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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.'"
Hardly surprising; businesses like some stability in their apps. You don't want stagnation, but you don't want to have to test and deploy entirely new releases every 3 months just to maintain a supported environment either.
I'm not sure Microsoft need to be worried about that particular market anyway because, as much as I hate to say it, IE is really the only browser that's suitable for use in a large Windows environment. It has ludicrously granular control available via Group Policy and updates can be deployed via WSUS without needing any user interaction or elevated rights. Firefox doesn't even offer an MSI installer, let alone any practical way to manage settings or control updates across multiple machines (but then Chrome, Opera and Safari are similarly lacking so they're hardly alone in that regard).
Why wouldn't they? I mean, IE isn't my cup of tea and standards support is still a little behind the curve (though improving) but IE8 and certainly IE9 are solid browsers for your average corporate user.
I often get the impression that some people are rather stuck in the IE6/XP era when it comes to any product that Microsoft puts out; they're not *all* shit you know :)
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.
Each company and such has a bizarre meaning to version numbers.
FF 5 IS the security update to FF4.
Much like Chrome goes up by major numbers.
Then you look at open source where things often start in the 0.01 range and every digit could be a new feature release.
A number of companies use major.minor.build however it really isn't as standard as you think.
Cisco ASA devices look like major.minor.build however new features regularly appear in the "Builds"
Juniper security gear has gone to a year.quarter. release numbering system
take your pick.
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
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
Firefox 5 is the security update to FF4. I don’t think anything was broken apart from the version number.
Its just really confusing to people not following this why they would do this way. I was a 5 mb update on windows for me.
The only change I have seen is maybe a new animation on the left of URL bar (and that might have been there anyway).
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.
I think most people are just pissed that Mozilla appear to be rather pathetically trying to mimic Chrome of late rather than focusing on improving Firefox where it actually needs improving.
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.
The Mozilla foundation needs to understand that their recent bad decisions have consequences.
I use Firefox, and have for quite a while. I've gone from a strong supporter and proselytizer to... less enthusiastic. It's still my first choice of browser, but just barely.
It was the Awesomebar debacle, and their refusal to include an option to turn it off, that first made me suspect they were headed in the wrong direction. Removing the status bar was a bad idea, and then this ridiculous botchup with versioning... sigh.
They have positives. They have the best plug-in architecture, and they aren't including patented/copyrighted codecs in the browser, which is good (although they should allow a direct interface to the underlying OS codecs, not simply forbid them from playing). Still, I was contemplating shifting over to Opera. Now, today, we learn that Opera is probably going to go to hell in the next few months.
At this point, I'm hoping that somebody will fork Firefox back at the 3.6 version, and take it from there. It needs to go in a direction the users want, and stop trying to force the users into a direction the designers want. If you stop listening to your users, they will leave. It's beginning to happen with Firefox.
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.
How that's different from an update from the last version of FF 3.6 to FF 4.0?
Mozilla _just_ EOLed 3.5.x. 3.6.x isn't EOL yet. People expected that the release of 5 would be concurrent with a security patch for 4, because that makes sense. Mozilla showed they lacked sense with the awesomebar debacle.
Uuum, dude: I had 3 years of psychotherapy after having designed a web app that was supposed to run in IE in fall 2005. This is not a joke. And I have to really pull myself together to not rage and say you should die or something. :/
I got to know IE extremely well over the years. Every tiny quirk. Even the race conditions depending on a dozen independent factors. Even that horribly illegal code (illegal according to MS too, that is) does not only often work, but in some rare cases even is necessary for it to "work" (this case is also a race condition on top of it all!). And yet I still haven't found the bottom of the pit of chaos, where some inner sense and logic is supposed to be.
The problem with IE is, that it must have the most advanced AI in human history inside, as it manages to simulate utter irrational and unpredictable behavior with sheer perfection.
Yes, you can say IE has "improved" since then. But the problem is, that it's still Trident. The engine that is named after a tool of the devil for a good reason. ;)
It's an utter mess. Calling it "spaghetti code" would insult even the worst spaghetti code any twice-outsourced enterprisey consultant called "The late Paula Bean" could ever write. It just doesn't fit it anymore.
So apart from a complete rewrite, there is no chance in hell (literally? ;) that it will ever be something even remotely acceptable.
If MS decides to throw away Trident, we may get a good IE. Until that, anyone who defends IE, just doesn't know shit and never has done some real coding for that monster. And so he should better keep quiet, as every time an IE loads a page, a thousand web developers shiver and shed a tear of past mental rape horror.
No, the change is NOT only a number. Mozilla has stated that every major version change breaks ABI compatibility.
That probably doesn't matter to you (it certainly doesn't to me) but if a company distributes Firefox extensions for their employees, they're going to have an upgrade headache on their hands.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
It's only a number and an IT'er worth his salt should be able to confirm that much.
Yes they can. The problem is that they aren't the ones that make the decision. Large corporations usually have stifling configuration management and strict rules about testing. It's usually non-technical managers that see the new version number as a major upgrade and insist on retesting before they risk rolling it and potentially breaking large number of computers. Yuo should be happy that you're ignorant of this fact.
About Fedora's 6 months release cycle, maybe you missed Fedora is the cutting-edge development version of and for Red Hat?
Wow, you were so close to getting my point. Maybe I needed to continue the train of thought just a tad more? Fedora is unsuitable for the corporate desktop for the exact same reason Firefox is. It's not version stable and changes to rapidly. Both products are targeted and marketed to the hobbyist, or environments where a near constantly changing platform isn't an issue.
That would be true if everything continued to work. But Firefox 5 broke quite a few extensions. In principle I agree that if things just continued to work, then it all comes down to a version number change, and Firefox 5 would be a security update for 4. However, if you also add to the mix that in the "enterprise" a typical user can't do much with their computer, so a simple auto update like this requires admin intervention and you have a real problem.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
The fact that IE9 doesn't run on xp might be a bigger upgrade headache. At least FF5 runs on the commonest OS.
Help stamp out iliturcy.