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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."
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
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
I would this squarely in the category of "its not worth the effort"
Why? Simple, we are aready so locked down, scanned, and updated, that the risk of IE is down to levels not worth going beyond. In other words, going to a new browser gains nothing but incurs cost, training, and support.
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.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
s/would/wouldn't/
idiot
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
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'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.
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.
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
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 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
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
WulframII - Free Online Mutiplayer 3D Tank Shooting Game
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.
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.
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.
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.)?
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. :)
. . . 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?
"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.
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/
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.
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?"
Capitalism: When it uses the carrot, it's called democracy. When it uses the stick, it's called fascism.
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
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
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...)
Please, please, PLEASE tell me that you're not an IT professional typing like that. You're making the rest of us look illiterate and stupid.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
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.)
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?
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.
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.
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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Any large public or private organisation paying recurring, per-seat licensing for software is being economically stupid.