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Microsoft Exploits Firefox 4 Uproar, Beats IE Drum
CWmike writes "A Microsoft executive late Thursday used the furor over Mozilla's decision to curtail support for Firefox 4 to plead the case for Internet Explorer in the enterprise. 'I think I speak for everyone on the IE team when I say we'd like the opportunity to win back your business,' Ari Bixhorn, director of IE at Microsoft, said in a post on his personal blog. 'We've got a great solution for corporate customers with both IE8 and IE9, and believe we could help you address the challenges you're currently facing.' Bixhorn addressed his open letter to the manager of workplace and mobility in the office of IBM's CIO, John Walicki, who, along with others, had voiced their displeasure with Mozilla's decision to retire Firefox 4 from security support. In a comment appended to a blog maintained by Michael Kaply, a consultant who specializes in customizing Firefox, Walicki called Mozilla's decision to end security support for Firefox 4 a 'kick in the stomach.'"
Microsoft gives IE away for free. The only reason they want to "win back your business" is to take advantage of vendor lock-in. I'm not seeing where this is good for the business, especially considering that the security fix for Firefox 4 is well-known and free (upgrade to Firefox 5).
Part of the reason that I'm pissed off by this version a week crap is that plugins that should work no longer do, simply because they expect a version number. Google Toolbar doesn't work because of that. That's a serious WTF moment.
I hope FF loses some market share. Stupidity should be punished in the business world. I don't personally care if it's Microsoft with IE, Google with Chrome, or Apple with Safari, or any other browser. I don't care about rapid releases. I'm against them, actually. In a business environment, rapid releases only muck up the works and makes life harder for the IT staff.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
At least Chrome has been consistent about it, Mozilla just seem to have lost it completely when it comes to Firefox, jumping all over the place chasing every new "feature" that one of the other browsers comes up with.
Seriously, stop trying to be Chrome, Chrome is already doing that pretty well.
It's not change is bad, it's needless change is bad.
If Firefox wants to be a cutting edge testing environment for whizbangs great, make that clear. If it wants to be used in production environments where long term stability and available time for internal test cycles trump access to whizbangs then this is bad.
We use firefox for everything, random websites with new versions of dancing cat videos, personnel apps like timecards, purchasing etc and monitor and control for instrumentation.
Don't really care if the new dancing cat video works, don't even really care if the craptastic PeopleSoft works, do care that monitor and control stuff works.
Perhaps Firefox should take a page out of Ubuntu's playbook, and offer a special LTS (Long Term Support) release that will receive back-ported security fixes for the next two or three years. That will give the IT departments and embedded systems manufacturers the long term stability they want, while general users and browser enthusiasts can continue to update their browser every three months.
Or they can do nothing, and continue to lose marketshare to Internet Explorer and Google Chrome when IT departments start adding Firefox to their unapproved/unsupported software lists. Their call, I guess.
It really makes me wonder whether these large companies have an IT department.
Surely they can replace FF4.0 by FF5.0 without exposing their net to Chinese hackers.
Apparently you've never worked in big IT, where software must be thoroughly tested before being rolled out. Image you're the guy that convinced your company to roll out FF as a replacement for IE and them that it was fully compatible with all their corporate websites. Before you've even fully tested and started deploying it, Mozilla EOLs that version number. Kinda sets you back to square one and you look stupid for having suggested it in the first place.
Mozilla screwed themselves on this. FF5 is hardly different than FF4, yet yhey bumped the major rev number trying to convince people they are innovating and ended pissed off the corporate customers who want stability. Fedora still hasn't learned this lesson with their 6 month cycle and a hearty fuck you if you don't keep up because you can only safely upgrade from 1-2 versions behind. The corporate world wants stability and good manageability damn it. They don't want a constantly moving target with questionable long term support.
Chrome uses an extension API to help ensure that extensions work from one version to the next. They also have an updating mechanism that ensures nearly all users have updated to the latest version of Chrome within a week of final release. Firefox has neither of these, so extensions can easily break from one version to the next, and it could be months until most Firefox users update to the latest version. Mozilla should have ensured their updating mechanism worked quickly and most popular extensions used Jetpack before they switched to a rapid release schedule like Chrome has.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.