it really doesn't make sense to spend the time on it when IE is there and is automatically updated by WSUS giving us a consistent platform to work on.
My job was to give the users the ability to use the web and intranet at the lowest cost with the least IT overhead. IE was the way to go. Firefox is installed if they want to use it but it isn't the default nor will it be any time soon.
All 100+ desktops and laptops run FF as their default browser and have for the last 3 years. Everything thing has worked out just fine. All of our in-house web apps work with FF. Life is good where I work.
Bearded Dragon
Okay, and how does that allow you to update the installs that are already out there? How does that allow you to change the settings of the installs already out there?
no text
There's a Firefox registry setting you can use to turn on automatic NTLM authentication.
Type "about:config" into the address box in Firefox and the list of registry settings will appear.
Then type "ntlm" into the filter box, and the list of settings will shrink to three. Choose:
network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted.uris
by right-clicking it, and choose Modify. Add to this string a list of URL's for sites that require NTLM authentication, separated by commas (eg, "http//intranet, http://wwwpost/"). URL's "below" the ones spoecified (such as "http://intranet/news") will inherit the authentication).
Since it helps keep users from picking up malware, Firefox has been adopted as the Windows browser of choice at our 2000-employee computer firm.
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
I know in my workplace they have some kind of conflict with using firefox....they openly allow it for normal web browsing but there appears to be some parts of oracle that "only work with IE". Our techs have expressed desire to have things work in FF instead, but corporate doesn't regard it as a priority yet (nor is it even on their to-do in the future lists). Beyond that they allow it to be installed, but they don't put it on the PCs in advance. So I can understand where IE is still locking people down, certainly.
How hard is it to program oracle to use firefox instead of IE? Currently it "doesn't work". They are using oracle for a database with multiple arrays for storing customer information and orders/quote/service request tracking, primarily.
Mozilla does not at present provide paid support but it is my understanding that they will be offering a greater range of support services in the future, including volunteers over a VoIP connection to field questions.
Also, Mozilla does hire Michael Kaply to improve on the CCK (Client Customisation Kit) which can allow a business to deploy a customised and locked down version of Firefox to their requirements.
I personally do not know what it takes to get a business to adopt some basic software like this, to me there seems to be no hinderance whatsoever. How is it different from IE, apart from being better on so many levels? I just can't see a company with a support contract from Microsoft getting the IE team to fix bugs in the browser, otherwise it'd be a half-way decent browser.
Capitalism: When it uses the carrot, it's called democracy. When it uses the stick, it's called fascism.
Great - another CCK. But nothing to do with the 'Content Creation Kit' for Drupal... maybe there should a central repository for TLAs to avoid confusion... or perhaps TLA namespaces?
are available here http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox:2.0_Institutional_Deployment
And a great support site is here http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewforum.php?f=38
I love Firefox to bits, except this:
If you run as a limited user, then Firefox decides it needs to update, every time you load it, you get a "failed to update" message.
Yeah, you get the message even if you log on as an admin and apply the update. The only fix is to temporarily add the limited user to the local admins then run Firefox.
This is stupid - limited users are very common in a corporate environment.
So what I hear you saying is you've never tried to configure kerberos authentication within Firefox?
I would GLADLY pay $500 just to figure that out. (but not to buy software that does it, I'd rather learn how, then share it with the rest of the world, like most people should do with the support they receive)
At home, I only use Firefox (then again, I dual-boot linux and windows, and my wife has a macbook from work), and at work I use Firefox, but there are many gotchas that are preventing it from being near as useful as it could be. No windows-based authentication is probably the biggest, because now my users will have to log in to our intranet each day, even after they've logged into their computers. (Which makes a big difference on how many people make full use of the resources available.)
There's also the inability to use Group Policy to lock down various components, not to mention if you log in as an administrator to update firefox, when the non-admin user logs in it throws up an error message about not being able to update all the files. (very annoying for most of my users)
With that said, I just have my staff deal with the problems, but then again I don't force Firefox on them. The day I can control the use of it from my office is the day I enforce a company-wide Firefox policy.
It appears, unfortunately, that the Mozilla Foundation is in bed with Apple and stole their secret: "Ignore the business sector, but imply that you haven't."
I hear and appreciate your comment that if companies called paid tech support with each problem they had it would be insane, but also keep in mind corporate support for free products is usually geared towards the IT Support Staff, who needs support too sometimes (especially when deploying to the whole company for daily use).
"Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed." -C.S. Lewis
At a guess, 90% of non-managers in my IT department (of 500) use FF. With IE tab probably, just for those legacy apps which don't know better. ALL developers I have chatted to use FF as primary browser.
But the IT department isn't stupid. They're not going to package FF as an extra cost when IE is part of the OS. Simple, basic economics: FF is an additional cost to IE which is bundled.
And most "work" users don't care...
Atheism is a non-prophet organisation
There is certainly something very strange about these stats: nine percent are using Netscape?! I somehow doubt it. But add that to the reported 16% for FF and you get close to the healthy 26% or so other people are reporting.
I don't use Google Desktop, but if you really can browse with it, chances are it's FF in disguise.
If corporations want to pay for support then why not provide it ?
Sourceforge services looks like a good way to provide it .
[site]
"Risk-averse corporate users" are afraid of firefox because of no guaranteed support? Hello, isn't the last 10 years of evidence enough to suggest that IE is the riskiest browser out there?? I know when I use it at home, it's almost a guaranteed recipe for spyware, cookie snatching, and malicious websites thanks to the (in)security model of ActiveX.
... "better the devil you know!"
I guess it proves the old adage
You are in a maze of twisty little passages; all alike.
A major hindrance to Firefox's adoption in the corporate world is that it is SLOW on tables. IT departments have to make laundry list applications using tables.
IE depicts these ten+ times faster than Firefox. A page which loads in 3 seconds on IE may take 30 seconds to load on Firefox. That's a complete showstopper.
This is a well-known bug which has existed since the early days of Firefox. And no, Firefox 3 doesn't solve it.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=352367
Using NoScript is more like an asylum allowing its inmates knives on an individual basis, according to whether they're likely to do harm with them.
In any case, a well-built site should work fine without js.
I'll tell you what the real reason is: Microsoft's plan has worked.
IT departments are overworked, understaffed and in the windos department, most of the so-called admins are young people, university drop-outs, MSCE holders and others that are somehow seen as "good enough" to run the corporate desktop infrastructure but that you wouldn't let near the important SAP, Unix servers or other "real" computers. Sorry if that sounds sarcastic, most of the boys aren't at fault, but that's what they are: Boys. Very few corporations pay for real (read: more expensive) windos admins.
So the result is a department that struggles daily to keep things running, often with more hacks than strategy, and where deploying any additional software will be fought tooth and nail because it adds to the already overwhelming workload (did I mention they are almost always understaffed?).
In comes MS and includes the browser in the OS. End of game for all other browsers, because the IT department now sees them as additional software, and unnecessary to boot because "there's already a browser on there".
I don't blame the windos admins. I blame the justice department for essentially dropping their case and the judge for not seeing through the full game. Despite their bundling being found illegal, MS still played and won the game.
And no matter how easy or automatic Mozilla makes it, how many tools they build or how much ads they run, Firefox will always be an additional piece of software that doesn't do anything that a built-in piece of software doesn't already do. And with that scenario, IT departments will be very reluctant to deploy it, no matter the support options, tools, whatever.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
give me freshly updated dragon hentai porn in the top-right rather than an animated icon and i'm sold..
... but you still somehow need to deploy them in an automatic fashion. I'm guessing, though, that a tool could be developed fairly easily that puts the updates in the correct directory so that FF sees them the next time it starts and then installs them automatically.Package management is normally left up to the distro. So if the distro sucks, then it also has a sucky or absent package management system and no maintenance of major packages.
So the only obstacle the Firefox is facing is the anti-competitive nature of M$ Windows maintenance tools: the tools appear to only support M$ cruft, so when the 'reformat and reinstall' mantra is invoked -- poof -- gone are the competing products that staff had to wheel, deal, and wheedle to get into place. Eventually they run out of time and let the M$ have their way.
RHEL / Fedora, YellowDog, Mandriva, Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, etc. all have no problem keeping FireFox packages up to date. What's the problem with the IT staff mentioned in the article? I thought the reason to go with a big money vendor was to get the big money support the PHBs / MBAs are always talking out of their asses about. Can't the IT staff mentioned in the article press the vendor to do what it is ostensibly contracted to do for them?
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
What we need is a supported, cross-platform means of deploying those settings to 1,000+ browsers. I know Firefox ADM is out there but there's no guarantee that those ADM templates will work with future releases. Plus that only applies to Windows system management. If Mozilla wants corporate customers to use their browser they need to offer corporate customers the same management options IE has.
Yes, my only tool is a hammer. And you're starting to look like a nail.
You've minimized the amount of testing you need to do for alternate browsers. Just make the applications work with IE and you've satisfied almost all of your users needs. Fewer browsers is actually a good thing for web developers--especially if they are targeting a limited niche of working in the real world of constrained budgets. The more browsers/configurations you need to develop and test for the more it will cost (or the less features you can include).
Mozilla Foundation Top 20 Excuses for Not Fixing the Firefox Memory and CPU Hogging bugs. These are actual excuses given at one time or another.
As long as corporations install Winblows (which MS will fight tooth and nail to continue), IE will dominate in the corporation. MS creates incentives for corps to buy more apps from them, more apps that currently require IE. As FF reacts and enables support for them, think Sharepoint/Project Server, MS responds with upgrades and new apps that don't work in FF (or any other browser for that matter). Thus the corporations cannot get rid of IE as their default browser on the desktop.
As Linux becomes more accepted and usage expands, so will other open source apps in the corporate setting. As this proliferates, you'll see more of a move to FF.
I wonder how much of this is due to the unclear support for remote/unattended installations. Maybe FF3 is better, but with FF1/2 the only way to support custom/unattended installations was a collection of externally developed hacks or required you to basically build your own installer. I played with this about 2 years ago and compared to the remote install and customization tools for IE it's a no brainer for hassled admins.
Now, I admit freely the IE team has it a lot easier since they are only targeting a single platform and a handful of OSs, but I know for a fact this is something that a few places I worked at didn't like.
If anyone knows better please correct me!
Peace, or Not?
No, you should and probably do have in-house IT staff anyway. This wasn't a suggestion to hire another employee to do nothing but support firefox.
Additionally, in house IT support troubleshoot and fix issues with software they didn't develop, don't have source code for - all the time. For example: I didn't write windows. I don't have the source code for windows... I fix windows problems all the time.
There's not a whole lot that can go wrong with firefox to begin with...
"Mozilla thus far has neglected to develop tools to help IT departments deploy and manage Firefox". Autoconfig is nice, but not anywhere as good as group policies. An official MSI package would hurt either.
President/CEO Pacy World http://www.pacyworld.com
The reasons you give for the inertia in corporate environments are actually indicators of the stagnation in Microsoft's OS line (XP being around for so long, with no major updates except for the browser). If there is one good thing about Vista it is that it moves things forward for the MSFT platform as well as for interoperability. IE7 is proving to be as different a browser from IE6 as FF is in terms of compatibility. Since an effort has to be made to make it IE7 compatible might as well make it standards-compatible with pretty much the same effort.
.com bubble was near fully-inflated.
*no activeX
Many of my employer's web-based products followed a late-1990s design philosophy--they are absolutely infested with ActiveX garbage--mostly because they were quickly "webified" versions of early products that were not web-based but employed ActiveX components extensively. In the early days, MSFT did a good job of enticing software developers into IE lock-in by allowing Activex to be embedded into web pages, because if you were big into ActiveX/(D)COM/OLE in your client-server apps you could throw together some pseudo-HTML ActiveX wrapper around that crap and marketing could sell it as "web-enabled" right around the time the
However, IT departments weren't enamoured with ActiveX to the same degree as (lazy|pressured) developers, and whatever fondness they might have had wore off quickly. Even 3 or 4 years ago IT departments were cringing at the mess of ActiveX in those products. There's been heavy pressure to remove it and in the latest releases it's now completely gone. Internally, the web interfaces to our business systems are completely free of ActiveX--though they rely far too much on Java applets. In any case at present (and moving forward) not supporting ActiveX is a GOOD thing in IT department's eyes, because it actually is less work for IT (they don't have to worry about restricting ActiveX in FF the way they have to on IE).
*not backed by a huge company so perceived lack of support
This is really a non-issue for all but the most clueless PHBs. IE6 was a dead product--MSFT figured discrete web browsers were obsolete and that they could hijack the WWW and make it the vehicle to deploy distributed apps based on their own XML formats. There was no innovation and the most minimal support for IE6. Honestly, I've not heard once about a company that has had to make an urgent supoprt call about their web browser, not have I heard once about MSFT stepping up and making a critical fix to IE due to a request from a specific customer. IT people KNOW that there is probably more "community support" for Mozilla browsers than there is corporate support from MSFT for IE, and FF code is under more close scrutiny than IE by far.
*legacy web applications produced in ASP and older ASP.net that break horribly in firefox (and even latest IE7! yes ive seen it happen)
Not only do many ASP(X) apps break in IE7, they actually break WORSE in IE7 than they do in FF...quite embarrassing for MSFT actually. However that is the key point to note: There isn't a dependency on IE in general--it is on IE6 SPECIFICALLY, and the days are numbered for IE6, being Vista is equipped only with IE7. MSFT is sure to extend the 7-year promised lifespan of XP, but it won't do so indefinitely. I figure this year MSFT will draw a line in the sand and insist new computers NOT be available with XP pre-installed (probably this fall--end users will have to perform the downgrade--err, "upgrade to a more familiar experience", themselves).
As I said, with FF having a significant minority presence in the market and efforts required to make apps work in IE7 anyways, this provides a promising opportunity to make apps STANDARDS-compatible.
*it depertments are slow to change and adapt and are very conservative
Those sort of outfits are basically the ones that abdicate their strategic planning to their vendors--they're the same ones managed by the clue
From a school setting - I have a hard time wanting to use Firefox (or FoxFire as all my elementary teachers call it... drives me nuts!)
Safari is VERY easily managed through the Workgroup manager server tools. I can set proxies, home website, block/filter sites which need to be blocked (that are missed by other devices.)
Firefox ignores them all.
IE is only installed on all the systems, if all the systems are up to date windows boxes (2k and below are stuck with ie6)...
If you have older windows systems, or anything else (macs, unix, phones etc) then you can't use these ie-only apps at all. If you develop your apps for firefox, then you can supply firefox to virtually all desktops, and on any other devices (eg embedded devices like phones) an app designed for firefox is far more likely to be standards compliant and work on these embedded devices.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Exactly. The more pieces of software you install, the more points of failure you have. Its another thing to patch and another security hole waiting to be exploited.
That said, I use Firefox exclusively at work. Once I discovered the mouse gestures add-on, I dropped IE like a bad habit.
And they will probably *make* you go "belly-up" if you do anything that's remotely competing with them, court orders and monopoly settlements be damned.
That's great information; but at the same time it's actually a really good example of lack of support contributing to so many corporations /not/ willing to use FF.
After all, it's not really practical for organizations that rely on NTLM for multiple servers to manually configure several hundred or thousand firefox installations to accept those specific servers -- never mind if the list of servers changes. Too, it's even more unlikely that they'll be able to trust the users to properly maintain and configure those settings themselves.
That is true and in that environment I would have made a different decision about what browser to standardize on. The point being that the proxy war between Open Source and Microsoft being fought out in the browser debate has no relevance on the decision to standardize on one browser or another. I don't care if MS thinks Open source people are a bunch of socialists or that open-source people think that MS is a corporate fascist. I care about doing my job under budget using the tools available. In my case it was IE. Your mileage may vary, of course. I can't justify using my company's money to implement something I don't need just for the sake of sticking a finger in Microsoft's eye. That isn't my problem.
So...you're saying waving your twee little support contract at the mighty Redmond is sufficient for them to drop whatever they're working on, abandon any strategic assumptions that factor into their release schedules, and do a code drop for your specific benefit?
Bollocks. You're either incredibly powerful or unfathomably mental, and deeply disturbing to us mere mortals in either case. Although the image of someone standing outside the main door at Microsoft, waving a piece of paper and bellowing for satisfaction is rather amusing in a Python-esque way.
GP post is spot-on: support guarantees you nothing. Nothing at all, beyond someone picking the phone up and listening to you (hopefully politely) for a few moments. It should at least include a reasonable attempt to diagnose your problem, but even that seems dodgy these days. It certainly won't swerve a major vendor an whit off of any bigger plans, which do typically encompass release schedules for a product that helps ensure lock-in like IE does.
Guess it's time for a sit-down with your legal representation, let us know how your suit proceeds. In the meantime, someone please mod this down to something reflecting reality...it certainly isn't insightful.
Thank you - you win my award for "most useful tech tip of 2008" (although admittedly, there's still 99% of the year to go so I wouldn't count on the trophy & award ceremony /just/ yet..)
I've been using FF for a couple of years at work, but have been limited to external sites only; most of our intranet pages require authentication, and TBH it's just too much of a hassle to repeatedly enter my NTLM credentials - especially when some sites load page content from 4 or more different servers, each one needing authentication. The IETab plug-in has helped hugely.. but your tip is just what I've been looking for. Thanks!
"No, you should and probably do have in-house IT staff anyway."
That really depends on the size of the company. I don't think this is some generalization that can be made for all businesses.
"I didn't write windows. I don't have the source code for windows... I fix windows problems all the time."
But what happens when you do get a problem that the paperclip can't help you with?
"There's not a whole lot that can go wrong with firefox to begin with..."
FF isn't the ultimate infalliable killer app, it's just a better version than IE. It still get the occasional leak, especially as new technology gets integrated into it.
It's not about sticking a finger in Microsoft's eye. It's about being locked in to Windows and Internet Explorer. If your company wants to save money by moving to Linux, you'll have to give them the bad news that it will cost more money to make the web sites work. Perhaps it would have saved more money in the long term to be more forward-looking and make the sites standards complaint. The point is that you made a judgment call, and time will tell if it was the right one or not.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
If you could push out Firefox settings via Active Directory Group Policy, I think most IT departments would start deploying Firefox more rapidly.
It would not have saved money. All of those debates were had amongst the staff including the VP of IS who is a big Linux user and advocate. I'm perfectly fine with an all Linux environment but it this case it could not be justified. So to bring this back around to the IE discussion, ultimately, IE ended up being the way to go.
I'm a little disappointed that there wasn't more information in this article about the work that IS going on.
IBM (and other folks) are actively trying to get more people involved in making Firefox better for the enterprise.
We realize this isn't an area that Mozilla Corp. cares much about, so we're trying to rally more folks to support in this arena.
If you want to participate, check out:
http://www.kaply.com/weblog/2008/01/03/firefox-enterprise-newsgroup/
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I find some dark enjoyment that some applications are IE only. The poorly written code that makes up IE only application generally means they require all browser security settings to be turned off. Consequently, I allow IE to only go to a restricted set of sites on the Internet, whereas Firefox users can go anywhere on the net.
You need to re-read your post, with a focus of the tense of the verbs. It is all future-state, not past or current. And besides, it looks to be a toolset for ISPs to build custom-branded versions of Mozilla with the dialup (?!) information for the ISP already setup.
What does this have to do with enterprise deployment, policy-enabling and on-going remote patching?
From http://www.mozilla.org/projects/cck (Emphasis mine)
"There is work going on to product a XUL based Firefox CCK. For more information, see http://www.mozilla.org/projects/cck/firefox/."
"The CCK project will produce a set of tools that help distributors customize and distribute the client. Support is provided for creating CD and download installers. Wizards are provided to simplify customization, installation, and ISP signup."
"Currently, our design centers around a win32 implementation because the size of my team has been limited. See Advocacy below if you don't like that."
Are these tools? No - it's a project to create the tools. How do you read that and think enterprises can deploy that NOW?
I could be mistaken but I believe the previous poster just said "There are Firefox ADM's available"
It is my understanding ADMs can be imported into group policy and applied.
Wow, what a nice usable interface. Well, at least you can set it through a central policy. Oh wait.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
It's been our company's IT policy for over two years that Firefox is the default browser, and IE is only to be used for web sites that require it (and even then we contact the web site owner and protest).
You have to enable SPNEGO for proper kerberos (aes-256 etc) via http headers. NTLM is not used by anyone anymore really because of the problems with security and how it integrates with the rest of the centralized authentication setups. And yes, many environments opt for IE until Firefox does SPNEGO way better.
Are you speaking from experience or from your ass? You find it necessary to formulate your argument with insults and arrogant unfounded facts. It sounds to me like you just enjoy complaining about Microsoft cause you can make lots of friends on Slashdot and feel good about yourself. If I'm wrong, let us hear your experienced tales of woe and hardship!
The fact is, Microsoft's products are part of a competitive and flexible market. The support they offer is a product in and of itself. Believe it or not, customer satisfaction is taken quite seriously by commercial product vendors. If you think that a customer, no matter how large or small, who paid for a support contract gets brushed off on a phone call, you obviously are speaking on assumption alone. If this really happened nearly as often as you seem to imagine it does, the company would get a poor reputation and nobody would even buy their support.
There is a very strictly and legally defined process involved in support contracts, even the "twee little" ones. Trouble tickets must be resolved in a given amount of time. If not, they get escalated. It doesn't matter who the customer is, if the issue exists, and is considered severe, it will make it up the chain. Want evidence? Why do you think Microsoft releases 30 security patches a month? You think it's cause they suddenly feel like improving their product for no reason?
I think if you had ever really dealt with a support contract, you'd realize just how wrong your statements are.
Capitalism: When it uses the carrot, it's called democracy. When it uses the stick, it's called fascism.
For now, yes. For the future, who knows?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
At my office, for instance, we're all big Firefox users. Everyone has it installed, everyone uses it by default. However, we're also mostly a Microsoft shop, which means Outlook/Exchange for email, calendars, etc., SQL Server as the database, Sharepoint, MS Project, etc.
All of those pieces of software have web components, and for each and every one of them, they don't work well, or at all, in Firefox.
Outlook Web Access (OWA) forces any non-IE browser to their light version, with the following message: "The Light client provides fewer features and is sometimes faster. Use the Light client if you are on a slow connection or using a computer with unusually strict browser security settings. If you are using a browser other than Internet Explorer 6 or later, you can only use the Light client."
As a result, features that people expect in OWA in IE aren't there in Firefox, which means people open up IE to check their email on the road.
For our internal reporting, we use Microsoft Reporting Services. The reports will not render at all in Firefox, forcing people to use IE. Due to some intentionally bad code in the HTML output, the reports appear completely collapsed in Firefox, but look perfect in IE.
For the longest time, code samples on MSDN were coded in such a way that they appeared as 5-pt text in Firefox, while being 10pt in IE; you couldn't even read the samples in FF without increasing the text size in the browser to ridiculous proportions. (In fairness, I believe that's corrected now.)
The list goes on and on. I was thrilled years ago when Mozilla and then Phoenix/Firebird got NTLM support, meaning I could view my local intranet in a non-IE browser. But as long as Microsoft continues to write web software that barely works or simply doesn't function at all in Firefox, people will continue to use IE for those applications. And the more you're forced to open IE for instance A or instance B, the more likely you are to keep the browser open at all times, and just use it for everything. There's no reason for the above applications to not offer identical functionality in both browsers (and Safari & Opera too), Microsoft just refuses to do the right thing and make their products accessible for people not running IE or Windows.
then maybe they would work in firefox, as it is most of the corp web apps i sue HAVE to be run in IE or they barf :-/ (like oracle) I would see that as the major drawback.
When you can do a Cost-Benefit analysis on who "knows" let me know.
Wait, what? Don't have source code for Firefox?
I'm waiting for an explanation as to how I'm not understanding, because if you just said what I think you said, you're claiming that your techs don't have source code to the most widely-known open source program?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
"Companies headed by idiots don't last."
While I wouldn't use the word "idiot", the history of Firefox management may fit your explanation, and show why Firefox is not doing better. See the thread The Slashdot story they wouldn't run.
Also, I think that people who work in IT often underestimate their ability to lead, and the amount of work that is required to lead.
That's great, but Microsoft had that running in IE version 3. What's the hold-up?
It also only talks about customizations for ISPs/computer vendors, it doesn't address things like Group Policy-type functionality for corporate networks at all.
Comment of the year
> Do you really need paid support for a web browser?
>>As a company, considering the web browser is the front-end for a large number of products being developed, the most used application by your employees, and the #1 gateway for potentially devastating viruses, I would say yes.
Install FF and you won't have to worry so much about those viruses. It FAR safer than IE.
> This is why you have in-house IT support staff. To fix your problems.
>>So you think having a couple of tech monkies getting paid $50k plus per year to sit around playing solitaire and waiting in case something goes wrong, even though they didn't develop the browser, don't have the source code for the browser, and likely only know as much as the F1 button will tell them, is a better choice?
First of all, they'll only be "sitting around" if you let them. You can pay them to, you know, work in between the times when things go wrong. Secondly, you could easily hire someone who does help develop the browser, because unlike IE, they actually do have the FF source code available to them, IT'S OPEN SOURCE!! And finally, if you're hiring tech people who "likely only know as much as the F1 button will tell them" then that's an issue with you're ability to hire qualified people. On the upside though, is you can fire them and hire someone else who also has access to the source code... but if you aren't getting the solution you need from Microsoft, then what?
> If you were going to call up Microsoft every time you had a problem, your company would go belly-up pretty fast.
>>Microsoft, for all it's evil, offers guaranteed 24-hour support and a very fast turnaround. They haven't gotten to where they are by making all of it's customers go "belly-up".
I'd offer 24/7 support too at THOSE rates. And really, whether their customers go belly up or not won't effect them as long as the check clears first.
> Also, it's not like you can make MS release bug fixes, or security patches, even when you know there are problems
>>Really? Cause I thought that was exactly what putting in a trouble ticket through a paid support contract did... Let me know if that's really not true, cause I'd have pretty good grounds for a hefty law suit.
Good luck with your lawsuit then, because a paid support contract doesn't force MS to release bug fixes, or security patches, even when you know there are problems. They might still fix your problem, but they don't have to release anything. In fact, they have an incentive NOT to, because you've already shown them that there is a problem that people are willing to pay extra money to solve. That's what is so troubling about their support model, it pays for Microsoft to release garbage so customers pay their contract support rates to get their software to work the way it should have in the first place.
How would you manage this centrally for a secure subset of sites, like how you could create a group policy in active directory to, for example, add a set of site to the trusted zone, enable windows authentication for the trusted zone, and then apply that policy to a particular group of users?
SPNEGO authentication is a must-have in many corporate environments for many flavors of single sign on. Without this, it's virtually impossible for many larger corporations, which may rely more heavily on SSO, to approve this browser for corporate use. Firefox + SPNEGO however, would still run up against the many corporate web applications (typically built by outside vendors) which are utterly useless within firefox or any other standards compliant browser. IE3 and IE4, which basically defined their own standards, have hurt the web more than we'll ever imagine. How much technology (browsers, gadgets, etc.) is hindered by the utterly broken web as we know it?
Rakishi, calling someone an idiot is just an expression of anger, and not a real reply.
The question is, "Why isn't the money being spent on Firefox development?" Someone must have plans for the money if it is not being spent. What are those plans?
How could Mozilla Foundation spend so much money and get so little in return? Firefox development has been glacially slow.
So FF can't be automatically updated?
I'm running 2.0.0.11 and on my Tools->Options->Advanced->Update dialog I have AUTOMATIC UPDATES checked. I also have it watch to see if any addons could be broken by the update. We run Windows at work but FF is the default browser for all 500 employees.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
There are many, many possible ways to reply to this. I'll go with what I believe to be the most direct and simple.
Find a copy of a support contract (Microsoft or any other large vendor's, it doesn't matter.) Find the section or clause in it that obligates the vendor to respond to your issue with a functional remedy to your satisfaction and what period the remedy will be provided within. Note that "acknowledgement of" or "recording of" or "response to" the issue does not constitute a remedy, for purposes of this discussion. A remedy is something that mitigates the issue, nothing less.
Still looking?
Still looking?
Given up yet? Probably should, as you won't find it (unless your relationship with the vendor truly does fall into the "incredibly powerful" category I mentioned previously.) No vendor, not one, will contractually surrender such an amount of freedom for any but the most extraordinary relationships. That is the whole of the point I was making, which presentation so offended you. You are guaranteed nothing in terms of a functional remedy by such a contract; whatever is provided is provided at the vendors discretion and generally on their timetable. Nothing in this represents a rubbishing of Microsoft or any other vendor; it is simply what is. Were I running a company, I would be loathe to give up that kind of control of my timelines, I certainly can't fault any other vendor for having the same view.
There are many valid reasons to purchase a support contract, not the least of which is having de-facto access to other customer's tales of woe and the vendor's attempts to help said customers. Such means can indeed provide an appropriate resolution, and often do, and that may be worth the associated expense. Note though in this case, the vendor is providing something they already have, at their convenience, which is quite another case from what you're positing.
I also do indeed believe that support is taken seriously by many vendors, who do indeed view it as part of the brand experience and reply accordingly (sadly nearly offset by the set of vendors who view it otherwise, but that's another discussion.)
The above notwithstanding however, the notion of entering into a support contract as a mechanism to force timely mitigation behavior from a major vendor like Microsoft...my apologies if I don't lend that much credence.
(Any may God help me if I feel the need to stoke the techno-populist fires on Slashdot to reinforce my own self-esteem...)
"Install FF and you won't have to worry so much about those viruses. It FAR safer than IE."
But it's not 100% safe. And a lot of government agencies won't use products that don't offer a vendor support contract simply because there's nobody to turn to if something goes wrong.
"a paid support contract doesn't force MS to release bug fixes, or security patches, even when you know there are problems"
Actually, that's exactly the point of paying for a support contract.
"They might still fix your problem, but they don't have to release anything. In fact, they have an incentive NOT to, because you've already shown them that there is a problem that people are willing to pay extra money to solve."
The reason every one of their patches starts with "KB" is because every patch they release is in reference to a knowledge base article of a reported issue that was resolved. As part of the contract, the knowledge base is open to anyone who purchased support. They're not allowed to hide anything, as you're suggesting.
"That's what is so troubling about their support model, it pays for Microsoft to release garbage so customers pay their contract support rates to get their software to work the way it should have in the first place."
Microsoft isn't the only major vendor to have support contracts. Redhat, Sun, Remedy, Cisco, WebLogic, Oracle... the list goes on.
After having virus and spyware issues and all the other baggage of IE, it has been relatively easy to convert my clients to Firefox. The "learning curve" is normally less than a week, too. And for the rare site (Charleston County Government needs to recode their web site BADLY) that doesn't work in FF, my clients are now accustomed to using IETab.
Amen. Up to and until I as an administrator can centrally configure settings--ideally via GPOs--Firefox will find corporate resistance.
Heck, I urge my users to use it and I have a coming headache where upper level management wants me to dictate our intranet site as the startup homepage. I can do it in five minutes on IE with a GPO. Firefox . . . well even if I go around and change it for everyone, how hard is it for them to change it to whatever they want?
I am developing an IE only client server application. Nobody is interested in making the changes that are necessary. What I did so far was at least making the UI look ok, but the application uses 3 way dialogs which are not available in FF or Opera and there is no interest in paying for a change.
Of course we have to turn down the occasional client who is working with linux.
message hash: fimbul winter darth vader
There are dozens of older web applications that range from time card to ERP that are purchased applications and were tailored for IE4/5/6. The main purpose of the web browser is for the internal corporate lan, not the web. Sure FF may properly render strictly compliant pages better than IE, but guess what, these pages were created with IE in mind 5 years ago. They are purchased apps and supporting FF would be a nightmare for the help desks.
Actually, this isn't even about IE vs FF, it's about how often do you upgrade an application that is as heavily and diversly used as a web browser. In fact, the main reason we are still using IE6 here because IE7 doesn't run our current ERP systems web front end.Now before you bitch about how crappy IE7 is, the reason it doesn't run it is because this application has JS in it that actually has '-' in it's function names! I don't know if this is actually OK in the JS spec, or if older browsers (current FF also) are lenient, but what crazy person would do such a thing? Anyway, works in IE6, works in FF even(though the corporate time card application doesnt), but doesn't in IE7 so fat chance of upgrading anytime soon.
FF is my default browser. But when it comes to developing intranet apps, I don't bother adding support to another browser like FF.
Firstly, I don't want to work more, to make sure my js script, all html syntax, css valid on both IE and FF.
Secondly, adding another browser support means doubling testing effort.
Lastly and most importantly, we are not trying to win more geeky users. like it or not, all users have to use our apps. Period.
Anyone in the mainstream corporate or business level of IT who puts anything other than IE on a business class machine for work should have their head examined. Sure, at home it's a hair (thin one) more secure, but interoperability with business class websites and web applications is hit or miss, and it's speed and many of the features utterly useless for a corporate worker. IE, being less secure, is a liability on it's own... but then, any IT team that properly secure it's network is a bigger issue anyway.
From the summary:
Mozilla thus far has neglected to develop tools to help IT departments deploy and manage FirefoxThat would be nice to have, but anyone else could sell something like this, if there was demand for it.
... and it doesn't offer paid technical support services to risk-averse corporate users.Why would anyone with a brain care that the Mozilla Foundation doesn't do this? A huge benefit of free software is that there's no monopoly for support, so you can hire anyone you want to do paid technical support.
If there really is so much money to be made selling tech support for Firefox, then start a company that does it! Otherwise, that's not the problem.
http://outcampaign.org/
It's still the case as well that quite a few large enterprise-type applications have adopted the "Wrap our fat client in an ActiveX blanket and call it 'web-enabled'" methodology, which means that even if someone uses FF as their daily browser they will still need to use IE for those.
I would also submit that for an IE-only site, the relevant number is not "How many people using FF hit your site?" but rather "How many people using FF hit your site but aren't interested enough to come back with IE?"
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
Why?
Anything we deploy is a potential destabilizer or security hole. We have lots (millions) of pages that only work correctly in IE, integrated PKI, custom extensions, etc. We have ZERO pages that require firefox. Ultimately, "preference" is not a sufficient reason to approve something.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
I don't know how they got these statistics, But I don't think netsscape has had 9% of the market since 1998.
Agreed. I think the GP post also shows narrowmindedness in calling a non-tech savvy CEO an "idiot."
My bosses don't understand a lot of what I do, but they obviously understand business enough to build a successful company. Leadership is not knowing everything, but finding people with the knowledge you need, and fitting them together into the "big picture."
My bosses have assigned me tasks that I thought were irrelevant to my job, only for me to find that, hey, this actually helps me improve at what I do.
There are more kinds of smarts than just tech smarts.
oh yes. This is so true, I have an issue where we have a proxy to the outside internet, and SSL traffic is sent through it. But, when you view a server running over SSL you cannot say 'ignore the proxy for all internal servers', you can't even put in a CIDR exclusion range, or even put the host names in - all these are possible but none of them work reliably. You have to put in *all three* to be sure, and even then you have to do it on the clients.
FF *needs* admin-friendly configuration for it to be used in a corporate environment, or it'll never be taken up except by the odd individual here and there. If mozilla's goal is to increase uptake, then central settings, options that work for non-home users will have to be implemented.
NTLM.
Seriously, corporate Intranets lock things down and require changing network passwords. FF makes me type all that in manually, and again every time it changes, and manually log in every time I hit a resource.
Fix NTLM and you will remove a large (but admittedly not the only) obstacle to corporate usage.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
-Tom
You want to know why you are struggling to keep costs down?
Your 400 person company has a VP of IS, a Director IT and god knows how many other people in the IT dept!
In the company I work for, the location I am in has 400+ employees, most of them being remote VPN users. Do you know how many people are in the IT dept? One. That would be Me, Myself and I.
75% of my day is spent twiddling my thumbs reading Slashdot and Digg while waiting for the occasional trouble call.
Loading and managing Firefox across all of my systems would not use one penny of my budget. Ever heard of imaging and roaming profiles?
My systems stay up, my users do not and can not load their systems with crap even though EVERYONE is local Admin and I administer all laptops, desktops, servers and warehouse control systems with ease.
the history of the world
One possibility would be to write a simple extension for firefox that does it for them. That way, they can redirect any failed auths to a page which says "please click this shiny button and then say yes to the question and then restart your browser and try again."
For instance, I'm using 3.0b2 right now, and there's a line in firefox.js: If you patch it to read or whatever, then I'm fairly sure that it will change the default.
If you want to lock users out of changing any settings, change the permissions on their personal prefs.js (this file will be in the same place in every users' home) so that they can't write to it; maybe change its ownership too. Admittedly, something more fine-grained than that will probably need some modifications to the Firefox code base. I assume that a second global settings file could be used, so that preferences are read in the order of (global default, user, global mandatory). I haven't had a look at the code, but while it's a non-trivial change, it is probably straightforward.
Still...
...sometimes you Windows admins, on the whole, are such unimaginative, uninquisitive weenies. Put it outside of point-and-click and all of a sudden it's not worth investigating or trying to do.
I think this should be considered an honest disagreement. I think that someone with no technical knowledge cannot reliably run a technical company. Other people think differently.
Sure someone who knows business can do business things. The key word is "reliably". Eventually something happens that requires technical knowledge, and a manager who doesn't have it will need to depend on the advice of others, who may be thinking of their own paychecks, or company politics, or not thinking at all.
I think that Firefox development has been miserably slow, considering the enormous amounts of money spent ($20 million in 2006).
Another thing: I hope some Slashdot reader can convince me that it is possible to do things without having the necessary qualifications, because, if that is true, I plan to be a male supermodel.
Opera is better except that there is no way to stop the moving ads that are so annoying. AdBlock Plus Firefox extension is excellent for that.
Slashdot is probably one of the larger online communities of open source enthusiasts, and it hasn't worked with firefox for months (the comment/reply bar doesn't show up when displayed on firefox). It would seem that even sites frequented by Firefox's core user base don't feel they need to be viewable on Firefox. That certianly doesn't point to a bright future for its wider adoption.
"You want to know why you are struggling to keep costs down?
Your 400 person company has a VP of IS, a Director IT and god knows how many other people in the IT dept!"
Oh, I don't deny that but that wasn't my decision. I had to work with the environment I was given.
And as far as the rest of your post is concerned I will happily concede that you are a far superior IT guy than I and probably better looking as well.
You are assuming this would have to be done manually.
I think today's /. MessageOfTheDay (at the foot of the page) manages an Insightful response to that statement:
Co-operation beats competition
After all, it's not really practical for organizations that rely on NTLM for multiple servers to manually configure several hundred or thousand firefox installations to accept those specific servers -- never mind if the list of servers changes. Too, it's even more unlikely that they'll be able to trust the users to properly maintain and configure those settings themselves.
If the administrator is too incompetent to add the line user_pref("network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris", "someserver.com"); to all users' prefs.js text configuration file in 10 minutes they should be fired. I researched this in less than 5 minutes for this post.
Incompetent "enterprise" administrators who can't/won't do even minimal research, analysis or basic scripting are the problem, not software missing useless "enterprise" capabilities. Most "enterprise" software is a scam.
---
Any large public or private organisation paying recurring, per-seat licensing for software is being economically stupid.
Lack of ActiveX support hurts.
Lack of kerberos or NTLM authentication hurts (even if there is some arcane way to make NTLM work on a client-by-client basis, how does that help at the enterprise level?)
But, I think the broken installer is killer.
Firefox simply cannot handle the simplest Enterprise scenario, wherein the users are not local administrators of their boxes, and the IT staff need to remotely do updates.
Ook.
[smacks the top left of the keyboard with an open palm]
It's not the years, honey, it's the mileage. - Colonel Henry Walton Jones, Jr., Ph.D.
Here's the interesting number to watch: IE market share So what we're looking at here is IE down another 4% since the beginning of the year. I don't think it's Firefox that's "struggling".
Here's some longer term numbers from w3schools.com: That one's actually looking more hopeful for IE holding on to the market share they have remaining. Not in business, but in academia.
no idea - I don't recommend anything, but keep hoping that someone will fork firefox into freefox..
i last looked at opera about 4 years ago, and it was ok.
Anyway, my point here is that Firefox's domain authentication is not as good as IEs for whatever reason.
Maybe this would be a more useful question. In 2006, Mozilla Foundation spent $20,000,000. That's enough for 200 programmers each earning $100,000 per year. Yet in 2006, there were only a few somewhat minor updates to Firefox and Thunderbird. Where is the money going?
Others complain about pushing out updates. That is also trivial. You can easily push Portable Firefox out to users using Active Directory.
The main problem is that corporate users are committed Windowsers and incapable of thinking and analyzing the problem. They want to be spoon fed with solutions from Microsoft only. If your problem is the damn registry, then don't use the damn registry. If you can't update parts of some program, then push the whole program out.
Simple as that. You don't need to be an Apple Genius to figure that out.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Our solution to the users running manual updates was twofold:
Of course I know what you said. So, by your calculations, there are more than 50 programmers? The question remains the same. I saw very little come out of Mozilla Foundation in 2006 and 2007. There were few or no feature updates. They fixed some bad memory hogging and CPU hogging bugs, after bug-check software companies like Coverity showed them the bugs were there. They complained loudly if a bug was reported to them without information that would make finding the bug easy; they made it clear they don't do the difficult kinds of troubleshooting, just the easy kinds.
The big result of 2007 was deciding to take less responsibility, and resulted in disconnecting from Thunderbird development, and Thunderbird developers leaving.
I didn't see anything that would indicate more than 50 programmers worked 2 years.
You said, "Fixing security bugs on a stable branch (which doesn't allow major architecture changes) without breaking functionality is often very difficult."
Most of the bugs that were fixed were bugs in the sense that someone made a coding error that caused a memory leak. Once the problem was made obvious, fixing was easy. This was after
As I write this, 7 windows of Firefox are taking 40% CPU, for doing nothing. The CPU hogging bug was reported 6 years ago, and resulted in the bug report marked as invalid, with a complete refusal to do any trouble shooting.
Very serious shortcomings in features, like the fact that Firefox can't be made completely portable and the session restore often doesn't restore all tabs, have been ignored.
Many of the "advances" in Firefox were documents that indicate how to make Firefox operate the way it should, blaming crashes on plugins, for example.
Because this is a reasonable and simple solution that somehow integrates well with the environment, and is easily mantainable with little ongoing effort? What if the user changes it -- now we have to script to detect tampering and restore values. Not to mention that it still doesn't strike you as odd to have to store and maintain redundant records -- hundreds or thousands of server names - on thousands of workstations?
Incompetent "enterprise" hackers who think that they are administrators, and who believe that cobbling together any solution that works are a large part of what gives /competent/ administrators so much headache. And why they get paid so much.
...sometimes you Windows admins, on the whole, are such unimaginative, uninquisitive weenies. Put it outside of point-and-click and all of a sudden it's not worth investigating or trying to do.On the other hand, having to push a multi-meg file (think enterprise, with thousands of internal authenticated servers at the extreme end) down to many tens of thousands of workstations, and then repeat that process every time a new server is brought online or taken offline, somehow seems efficient to you?
There's a difference between a hack/workaround, and a good solution. What you describe is a hack. A good solution would be to allow a simple preference to permit all internal resources to be allowed; and allow wildcards for others. /then/ it becomes practical to maintain.
Personally, I'm not any kind of admin except for my home LAN (linux and windws, and yes I use firefox ;)) . But I do know the difference between a hack and a viable solution.
All of that merely serves to draw attention away from the fact that Firefox development costing $20,000,000 per year does not seem to produce faster results than Firefox developed by volunteers. There seems to be gross mismanagement, and maybe that is one reason why Winifred Mitchell Baker was replaced as CEO.
> does not seem to produce faster results than Firefox developed by volunteers.
I'm sorry, but that's clearly false. Just compare the changes in the rendering engine between Gecko 1.7 and Gecko 1.8 to those between Gecko 1.8 and Gecko 1.9. The latter are much more extensive and would never have happened without the sort of funding that's been available over the last few years. As a simple example, if development had proceeded the same way it had right after the Netscape division at AOL was dissolved, there is no way Gecko would be passing Acid2 right now.
Do keep in mind that there is a lot more to Firefox than just the user interface. If you're comparing the user interface evolution right now to what was happening in the Phoenix 0.6 timeframe, then of course there is less "progress". The 80/20 rule applies to interfaces just as much as anything else.
As for the CEO thing, having met Mitchell and talked to her I would be inclined to take what she says at face value. She's been taking less and less of a role in the actual administrative aspects of running the corporation, and it makes sense to have the titles match the actual work being done.
Frankly, it sounds to me like you have a chip on your shoulder against Mitchell and the Mozilla Corporation for some reason, and it's clouding your judgment and keeping you from doing some basic research to verify your claims...
Here are a few Firefox flaws. The list was made quickly; it is not extensive. Hundreds of articles have been written about Firefox problems; the articles mentioned here are just some I found during a quick search. The overall impression I get is that Firefox development is very badly managed.
CPU hogging: I've typed every comment in this thread under the same conditions: Firefox is taking 30-40% of the CPU. This has been reported many, many times, by many, many people. Leaving Firefox open for days, as when doing extended research, especially when the computer has been put into hibernation, causes Firefox to hog the CPU. Firefox actually corrupts Windows XP so that it is necessary to reboot the computer, not just Firefox.
The CPU hogging bug affects the most heavy users of Firefox.
Here is one of the many stories about Firefox CPU hogging, the February 08, 2007 PCWorld staff blog: Help! Firefox is Sucking the Life From My Processor!. Quote: "... Windows Task Manager shows that Firefox is bogarting 90 percent or more of my processing power. The problem happens pretty consistently on three different Windows machines I use."
Abuse by the developers of those who report bugs: Apparently developers have refused to start numerous windows and tabs so that they could see the CPU bug for themselves. That's been the response to the CPU hogging bug reports I've seen.
Firefox developers seem to be involved in work avoidance schemes. They don't seem to want to work on bugs that require extended troubleshooting.
Firefox cannot be made portable. Bad choices have been made in how Firefox handles its files. Running a portable version of Firefox is impossible if a version started from a hard drive is running.
Firefox will not allow multiple instances. If something goes wrong with one Firefox window and tabs, it affects all the windows and tabs that are running.
Firefox session restore is not reliable. If there happen to be delays in restoring a tab, possibly because other tabs were loading, Firefox throws away the URL, rather than simply displaying it in the tab with a blank window.
Firefox hogs memory. See the ComputerWorld article, Hands on: A look at Firefox's memory issues. Quote: "It's clear to me that there are pandemic memory problems in Firefox, and also that Mozilla has not responded adequately to them." Since that article was published, Firefox developers have fixed numerous memory management bugs, while continuing to deny that any exist.
Firefox advertises extensions, then blames them for problems. A common topic of articles about Firefox is some variation of "How to make Firefox work the way it should".
Often Firefox developers blame Firefox extensions advertised on the Mozilla web site.