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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."
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).
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While I would agree that anyone in the know should be promoting an alternative to IE, sometimes it isn't the IT guy's choice. My company "outlawed" Firefox... That order came from the CEO who can barely operate his cell phone.
You arn't thinking of issues on a higher level. There is no reason why a home user shouldn't be using FF as their main browser. The only time I use IE at home is because of my phone provider. For some reason it doesn't accept my card payment when I do it with firefox it just reloads the default page. But other than that FF is always my default browser at home. On a higher level though there are many issues with intranet issues with apps.
Who cares? Those of us that hope that Firefox gains enough market share that people will stop being morons and developing websites that only work in IE. Then maybe we'll get back to standards instead of browser specific webpages and extensions.
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We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I use FireFox in a corporate environment. IETab helps, but there are several sites that simply will not work without IE. Guess which ones? Yes, those sites that belong to software or companies hired by the one I work for to provide some HR or payroll services. Even better than their idiocy in blocking all but IE, these are links to servers outside the company, and I've seen them when they were not even forcing https for the connection.
The departmental website that I manage is (perhaps not that great) fully usable by FireFox, or any browser but I can't stop them from using outside companies or creating IE only sites.
The real reason for this? I suspect that it is because no one in any position of responsibility understands web services, so if their point and click web page software works with IE, then that is how the rest of us have to view it.
drum roll.... so the real reason that FireFox is having trouble in corporate offices is purely due to ignorance on the part of the corporation.
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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 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.
However there are similar situations which go the other way...
I know of at least one company that didn't want to develop/test their internal apps for more than 1 browser, but they have a number of mac and solaris based workstations in the company... Their solution was to have firefox installed on every machine and make people use that. Several of their internal apps don't work with ie at all.
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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).
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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.
No first part MSIs. The majority of our workstations here are Windows XP.
.exe installer,
why would that matter?
As an admin of a medium-sized corporate network of XP boxes, might I ask why that matters? Personally I encourage my users to use the Portable Edition of Firefox, as it doesn't require any installer (I can preconfigure it exactly as I want, and just copy the installed dir to any machine), but even if I needed to use the old-fashioned
Management through group policy, or some other way to lock it down.
So you trust your users to behave and use a locked down IE, but you don't trust them enough to limit their browsing to sites the company would disaprove of?
Not to say I disagree - Quite the opposite, I pretty much understand completely - I simply don't count on them behaving in the first place. But I find it a whole lot more effective to restrict users at the proxy (and block all non-proxied traffic).
Better support for restricted users and roaming profiles
FireFox Portable very neatly solves that problem. Install the whole thing to their My Documents, it stores the entire profile under the installed dir, and you have no problems with permissions.
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/
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.
Yup. For the longest time, Firefox had a bug where it put its cache in the "Application Data" directory instead of the "Local Settings" directory. For those who are unfamiliar with Windows, what this means it that Firefox was saying that the web cache was important data that should be migrated to follow the user, instead of disposable data that could be flushed with no penalty. As a result, for an extremely long time, Firefox was utterly, 100% useless for companies/organizations that use roaming profiles. It took ages for this bug to be fixed; IIRC it was reported around version 0.6 and finally fixed in version 2.0, but I can't find it on Bugzilla anymore so I can't be certain.
I think just the fact that it is a free product hurts them on some level.
That's true, but the blatant, long-standing bugs (like above) that show that Mozilla never bothered to even test the product in a corporate environment hurts them a lot more.
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.
It doesn't help that Mozilla purposefully makes it harder. Would it kill them to map "innerText" to "textContent?" Would they suffer and die if they made a global "window.event" object and aliased it to the last event object made for an event handler? Those two minor things alone would "automagically" make legions of IE-only pages work in FF.
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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?
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.
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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.
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