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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."
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
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.
standards? when have we been there?
With more companies adopting security practices such as web proxies, blocking broad Internet access, removing administrator privileges to user desktops & laptops, browser security receives less of an emphasis that feature functionality. In general, corporate IT staff are not tasked by their management to make sure a user's browser works well with Yahoo! or MSN Groups or even Slashdot. They are tasked to ensure the user's browser works with the myriad of applications that the managers expect the users to use throughout his/her work day.
When faced with internal corporate applications, there are still some that do not work well with Firefox. Through no fault of the browser, the corporate web application could be designed specifically with IE in mind and, hence, doesn't work as well with Firefox. In order for Firefox to obtain a larger marketplace within corporate infrastructures, there needs to be significant uptake by the companies designing internal corporate web applications.
That is never going to happen though - nothing pushes corporate developers to work with the standards.
Dev: "So, what browser are we going to use?"
Corp: "Well, we run Windows on the desktop, so Internet Explorer is already installed. Plus all our other in-house uses IE"
Dev: "Have you considered Firefox? We can make it standards compliant, then you can use any browser!"
Corp: "You were outbid, the low bidder is only testing against the platform we use, IE."
Yeah, Seriously. Do you really need paid support for a web browser? Corporations really need to get away from this attitude. Stop paying through the nose for every piece of software. How often do you really call up the company who made your software and ask for support. Sure sometimes, but I be that most of the time, your in house IT staff fixes the problem before calling up support. You want support with IE, here it is. $CAD 59 for each request during business hours. Over $500 for after hours support. This is why you have in-house IT support staff. To fix your problems. If you were going to call up Microsoft every time you had a problem, your company would go belly-up pretty fast. Also, it's not like you can make MS release bug fixes, or security patches, even when you know there are problems.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I agree. I might switch all my users to FF if I could manage all the settings from Active Directory (such as not adding plug ins, security settings, etc), but I'm not aware of any way to do this right now. And as you said, we already lock down the Internet, so why bother (we are also a MS shop, although I'm installing a Fedora server right now.)?
"Can firefox be locked down so users cannot add plug ins? As the article mentioned there isn't support for risk adverse let alone push services."
That's the real problem for me. I can't put FF on the list of products approved for general distribution out of fear that some dolt will blithely install a malevolent extension. Which is really a shame because FF + NoScript is awesome. As it is, I approve use of FF on a case by case basis, limiting it to people who have a history of following instructions...
I'm told that that there *is* a way to block installation of extensions and plug-ins, but it's labor intensive, and I frankly don't have the authority to obtain the labor required. So if that could be made easier, well, I think this could take off in a big way.
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.
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.
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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