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Firefox Is For "Regular" Users, Not Businesses
nk497 writes "Some have argued that Mozilla's switch to a faster release cycle has made it more difficult for companies to use Firefox, but the open-source browser maker isn't too bothered, according to one employee. Asa Dotzler, community coordinator for Firefox marketing and founder of Mozilla's quality assurance scheme, said Firefox is for 'regular users' — not businesses. 'Enterprise has never been (and I'll argue, shouldn't be) a focus of ours,' he said. 'A minute spent making a corporate user happy can better be spent making many regular users happy. I'd much rather Mozilla was spending its limited resources looking out for the billions of users that don't have enterprise support systems already taking care of them.'"
If you make the best browser available, you'll serve the needs of both businesses and individuals.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
(Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla.)
Asa is one guy with strong opinions. He doesn't speak for all of us.
Here's a senior developer disagreeing with Asa, for instance. We're still figuring this out at Mozilla. Asa's is not the red dino's final word.
As far as I can tell, there is mainly one reason that IE is better than Firefox for "business use"....
Companies like Microsoft products and Microsoft products don't work with Firefox.
How well does Sharepoint work with firefox? I can't even fill out my damned "project time sheet" every week without IE. Its just a glorified web form but, since they have no incentive whatsoever to make cross platform software, they....don't.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Why not do a LTS-version each 2 year? It works for Ubuntu.
[nt]
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Firefox is for anyone who does not want to deal with that ingrained in the system bloated piece of crap security nightmare that is IE.
Which is most of us.
If Timmy can't use Firefox to buy things online or use online apps Timmy won't be using Firefox for long.
What is it with these great projects having a midlife crisis? Amarok did the same kind of thing by completely dumping the codebase in the name of "new" and basically forced the userbase to find a new project. Now Mozilla has basically said that they don't want to pay any attention to the people who have MONEY to pay for the things they are developing. Seems like a really short sighted, arrogant approach. I predict in 2 years time Firefox will have bleed all of their users to chrome / IE and will no longer be receiving corporate donations.
I guess if your going for an emotional response, go big.
--WooooHoooo--
If the support needs of large businesses are the same as those of individual users at home, then why is, for example, Ubuntu available as both long-term support and current releases? And why do the "professional" and server editions of the Windows operating system have "extended support" periods giving security patches after mainstream support for the "home premium" edition ends? Businesses prefer not to have a heterogeneous environment, and they want to make sure each major upgrade works with a company's own bespoke software before deploying it to production company-wide.
Regular customers also hate it when security upgrades (from 4.0.1 to 5.0.0) break most of their plugins.
I travel around a lot for my job visiting both large (Fortune 500) and small firms. Most of them allow Firefox to be used and many people do including build engineers and developers (whom I interact with primarily).
Being familiar with it I'm sure that many employees use it at home too. People are people whether they are at the office or home.
I wonder though if Mozilla re making the best use of their available minutes?
For example, how much work would be involved in making an MSI installer and allowing preferences to be set as a group policy? I'd imagine the work would be pretty small, but it would make firefox much easier to deploy to many millions of desktops at enterprises which don't need to extensively and rigorously test every release.
Internet Explorer is not what it once was. Chrome is fast, stable and has an increasing range of plugins. Mozilla needs to be careful, as if people become used to using other good or good enough browsers at work, they may start using those at home too. Especially if Mozilla isn't offering anything distinctive enough to merit learning two browsers.
Something this guy is completely missing: For most users, what they're familiar with using at work is what they'll use at home. Get them used to working with Firefox at their job, and they're far more likely to use it at home. That way they don't have to deal with "learning a different program" if they're using two different browsers.
For many years my employer stuck to IE6 while I used Firefox in my home. Why was this? Was it because one browser was superior to the other?
After raising questions, it turned out that for the longest time (although it should be changing soon if not already) there were enterprise controls like group policies, remotely configuring proxy, enterprise settings, locking down the browser, etc. that were actually considered better on Internet Explorer (even IE6) than Firefox.
The fact is that at some point, there are some features that matter much more to large corporations. Will I ever use any of the above in my home? Never. But that was the sole reasoning behind a Fortune 500 company clinging to IE6 for a dangerously long time. Your assumption that "better" for a user is "better" for an enterprise is often false (though I'm not claiming the two are mutually exclusive). Further improvements for the enterprise are likely to be far outside a home user's need. Hell, making the settings tabs more confusing is probably detrimental to mom and dad configuring their cookie settings or cleaning up their cache.
My work here is dung.
Dear Enterprises,
Please don't use Linux or other Open Source OSes where Firefox is the only real option. In fact you should use Internet Explorer on Windows and get locked into the Microsoft ecology.
Thanks,
The Firefox team.
Why are we still holding these jackasses up as bastions of the open source community? Frankly, I am sick of it. Years of moving family members and acquaintances on to Firefox and now Mozilla is too good to support* the people who got it where it is today. Fuck Mozilla!
* Retarded release schedule that constantly breaks addons. Retarded release schedule that makes Firefox unsuitable for business use, thus making it hard to suggest open source solutions. Retarded basic browser UI designs for no goddamn reason.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
So much hand-wringing is going on over this silly Firefox thing. Personally, I believe that the faster release cycle is a very good thing, needed to give users quicker access to new features. However, the way they are going about it is wrong, and clearly inspired by a "version-bump war" with chrome and others. They should have released 4.1 instead of 5.0. Major bumps should be reserved for architecture changes. That way, plug-ins will still work.
That being said, why would Mozilla continue to support 4.0? 5.0 is obviously a minor update to 4.0, and can be considered the most recent patch. Are we really so upset that some of our plugins have temporarily been disabled? Why would corporate clients be relying so heavily on 3rd party plugins that are not currently developed?
It's hot outside. Go find some air conditioning and chill out.
-d
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
People who use a browser at work also use a browser at home: they're the same people. Is the thinking that these people will use IE/Opera/Chrome at work then switch to Firefox at home? Granted, I'm sure a lot of people do do that, but adding "when you're at home" seems like an odd caveat to add to the Mozilla manifesto of openness, innovation, etc.
It's assinine for Mozilla to be picking a fight with Enterprise customers. Dotzler shot his mouth off, and it shows an overall lack of maturity of him, and Mozilla at large. Talk open source all you want, without some of those big players funneling money to Mozilla, the overall quality and speed of change in Firefox would change drastically for the worse. With Google pushing it's own browser (Chrome), Mozilla needs all the friends it can have, and going out of your way to PO these large businesses isn't a way to gain any friends.
Driving us here in education crazy - most of the learning management systems will "certify" a browser version for use on their various platform versions. And most promise to support within 3-6 months of release.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
I'd say most people at work use IE for work, but use something else (usually FF) for whatever is not work even when they are still at work and smartphone notwithstanding.
So they are in the workplace, just in a different way.
This mentality of separating "regular" users from "business users" makes a couple of flawed assumptions:
It's always disturbing to hear a software company say, "here's a population of users, and they don't matter to us."
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
I don't know about anyone else but the choice of browser has gone from being something reasonably important to an almost completely worthless argument.
- Speedwise, since Chrome's initial release everyone went "whoa" and upped their game with javascript execution and loading times far superior than just a few years ago.
- Interfacewise most of them seem to be converging on a Chrome/Opera minimalist look.
- Pluginwise the main Firefox players are being remade for Chrome and I'm sure that the others are on the way if not already here.
- Standards support-wise Acid2 is now supported by everyone including IE and more good support stuff on the way
All the browsers seem to be converging on one point. Windows now has IE, Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari and they are now practically identical to each other.
Maybe that's a little too much redundancy, and it's time to shoot one or two of them in the head...
So, if Mozilla launch Firefox 6 has as 3.7 magically all business software will support it? Came on, get real !! I think this is FUD against Firefox.
I am saddened to see Firefox follow Chrome's every little move. If it weren't for a handful of great addons, there would be nearly no reason to use Firefox now that they are turning into Chrome-Too.
Firefox is not only going to remove "http://" from the address bar in Firefox 7, but they are also getting rid of trailing slashes:
http://browserfame.com/41/firefox-hide-http-address-bar
IBM recommends Firefox as the default browser. There are many companies that do adopt Firefox as their default browser.
They'd put it in it's own "Container" with it's own process id and Flashplayer still manages to crash their browser... and I have been using FF4/FF7(nightly) and Seamonkey(stable and nightly)... and WTF is it with Sync? It never really worked for me... I stopped using it because I am afraid to lose my bookmarks because of that shit... I use subversion to sync my bookmarks now..
If I wan't to watch movies I use that google-chrome (i am sure someone will complain about that) because it has it's own Flash implementation and it doesn't stop working 5 minutes before the end of a movie... and when google-chrome fails me too I'll be using IE in VirtualBox... That's how much "religious" I am when I want to watch fucking movies...
...because made it a little harder for Grandma Silvia and Warehouse Joe to get contact viruses while scrubbing around in an outmoded IE 6.
Or as most people over 40 call it, the Blue "E".
Yes enterprises are time wasters - support probably spends 10x more time on them than anyone else, but often what people like at home they want at work and visa versa.
On the one hand, I am pleased by Mozilla's self-conscious understanding of the fact that 'enterprise' and home/SB are different, and that you can't really serve both simultaneously. Being stuck in the 'we can't kill IE6 until SA support for XP ends, if not even later" hell is lousy for the development of the browser and the web generally. Being willing to release early and often is a good thing. A few minor changes(ie. plugins check for compatibility by feature, rather than version number, and/or a "don't autoupdate until the plugins on this list have compatible versions" option) might be nice; but worrying about catering to the backwards compatibility needs of people's intranet crap and the like is a waste of time.
However, there are a few things that show up as painful most keenly in "enterprise" deployment scenarios; but which are more about remnants of archaic design, not tradeoffs between home and enterprise users. The fact that you can still run into the "Profiles" management dialog box without doing anything web-developery seems like something that crawled unbidden from the horrible days before multi-user OSes ran on desktops people could afford. Similarly, the fact that there is minimal treatment of installing a plugin for everybody on a machine, vs. installing it just for yourself(hardly an "enterprise" requirement: many home computers are shared by multiple people, and administered by the sort of people most likely to be unable to handle ad-blocking or the like at the network level)...
One thing I really don't want to see is IE becoming the only corporate choice again -- and Firefox is the biggest reason web development is no longer "best on IE6". I'd hate to see it be the biggest reason for web development to become "best on IE9" again.
I actually don't care about Firefox specifically in the enterprise, but there need to be options. Having a group that large locked to one vendor's idea of what the Web should be is detrimental to the Web as a whole.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The biggest problem that I can see is that Firefox isn't automatically upgraded the way Windows is through the automatic update process. Firefox isn't the only product that's like that. Adobe Reader and Flash need to be upgraded, too, and this is also outside the Windows update stream. I can't imagine a responsible system department not upgrading these other critical components.
FWIW, I agree with the fellow who posted ahead of me who said that Firefox needs to be in the corporate market because people will use at home what they have at work. That's certainly been my experience.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
That's what my company has (actually more, but fewer users access the dozens of other apps). Multiply that by N browsers (brand/version) and support costs go up even more. And it's not just support costs, but productivity costs after users upgrade to FavoriteBrowser V+1, and something doesn't work so they have to go through support calls/emails before being told that may be fixed in a month so go back to another browser.
We're allowed to use any browser, but if you want support you use IE Vx (where Vx is the version where all major corporate apps have passed QA and support staff has been trained).
I'm sure everyone here can write great web apps that work identically on any browser/device. Unfortunately our app vendors don't all have those skills and we prefer them working on business functionality rather than working on compatibility with next month's chrome,firefox, IE, Opera, Safari releases and the newest version of some web phone that 10 of our employees use.
Asa speaks as though all corporate users of Firefox are these giant behemoths that have large IT departments that can reprogram add-ons and webapps designed for Firefox with their well-funded programming department. The reality is that there are a lot of small and medium-sized businesses who don't have such luxury, but do make webapps or add-ons, or otherwise depend on Firefox functionality being backwards-compatible. And they employ a lot of people. And if they get cut out of the loop, that's users lost. And these users will go home and say "I don't want to use Firefox because it doesn't work at work" and then they download Chrome or just go back to IE (horror!).
We (as in most of IT) had been trying to get management on board with switching to Firefox for a while now in place of IE for various reasons, and were finally making some progress.
Then this idiocy happened. Management is back to being spooked. They like group policy. They like that they can deny pushing out a new version if it breaks apps until we can fix them, knowing that the previous version still has security updates for some timeframe > 0. IE gives them that. Chrome has some support for it. Firefox didn't really do much for us before in that area, but also didn't actively try to make it hard.
Then Mozilla (and Asa in particular) gave us the middle finger. Management noticed. There is zero chance of a migration happening now.
I've been trying to figure out if anybody outside of Mozilla thinks this is a good idea. It's like they have a reality distortion bubble over the place and when faced with the reality that this was a particularly bad idea for enterprise users simply decided they didn't like those people anyway rather then fess up to the reality that their new model sucks.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Understanding this isn't mozilla's unilateral view at the moment, this is a common problem with the mozilla projects and others. I spent a couple years jury-rigging mozilla and firefox installs for a university setting, and the only reason we couldn't use it sometimes is because the devs refused to fix known bugs that caused problems with windows' roaming profiles.
The thing is, when you take the time to think about how your product will perform in the enterprise, you tend to use better overall practices in your design - clean modularization, consistent registration and setting storage, better documentation for admins, more robust choices for library usage, better securities design so the software can run properly in heavily restricted user environments.... It's a matter of paying attention to how your software interacts with the whole computing environment, and in the end what you get can be a better and more manageable product that will survive the long haul - even outside the enterprise.
It doesn't have to be everyone on the team, but it's worth having people that seriously think this way, and work together with them.
I've spent more than enough time using 3rd party add-ons or rollups to make firefox work in enterprise. Not even a massive rollout, 50-60 machines, maybe a hundred or so users. I've been working with FF since 2.0 and I'm really reaching the point where, even though it's not as fast or safe, I'm ready to just chuck FF and go back to IE.
This is such a terrible oversight. Simple things like being able to deploy silently and centrally mange basic settings like proxy and homepage are NOT. THAT. HARD. Why do I have to go to someone like Front motion to get these simple options then go jump through some more hoops to repackage it as 'firefox' (which is a fucking joke in and of itself. 'Hey, look, someone's offering features that are really popular and useful, we better start swinging the trademark stick rather that trying to integrate these features)? Why leave enterprise to fend for itself? Why not make some hay while the sun shines against chrome and opera, who are equally as shitty in the enterprise? WHY MAKE IT HARDER FOR THE GUYS WHO CAN ROLL YOUR BROSWER OUT TO HUNDREDS OF USERS AT A TIME? But hey, yeah, keep devoting effort to super-mega-ultra-uber-teh-specialz bar 2.0 Xtreme, keep thinking that moving the home button and dicking with tabs constitutes innovation, and keep rolling out new versions every 37 seconds (because if Spinal Tap taught us anything, it's that 11 is one better than 10. So FF5 must be one better than FF4.) For fucks sake, they don't even provide an official MSI. The brower's icon should have a pair of hipster glasses on the fox. "MSI's and GPO's are so mainstream..."
Mozilla is starting to make me think of Hunter S. Thompson quote from Fear and Loathing: "So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Funny thing is, while my company provides IE etc, I and many like me, put Firefox on because it suits our business better anyway. For instance, when I use my company's horrid Junipur Networks VPN thingy, IE8 is horrific and I have to log in and out several times before I can get all the way in (network connect) but if I run Firefox and log in, it grinds for a bit but I get all the way in, usually in one or two tries. (I've watched the [sun] java console and know that the symptom is tied to some odd interface class that links java events to java-script/emca-script events in the browser, but I haven't dug deeper).
The fact of the matter is, the better the browser meets the HTML standards, the better it is for business. Period. The IE-centric web cannot survive the age of the iPhone/Android boom. They will conform or they will continue to fall by the margin. Heck, Windows version-next is all HTML5 by their own announcements.
Now the fact that Linux evolves faster, and so does Firefox, is only "a problem" for companies that are used to having to vet every slow-moving version of Windows. The habit of expecting breakage and avoiding patches is well established for Windows, because it was hugely necessary for Windows. On the average that breakage is far less common in the Open Source stuff as nobody is getting paid for bug support and anything broken can be fixed directly.
In short, we are in the pre-collapse age of secret-source, and the companies are going to lag behind there.
It is "correct" IMHO to aim FireFox at "regular users", since businesses _are_ "regular users". That is the only way to drag "corporate overlords" into the modern era. That has always been the case.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
A fool and his money... (or job)
Business _are_ regular users.
It's "corporate IT departments" that are irregular. They are used to things breaking with updates so they are afraid of updating anything. So sure, just ignore the ludite businesses and "pander to" the "regular users" so that the business, who _alwyas_ must be forced to act anyway, will be forced to evolve.
Trying to make "business users" some kind of non-regular users is trying to invent a false dichotomy.
I think Mozilla et. al. would be _correct_ to utterly ignore any "business specific" evolution as that would be counter productive. Making software "for businesses" is like making software for _any_ niche, in the long run it is a disservice.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
I think Firefox is creating this situation by doing continuous release wrong... They correctly tried to follow the Chrome model, In order to keep up with a continuously changing world, also shorter release cycles are more efficient. However, seems to me Firefox doesn't get it. They are still advertising large version # changes. Why do they allow you to download "Firefox 5" instead of just saying this is "Firefox" when you download you get the latest one. Period. With Chrome you have to dig to see a build #, and you will see the press talking Chrome 11, 12, 13. However, you never see Google pushing versions. This results in a situation where IT thinks they are still deploying in cycles instead of installing a constantly updated piece of software. How much time is wasted version branding? The should also make it so Firefox can be constantly updated via patches, so that IT admins can apply on separate schedule, or behind firewalls.
FF software update shipped (thank you).
Upgrade.
End of.
Whichever browser is the first to come with a built-in BitCoin wallet is surely the better one.
How does one become a browser consultant? Is there like a masters degree? What are the benefits like? Is it just me or does that sound like a made up for this story title in order to give some schmuck credibility with people who don't want to think to hard?
Basically no one uses IE for internet surfing/browsing. Most businesses restrict IE for internal use only, e.g. via Citrix Metaframe environments. ... I guess you can switch it off again, or can't you?
For "going out into the internet" nearly everyone I ever meet uses FireFox.
Assuming only home users would use it is bullshit, lots of home users are already switching to Google Chrome.
I for my part don't use Firefox anymore since the time where it started to auto update automatically
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Perhaps they should have taken the time to survey companies (or to review published data), so they might realize just how many enterprises have adopted FireFox. While I understand their position, they're cutting off the enterprise customers that helped increase the FF browser-share.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
He's absolutely right! Corporations like Sony, that hold all of our personal data, don't need secure up-to-date software! Only regular users need secure up-to-date software because it's only regular users that get hacked!
Each release breaks a bunch of my plug-ins. Then I have to use IE until they have new versions of the plug-ins. So as a "regular user", I always seem to have IE running.
Don't believe the BS about corporations not liking change as the reason for the failure of Firefox in the corporate world. Corporations have to deploy new updates and versions of every damned thing on a regular basis, what's one more application, really? A lot of corporations don't care about "enterprise support", especially for applications that are offered on an "as-is" basis. Think: IE for your intranet apps, Firefox for browsing. They don't necessarily need to certify, or test, but no matter what, they'll have to deploy.
Deployment can be trivial, or it can be quite a lot of work, depending on how the application is packaged. Firefox is one of those wonderful applications that despite having a user base of mostly Windows users, doesn't follow most of the Windows application deployment methods. It doesn't use MSI installers or MSP patches, and doesn't come with ADM or ADMX policy files.
In other words, deploying it is a bitch because it's non-standard, and hence it requires administrators to spend precious time fixing issues that shouldn't occur in the first place.
I'd deploy Firefox in a heartbeat, but until I can drop an MSI from an official build into SCCM, and then lock it down with an ADMX template that configures policies instead of settings, I don't have the time. I don't have the time to waste chasing down some virus-infested hand-made MSI on Bob's Blog, and combine it with some half-baked group policy template from somewhere else. I don't have the time to roll my own system either, especially considering the regular update cycle.
This wouldn't be hard for Mozilla to fix. They'd literally have to write just a couple of simple config files, and add some WiX steps to the build scripts.
This has been a top request on Bugzilla for almost a decade, and has been consistently ignored by the Mozilla team. I cannot begin to imagine why.
... this is an idiotic thing to say.... As a web-developer I might be a little bit delusional hoping that ultimately we have only few browsers and more compatibility. but right now we find that if our clients still use IE6 - and believe me, they do - this will be the baseline, rather than the much better other browsers might use - and be it just to have the CEO who is running IE6 happy. funny, but true with a lot of clients... so IGNORING businesses you do at your own peril.
having said all this, could IT departments please grow up, too?!?!
At least to some extent. I think Mozilla's trying to switch over to the fast release schedule because of serious version envy, as well as wanting to push out releases faster, but what I don't think they realized is the fundamental difference between how Google's Chrome engineers seem to view the version number.
A user downloads Chrome. That's it. They don't ever need to download updates, since once Chrome is launched, it patches the binary with newest updates automagically. It updates automagically in the background, only occasionally asking for a restart. The version number is buried in the "About Chrome" dialog box, and almost never referred to elsewhere. Extensions aren't tied to versioning, but rather, features. Chrome's fast release schedule works because they've taken some choices and options out of the equation. They're asking people not to support a specific version of Chrome, but rather the Chrome browser platform--which makes it easier: instead of asking what browser version someone's using, one asks what browser, and the supporter can be reasonably assured that the user has the most recent version, with all the most recent bug fixes and features. Whatever the version number is, at best, incidental.
Firefox, on the other hand, still requires some user interaction to download and install updates; updates still go through an installation/update process that's visible to the user, and worse yet, they give the option to the user to ignore them. Extensions are tied to versions, which is why there's frequent breakage on updates. Finally, on first launch, and whenever you visit the page, the version number is there, like it's important or something. Mozilla is still thinking with versions--which makes it important to ask what version of the browser someone's using, and leaving the supporter wondering what updates and what features have been installed and applied.
Mozilla's only gotten the fast releases half-right.
I was looking at this over the weekend: There are two .adm files that will do the trick.
Firefox.adm - does not seem to support proxy .pac files.
Mozilla.adm - does seem to support proxy .pac files
The methods for configuring these are not identical, nor are what they can configure. Additionally, in my brief hour of looking - I did not really feel that they were well documented (although hopefully they are documented within themselves...).
As a killer for me, there is no lockdown settings to the machine settings, as there is with Internet Exploder.
However, as the adm files used to be .. difficult to find, this is a great improvement. If I were still supporting small businesses, I could see firefox used more often in a small business setting...
It cares about making acronyms, and then being compliant with those acronyms, and in measuring its own success in terms that nobody outside IT leadership understands.
W
Much of the reason for the CCK is largely gone - default settings can be defined before ghosting a PC. Other things can be controlled by limiting what the user is entitled to do or not do with their own machine by means of the firewall and user permissions. i.e. if you don't want people installing flash then don't let them install stuff or block the update url the machine calls. Same goes for autoupdate of Firefox itself - block the url Firefox phones home to and do your own thing. An extension could probably also hide or grey out particular settings and reset them if they were modified.
Therefore I think enterprises probably don't need a CCK any more, but they probably do need a technical article to describe how to do all of the above. I also think that if an enterprise really, really needs a CCK like Firefox that there is a commercial opportunity to supply it. Perhaps the solution providers could even strike a deal with Mozilla to keep the firefox branding on CCK builds in return for a cut of the support / contract fees.
I'm deploying Chrome. It even has Group Policy templates. Sorry, FF. :(
is not exactly what I would consider a statement to operate under. This really is coming off as "screw them business people, if they don't like we can take a hike - err... wait a minute"
Really, what is the point of Firefox anymore? Originally I thought we were trying to escape the bloat that Mozilla became, now it seems to be a game of one upping in a battle most of us don't give a rats ass about.
How about instead of declaring what your not you fix what you are? Get off this gimmick of new release numbers. Get off this idea of who you don't serve. Just make the best damn browser you can and quit adding features or changing things before addressing the problems people tell you have.
Whats next, we are not for pissy users who don't agree with us?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Ubuntu is for home and business, because they offer LTS. They do this, and I am happy to wave their banner to home users and at my work where Ubuntu is replacing old XP machines, rather than Windows 7. But I don't EVER use Firefox. It's too slow, and nobody wants to use it anyways. I use Chromium. It's quick and stable.
Firefox fell out of favor with me over a year ago. It's bloated and their add-on system hasn't evolved fast enough. And without LTS, I won't install it at work.
And here's what they DON'T get (feel free to flame me, I was a FF fanboy once too). If I install something other than IE at work, users here are apt to use the same at home. If I don't install Firefox, they probably won't install it. And if they do run it and ask why we don't run it, my answer is simple, "It's crap."
Go ahead, Mozilla, flip the bird to sys/net admins. We can flip the bird right back and drain the core of your installs to 0. I can't believe you'd say what you did to a major administrator like you did. If you are trying to adopt the Apple snotty attitude, YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.
Who the hell do you think actually runs most of your installs? Schools, businesses, and even government. Are you so high on your horse that you think you are the only good browser out there now? IE doesn't suck as bad, Chrome is fast as hell, and Opera has always been solid. As you continue to lose market share, I want to make a serious suggestion. Fire some of your staff. That is the fresh start you need.
Ubuntu at least knows who butters its bread. It's the institutions that are pushing the numbers up. Mozilla doesn't have a clue.
I8-D
Having your add-ons broken every month is not something anyone, business or home users, should have to put up with.
I had to downgrade back down to 4 at both home and work. Two different sets of add-ons, all broken. Thanks Mozilla!
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
There is an opportunity for a business to step up and provide long term enterprise support for FireFox 4.0. Backporting the security updates is possible.
Talk about shooting yourself in the foot! Mozilla is headed way way down the wrong path (and Asa is a dumbass).
Mozilla, please listen to your users and drop your arrogance.
I have to say that I agree with the article, although not for the same reasons. Firefox was unceremoniously dumped from my business in favor of Chrome after months (years) of nonstop "upgrades" that broke extensions, bugs that never got fixed, and more memory leakage than I've ever seen in a widely used application. We're very happy with Chrome, and I don't see trying Firefox again any time in the the future unless the project radically improves and gives me a reason to spend precious time to give it another shot.
I don't respond to AC's.
We currently use Seamonkey as the default mail/browser package in the department I work in and don't seem to be moving away from it anytime soon. We've been very happy with it for years
LWN has a good article talking about the policies some Linux distros are taking on Firefox updates.
I gotta say, most people I work with use firefox regardless of business policy and it hasn't cost the company a dime to the best of my knowledge.
Now I know that "more or less zero" cost wouldn't scale up unchanged.
But as far as I know, there is no reason to believe that the cost (including security exposure to things like Active X and unpatched flaws) of sticking to old IE builds, is known to be cheaper than the cost of checking the latest release of FireFox against a company's list of must-have web applications.
There is no requirement to update Firefox with every EOL, and in general it isn't that fragile.
Meanwhile the "Windows Habits" have got major companies I am not allowed to name running FireFox 2-or-so to this day because they don't want to deal with the life cycle on their non-windows (Feodora etc) boxes.
Business were made sorely afraid by being repeatedly burned by Windows updates. It is oddly rare to be so pervasively burned by non-windows platforms. Before MS and after, most updates are reasonable, just no so much for MS. In my experience anyway, yours may vary.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
When I look at version releases like 3.0, 4.0, and 5.0, I think of these as major game changing releases that introduce new features, better performance and compatibility. If you assume that these are big releases, then it becomes prohibitive to small teams like mine that support 20+ ASP.NET websites to fully vet out the new release and ensure compatibility. If Mozilla is just trying to artificially keep their product fresh by releasing 5.0 as an incremental upgrade, and not bringing anything new or greatly improved to the table, then it's just an annoyance that can be more easily dealt with.
Regardless, on my systems, I'll take the wait-and-see approach, let the rest of the world deal with the problems and wait for my favorite addons to be updated before I upgrade.
The place where I work has supported Firefox since 2.0 came out. They do implement internal change control, which is why we don't get new versions of the browser until it has been tested and found to be compatible with our internal applications. If there was an incompatibility, it could take months to fix the webapp, delaying internal deployment. Security patches were approved much faster because they were more important and didn't break as much.
However, with this new release schedule Mozilla will not be releasing security patches separately. Instead every version will have new features, bug fixes, and security patches. Thus we have to choose between running an insecure browser for weeks/months while testing the new release, or risk breaking applications because we didn't test. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that we will be dropping support for Firefox instead.
Add OpenLDAP support like many other Linux applications have for autoconfiguration.
maybe the point was to make it so that it wouldn't NEED long term technical support. what kind of it-support in enterprise lets support calls for browser issues go to the browser provider anyhow?
By "support" I don't mean tech support calls as much as fixes for newly discovered security holes. Every major version of Firefox changes the ABI for extensions that aren't 100% pure JavaScript, and if Mozilla refuses to fix security holes in a given version of the browser, all extensions need rebuilt.
Someone please apply a clue bat to the poster! I have to spend a lot of energy convincing company presidents and so on that moving their users from MSIE to Firefox is a good thing. For all sorts of reasons. And here is a Mozilla team member undermining my work by claiming the exact oposite.
but, their new open hostility will only hurt Mozilla in the long run.
is opt-in. You know like in Labs. What an !advantage.
So - I have to fight this battle - we have tens of thousands of users stuck with IE6 due to internal application compatibility.
We have reviewed; FireFox, Opera, Safari and Chrome....
Guess which one is the best from an Enterprise point-of-view (i.e. remote managability, shared/overriden settings/configuration details)?
Chrome.... It even supports configuration settings being updated via GPO (Group Policy Objects)....
As well, using Chrome Frame, we can even provide an "up-level" experience for our one site/URL, while maintaining compatiblity for older sites (we simply only active Chrome Frame for that one URL)...
FireFox was the initial prefered option, but the lack of IT-overridable configuration settings (enabling automatic NTLM/kerberos authentication for all users) and now the lack of support for older versions has pretty much killed it in our enterprise (100k+ desktops)
This regular user would be happy if I could continue to use Firefox at work, on my locked-down, corporate maintained computer.
The statement shows vast ignorance and perhaps arrogance.
Regular users use Firefox to browse business sites.
If business sites don't support Firefox, then they must use another browser.
Sigh...
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Who is going to make all the web applications for firefox? I work for a small web developer(under 20 people). We use firefox to build the initial version of the website. webdeveloper, inspect element, gotta love them. But we do *not* upgrade our desktops willy nilly. We don't have any mandated corporate policy. It's just common sense not to upgrade at the whim of some external entity(mozilla, I'm looking at you), when we all have different projects all being worked on in parallel.
I might be personally working on 3 jobs at once. A coworker could also be working with me on one of my jobs, but then have others that I am not involved with. We won't upgrade until we have a lull in the work load. And that will *not* be right after a new release.
Yes, the linux kernel has a fast cycle. But even they have stable versions that they maintain. You can *not* go to a fast cycle without having long term stable branches. Whoever(single person or group) made that decsision(I'm sorry if this is abrasive(actually, no, I'm not)), was a moron.
When IE won't open a page ("Operation Aborted"), damn straight Firefox is for business.
In 2005 he felt differently:
I think we're going to see some serious bottom up pressure in the enterprise space because people want to use a Web browser and not be used by it. They want to get their work done without interruptions from adware and spyware. They want a cleaner and faster Web experience. They want a more capable tool; it's that simple.
When enough people demand it, I think a lot of small and mid-sized business will make that move away from IE. We'll even get some of the big boys in the Fortune 500, though their IT cycles are often a bit longer and managed with a heavier hand.
It's going to be a great year for Firefox, and it won't be limited to the home user.
From: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/007343.html
On the other side *YOU STILL NEED UPDATES*.
There's no way you can skip changing what is installed on your desktop, no matter what.
Because security bugs happen and thus you *DEFINITELY* need to install newer version.
The only thing that changed is the release model.
Internet Explorer is still using the old classical approach :
minor version change : only bug-fixes and minor feature (maybe change of a sub-system, etc.)
major version change : "Oh my god ! They changed pretty much everything and now nothing works at all !"
Firefox used a similar approach up until somewhere around 3.0
Now the Linux kernel, Firefox, and several other project switched to another model.
They've changed in size. A lot. They are also quite mature now. They also work more or less well according to expectation. There's simply no sense in breaking everything down to the last single part. And in fact that wouldn't be practical at all. That would require a monstruous effort. Same range as what went into "winxp to vista" development.
What make much more sense is to only fix bugs and change a few small features at a time, maybe change 1 sub-system. But not much.
In fact Firefox already started such approach before : 3.5 did change quite some subsystems, even if it wasn't a major revision bump. 3.5 to 3.6 did also see some sub-system change, even if it wasn't a complete rewrite of everything.
The new release cycle/versionning scheme is only reflecting this reality. There won't be any full wide rewrite of Firefox anymore. It's too big and too mature. That doesn't mean that it won't evolve. In fact, future version change will introduce new features. Only in smaller steps : changes of sub-systems.
They could have kept numbering it 4.0, 4.1, 4.2, etc. and kept the business world happy ("see, it's still a 4.x version !"). Except that, by incremental change, by the time they would have reached 4.10, it would have started to look rather completely different from 4.0, even if every single step in-between is incremental (and in fact this is what happened in the kernel world during the 2.6.x generation of kernel. There's no more a 2.7 leading to a future stable 2.8.0, only feature that get progressively integrated into the current tree).
Same is also happening with the HTML standard : past HTML5 there isn't going to be a single unified standard wide bump up to HTML5.1 or HTML6. Instead, various sub-parts are independently added (Canvas, Video, Audio, WebGL, WebRTC, etc.)
Now back to the enterprise world and browsers :
2 situations :
- either they need some non-standard technology. And thus are desperately stuck into the ActiveX-powered IE world (and very likely an old version of it).
- or they use technology based on open standards (HTML 4 or 5). In which case most browser should do fine, as long as they follow said standards (Chrome, Firefox, Opera....)
In which case there shouldn't be much breakage due to an upgrade from FireFox 4 to 5 : Both version are equally tested to follow standards, and standard compliant web application should still work after the upgrade.
For the rest, as said above, the newer version are expected to be incremental - it shouldn't require massively more testing than an update to a version which formerly should have the same major number.
The only main problem are extensions. Indeed, the min/max version support in their manifest file doesn't reflect this new type of revision cycle (yet). We need an independent "API version" system (or needed features/subsystems for more granularity). But anyway, I seriously doubt that an enterprise critically depends on an extension (most are for end-users functionality) (and even if they depend so much on it : it shouldn't be that difficult to help testing it against newer versions during the beta and rc phases of the cycle).
Okay, I must admit : the biggest IT departments I've worked in did administer only whole faculties or only a range of machines for the whole university (as in all lab PCs). Not Banks.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
"A minute spent making a corporate user happy can better be spent rearranging the interface. I'd much rather Mozilla was spending its limited resources fucking with the minds the billions of users that don't have enterprise support systems to explain where the hell the button they're looking for was moved.'"
What about all the regular uses that WANT firefox at work? If they do this, that will end and many users will stop using FF at home too.
This guy needs to be fired, soon.
Google Chrome/Chromium is blocked where I work due to their outrageous upgrade-without-telling-anyone crap. IT systems running Microsoft tech are notoriously fragile thanks to slightly-above-idiot-level corporate developers.
I think this is because this is a transition period. I would have liked to have seen it the other way around, but that is what they choose to do.
Firefox also has an API for extensions that aren't tied to versioning, it's called JetPack and it solved that problem years ago.
It is just all the old extensions that need to be updated/tested/rewritten where the problem is.
Chrome installs in the 'user profile' on Windows and that is why it doesn't need a popup, because it doesn't require admin-rights to install.
New things are always on the horizon
It's really boring to read about big corporation. The backbone of the economy (no matter the continent) is not the mega-corporation but SMEs and individuals.
We don't give a flying f*ck about browser penetration in the Fortune global 1000.
Firefox, Chrome and Safari have and will keep to have gigantic browser shares in the desktop / laptop / cellphone markets. Get over it. Screw lame Active-X addicted big corps.
What business user doesn't use Firefox? What on earth do they use if not Firefox? Don't tell me "Internet Explorer" because that's crazy talk. Business users are using Firefox.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
"Regular" vs. non-regular/corporate doesn't address the largest issue within Firefox and their insanely fast release cycle; Firefox plugins.
The add-on/plugin community is one of the largest benefits that sets Firefox apart from other browsers. You want to update Firefox every damn day with a new point release? Fine. Just don't piss off thousands of developers in your plugin community that help put Firefox on the map by forcing them to re-compile for every single release. Talk about biting the hand the fed you.
This viewpoint hints at Firefox’s miserable demise unless the Mozilla team wake up.
I believe that the successful drive to gain Mozilla users owes a great deal to the fact web developers standardized development using some version of Firefox 3.x and the Developer Toolbar plugin. This increased the adoption of web standards (HTML 4 and CSS 2) on the monopoly platform. The resulting black eye for IE forced MS to at least pay lip service to open web standards, with IE 9 being hailed (by MS, of course) as the most forward-looking and standards-compatible browser out there.
In other words, web developers, not regular users, led the adoption of Firefox.
In my case, I hadn’t even d/led Firefox until I started working as a front-end web developer. Prior to that (February 2010!), I used Safari (for Mac) as my main and only browser. To date, I only use Chrome because it’s a convenient way to tell Google I will not every be installing Flash on my system if I can help it. Chrome’s upgrade cycle puts me off. Firefox puts me off and frightens me at the same time.
I’m frightened because nearly every dev where I work (front- and back-end) is wringing his or her hands about Mozilla’s accelerated and backwards-incompatible upgrade scheme. There’s no good reason to have so quick a development cycle because (and here’s the secret) regular users don't care about upgrading.
Left to their own devices, regular users will use whatever browser their geek friend / dev spouse / prodigy child recommends, and I will guarantee you that if Mozilla keeps this up until July 2012 that Firefox will not be that browser for the simple reason that geeks, devs, and prodigies will not use Firefox because it’s too volatile a development platform.
So yeah, DEAR MOZILLA: Macs are targeted toward regular as opposed to corporate users. Have you seen the desktop browser share stats for Safari? Please, take a good hard look because that’s the future of Firefox on the desktop if Mozilla thinks it can safely ignore corporate (read developer) users.
One Mozilla loses its developer base, Firefox have a hard time making up that lost ground. Talk about technology death spirals will forever after reference Mozilla and the post-Firefox 4 upgrade scheme.
I hope Mozilla reconsiders, fires/demotes the managers who came up with this "copy Google" scheme, and goes back to making a stable foundation for web standards and cross-browser compatibility.
blog
You appear to claim that all versions of Internet Explorer (IE 6, IE 7, IE 8, and IE 9) can be described as "ingrained in the system bloated piece of crap security nightmare". So what web browser 1. presents a stable ABI for extensions and 2. is not an "ingrained in the system bloated piece of crap security nightmare"?
Foooorrrrrrk!
Table-ized A.I.
What a defective line of reasoning. If he wants people to embrance Firefox at home, his best approach is to make it usable at their office. Those who can't use Firefox at work are going to be much less inclined to use it at home.
I'm unimpressed and disappointed. I've expended great energy over the years encouraging our business to make as many of its damn web applications support Mozilla. It's been a frustrating task but I've been happy to see a general recognition from IT and management that Firefox is a useful office application.
He's utterly wrong and misguided.
...If installed to the user directory it will not. That's why Chrome doesn't need admin rights - it's installed to C:\Users\[username]\Appdata\Local\Google by default.
Chrome is doing an end-around security rules that are designed to prevent applications from being installed without sufficient authority. In what way is this a good thing?
I actually wondered during lunch break if it is possible to get IE8 to run under Wine.
So far I just decided to download the 4.01 Firefox source tree for safekeeping and disable all auto-updates.
IBM uses Linux on the "HMC" PC that controls their mainframes. The browser installed on those machines is Firefox. They recommend Firefox for remote control of the mainframe configuration/control application. IE has traditionally been a bit flaky for this particular application.
I work for a university library, and I've been an advocate of deploying Firefox to the staff and computer labs here (~600 computers). Firefox's lack of attention to group policy has always been an issue, but I've hacked in scripts to work around it.
However, the new release cycle is problematic for me, as I can't in good conscience deploy a .0 release without a few weeks of testing, and/or waiting for a maintenance update. I have to go from stability to stability, and I can't really afford a period of instability while people are shouting at me and my boss is looking at Firefox and going "well, we could just force everyone to use IE instead..".
By the time I was comfortable releasing a FF4 package to staff, FF5 was out. And now I'm stuck on 3.6 waiting for 5.0 to do a point release.
the "corporate" users that many people deride, occasionally deservedly, include people like me, who have a job to do and don't want to deal with 600 fairy princess machines each with their own bugs. I can't spend 12-24 hours on a FF5 deployment, and if I'm forced to do so every month or two, MSIE will eat its lunch at my workplace because my boss will decide that I have better things to do with my time.
For IT the soft is useful when they can get kickbacks while buying it. They cannot get it from Mozilla Foundation.
How unprofessional and shocking from one of the most well respected browser makers. I can't recommend it to clients anymore, not to mention the quality has gone so far downhill. It seems Firefox is the new IE of the 10's decade.
Chrome as rapid as it is, has at least an enterprise version of itself complete with an MSI installer and administrator tools and activedirectory policies for updates. Why couldn't Mozilla do this? It is not hard.
You know what? It doesn't matter if corporate America is holding everyone ... book boo hiss.
By Mozilla refusing to service this market they only hurt themselves and HTML 5. As a webmaster, why would you bother with it since the majority of people use IE? Just use outdated CSS 1.x as that is the most popular standard the world! Sigh ...
Now the corporations will surely hold onto it and the users will want to use it at home since it is what they know from work, which then feeds itself all over again. A few corps have migrated to Firefox over the years. Right now they are making plans to go back to IE.
I even saw a post from a Mozilla hacker begging for a user who gripped on rapid releases to use IE. Well guess what? If my product is geared towards enterprise user I will notice the spike in IE users and frankly go back in time with standards and only support IE. Is that what you really want? No one will care about innovation and will just gripe how slow and bloated your browser is as the majority of users will use Firefox with outdated sites where they get all bloat and no benefits.
Chrome is now my default browser even though I used to trash it and I still hate its interface. I just do not see a future with Firefox anymore and when the writting is on the wall it is time to move on. I may switch to IE 9, but it is not adopted yet.
http://saveie6.com/
Chrome is for those who want speed and efficiency, while Firefox is for power users who want the add-ons, without which there would be no reason to care about Firefox.
Businesses don't need Firefox. Businesses need Windows/IE/Office because they interact with Windows/IE.Office users.
I wouldn't think of suggesting Firefox or Linux where I work. I do just fine rescuing Winboxes when they fuck up. That was true during the Win95/NT era too. I don't evangelize at work. Note my money. Not my concern. Firefox Portable runs fine off my USB stick. I get what I want, and it's all about me.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I hate auto-magic things. I try to keep away from things that do that. I want to control my system, not vice-versa.
The wholesale change of UI for existing installs in FF4 was another kick in the teeth our trainers raged about. Now this version update business which seems to be solely driven by worrying about what ZDNet etc write about Chrome.
TBH as a corp sysadm I was already pissed off with Mozilla before Asa put his size 10s in it, and I've had "getfirefox" buttons on my personal websites for years. At the very least IE8/9 could become the default browser in our shop.
Other than separate per tab processes (which uses more memory than Firefox) how is Chrome any different than Firefox? The interface looks almost the same but Firefox is much more powerful because you can actually change it. Memory usage in Firefox is actually less than Chrome. Speed wise I also see no difference. Firefox also now has the exact same 6 week release schedule as Chrome which you complain about. Someone please help me understand what is so great about Chrome?
The comments here make me laugh. Mainly because for once, when it comes to Firefox vs IE, the comments are sensible and fairly balanced. In the past, Firefox fans lamented, nay screamed into the wind, "why are people still using IE? why? why??"
But now that Firefox starting to annoy the fans, the fans are all like, "why doesn't Firefox have all the good stuff that IE has, even IE6, like Group Policy and non-breaking updates for security? There are good reasons people use IE, you know."
Suddenly, out of the blue, everyone realises why people use IE. Hilarious.
Thanks to these comments I see myself stuck with IE at work for longer.
Chrome, Opera, Safari, don't even think about them. Firefox is (was) the one most companies would consider. I know, I know, lots of you guys are probably using them at work. But if you work in conservative sectors like banking and finance, forget it.
And thanks to the words of this person less chances of at least having a choice.
It does not matter if your browser is the best or better than IE, if you don't make the case for businesses.
To me to only consider home users is a joke, a toy project, and this guy is a non-funny clown.
I guess I will have to make my crusade for Chrome now, at home too, no use wasting time on something that will not go anywhere serious just stay at home
Well, f* you. Stop trying to talk this right, Mozilla just gave a big portion of their userbase (corporate IT pros) the finger.
Now the Linux kernel, Firefox, and several other project switched to another model
Are you implying that Linux and Firefox use the same model? Has Firefox been using the same major version number for fifteen years? Does Linux deprecate all previous versions as soon as the new one is out? I'll save you the trouble of going to kernel.org and see which kernel versions are still supported:
2.6.16: over 2 years of updates
2.6.27: over 2 years of updates and still supported
2.6.32: over a year of updates, and still supported
They've changed in size. A lot. They are also quite mature now. They also work more or less well according to expectation.
Then why does the major version number change at all?
In fact Firefox already started such approach before : 3.5 did change quite some subsystems, even if it wasn't a major revision bump. 3.5 to 3.6 did also see some sub-system change, even if it wasn't a complete rewrite of everything.
Which is what you would expect from mature software. Incremental changes and incremental version bumps. Like the Linux kernel, which did not even change its minor version number for almost 8 years.
The new release cycle/versionning scheme is only reflecting this reality.
What reality? The reality that Fx is a finished product? How does a rapidly increasing version number (a major version at that) reflect product stability/maturity in any way?
There won't be any full wide rewrite of Firefox anymore. It's too big and too mature.
They'd better hope not. If there would be, what number would it get? Firefox Longhorn?
They could have kept numbering it 4.0, 4.1, 4.2, etc. and kept the business world happy ("see, it's still a 4.x version !"). Except that, by incremental change, by the time they would have reached 4.10, it would have started to look rather completely different from 4.0, even if every single step in-between is incremental
What's wrong with that? In fact, what was wrong with 3.1? But anyway, you're missing the point. For a stable business environment, you want no change, for at least as long as your internal acceptance test duration (which can be months). And once a product has completed the acceptance test, you still want security updates for that product. Mozilla simply isn't willing to provide that. I would not want to be the IT worker that has to explain to his boss that the product he has been pushing for years will be abandoned two months after release. Every version. Over and over.
and in fact this is what happened in the kernel world during the 2.6.x generation of kernel. There's no more a 2.7 leading to a future stable 2.8.0, only feature that get progressively integrated into the current tree
And that model has been working fine for years. But Linux does not deprecate all existing 2.6 trees, and the next Linux version will be called 3.1, not 4.0.
Same is also happening with the HTML standard : past HTML5 there isn't going to be a single unified standard wide bump up to HTML5.1 or HTML6. Instead, various sub-parts are independently added (Canvas, Video, Audio, WebGL, WebRTC, etc.)
I don't see what standards have to do with it. Are you implying that Fx5 will be the last major version bump for Firefox, and that after that we'll get separate version numbers for FxUI, FxAwesomeBar, FxExtensionAPI and FxFlashResilience?
Now back to the enterprise world and browsers : :
2 situations
- either they need some non-standard technology. And thus are desperately stuck into the ActiveX-powered IE world (and very likely an old version of it).
- or they use technology based on open standards (HTM
Or just use Chrome, Chromium, RockMelt, or one of the other variants which update themselves without requiring me to do anything except restart my browser once in a while.
In many companies, you will be immediately fired if you install any software whatsoever on your machine. That's what is implied by "Enterprise" here. Only the IT staff is allowed to roll out software on the companies computers -- all the computers are centrally managed as part of the enterprise. And there is a considerable cost for the IT department to test, audit, and finally approve any patches/upgrades/new software, not to mention the cost of deploying it. Oh, and educating the users (yes, some of those people need that). What Mozilla has done is remove support -- such as security patches -- from a widely installed program, and force the enterprise to start all over with a new Firefox. This pisses off the enterprise, and makes them think fondly of Microsoft, which supports Internet Explorer for a very long time.
I thought the Enterprise used something called LCARS -- I had no idea it was using a Mozilla engine underneath that skin!
I am a home user and I use FF. Every time I open my bank's website, a super magical security plug-in is launched by the website. It is supposed to keep me safe and I like it.
Now, whenever FF updates - guess what - the plug-in breaks. Although I am a boring home user, the lovely plug-in is done by some company, who I am sure, does have a hard time fixing compatibility of its popular plug-in to every browser update.
What happens when FF updates every 3 hours?
They can't keep up the pace.
And I, oh so poor home user, DUMP Firefox.
Plug-in is mandatory to access my internet banking.
I am sure Asa goes to ATM to check his account's balance. But I don't.