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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
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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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 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.
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.
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. :)
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?
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?"
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.