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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."
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
You don't want users doing their own updates. You need for IT to do the updates so that you have time to do integration testing on the updates in order to make sure that company intranet sites, etc., don't break because of an update. This will give you time to, for example, fix the internal web application before going to production.
Automatic updates in Firefox can be turned off, 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.
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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
Actually, it's not quite as easy as just installing FF and making it the default browser. Firefox on it's own in the default configuration will protect your users from a lot of stuff (ActiveX installers come to mind), but I've found that some stuff will still get through.
FF with NoScript installed is a much better option if you don't mind spending a few minutes with your end-users and explaining what Javascript is, why it's abused and only to enable it for trusted websites. Amazingly enough I've found that even most of my computer-illiterate users are able to grasp this concept and I haven't had a single machine using the FF/NoScript combo infected with anything nasty.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
Bingo. I work for a couple of car dealerships that sell GMs. ALL of GM's web-based stuff is IE-only. Furthermore, it's IE6-only. IE7 won't render the GM Dealerworld site correctly, and GM won't provide support for you if you're using it.
Likewise, Toyota's "Dealer Daily" site (which is pretty much the only web-based toolset provided by Toyota and is used pretty much constantly by salespeople) doesn't work worth a damn under anything but IE.
I'd love to implement Firefox across the dealerships. I even found some GPOs to control it and force it to use the in-house filtering proxy. But I simply can't set it as the default browser when half the sites that the salespeople use are IE-only.
I suspect I'm not alone in this problem.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
"No patches, only automatic downloads which pull down full installations that take place seemingly every other day"
Last time i checked, it downloads patches, they got rid of full install downloads when 2.0 came out
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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
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.
. . . 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?
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.
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/
Well, here's something that may help. We use this to deploy FF in our AD environment.
FF Community Edition
Allows you to install over AD and has a snap-in allowing certain settings to be controlled over AD. The packages are free, or you can have them make a custom package with specific extensions for a fee.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?"
My experience doesn't bear that out. (Sadly) Our company's website gets about 97% IE, 2% FF, 1% Safari. (We aren't Opera comaptible and I've never seen a Netscape hit)
Our clients comprise most of the top retailers and CPG manufacturers in the US, so I feel thats a pretty good look into the corporate worlds acceptance of alternatives to IE. (Most of the non-IE users are from Creative Departments using Macs.)
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
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...)
We distribute configuration changes to Firefox through user.js and userChrome.css; settings here override the user's other settings when the browser is restarted. (Of course, this means that everybody's profiles need to be stored with a standard profile name in a standardized location, which you have to be able to copy files to remotely.)
If these aren't secure enough for you, then you might try Mozilla's guide to Locking Preferences or try their client customization kit.
Actually, it's not very labor intensive at all. See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Locking_preferences. The preference you need to lock is ("xpinstall.enabled", false).
Assuming your users don't have access to delete files from the program directory (or, if they do, otherwise aren't likely to go out of their way to look up how to undo this), this method should work. It took me about five minutes to create the file; then you just need to be able to deploy it. (We used a batch script.)
I am an IT Manager with several hundred users. I love Firefox and wouldn't use anything else for myself... However, for my users, it's a different story. From an administrative standpoint, IE is much more practical and easier to use and manage. We can control every aspect of it through Active Directory, and it works with every web site on the planet. When you have so many users to deal with in a corporate environment, even if 1% of the websites don't work with Firefox, you hear something about it several times a day. So, although Firefox is by far the best browser out there, at this point, it is still not worth rolling out in corporate environments.