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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!
Why not do a LTS-version each 2 year? It works for Ubuntu.
A word of caution (or words): When you have the attention of billions of people, you need to put your best foot forward. Having your colleague blurt that Firefox is for "regular" people, and therefore alienating not just corporate users but educational users (of which I am one), he took something that wasn't even a really good foot, and shoved it firmly in his mouth. When you're as big as Mozilla Firefox, the phrase is "prepared statement". Not so you can sound hopelessly cheesy like a politician, but so you're all in agreement with what you want to tell your adoring fans.
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.
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
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...
I kinda like stuff like this. I'd rather someone blurt out an honest opinion that I disagree with vice read some prepared and soulless press release.
People whine about people in high positions not being honest and spin-talking... but any time one of them does just come out and say something that wasn't prepared by a team of writers ... they get jumped on.
I'll agree though, the fact that this was his opinion and not "the mozilla corporate stance" should have been made more clear.
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
You need to get the word on this out there, because Asa's blowhard comments are what people saw and they resonate very strongly at the management level. They read that and completely write Firefox off.
(And I only wish I was just guessing on that. It's exactly what happened in my office.)
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
"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."
That isn't the reason you want a release to not be EOL'd after 3-4 months. It isn't just about addons breaking, it is about the effort required to go through and make sure a whole software stack works and is deployed with all the little tweaks that might be necessary (taking into account "HTML5" won't be a real standard for probably another ten years, business want a relatively fixed environment to build in). If Linux EOL'd a major release after 3-4 months it would be as popular as BeOS. Instead the standard is about 5+ years of security fixes.
Businesses don't run on pixe dust. They run on money. In particular they run by minimising the cost of infrastructure and the like. Firefox seems to be doing its best to increase those costs.
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
I'm all for being candid, but not when people are confusing your potential roadmap with some engineer's personal opinion.
President (overheard on microphone he thought was off): Man, we should just turn Kansas into a sheet of glass.
President (prepared statement): Each state...has a right...provided by the Constitution...to dictate the terms of their public schools.
First one is (FICTIONAL) very candid, but obviously so. The second is actually the stance the government is taking. If Asa had said, "In my opinion, and I don't speak for Mozilla in general, let's make that clear, I'd rather see the browser focused on the people who don't have a centrally administered environment," this would have been fine. Still candid, but it doesn't bring down the garage door on potential Mozilla investors.
I doubt it's 3rd party plugins that most corporations are worried about (but that might be one reason). It's stuff like rendering engine changed breaking vital internal web apps. Possibly vital in the "if this breaks, we lose a load of money until it's fixed" way. So if you update the browser, a sensible company would need to test it first.
With the previous system, you didn't need to do that much testing with 3.6.x (etc) releases, as they're only bug / security fixes, and shouldn't do things like change how the rendering engine works. You only needed to do the big tests for major releases (3.5, 3.6, etc). The major updates were spaced a reasonable length of time apart, and there was a nice period of overlap with both the old and new versions getting patches, so you didn't need to jump immediately.
With the new system, there's no guarantee that the "minor" updates won't mess with the rendering engine and so on, so you'd probably have to do more serious checks just to make sure something hasn't broken. Every 6 weeks. With no overlap when the old version also gets patches. Fun!
Apart from making sure things haven't broken, there's other issues, like the UI could also change, leading to tech support / documentation issues.
Ultimately, making non-bug/security changes to a browser every 6 weeks is just really inconvenient (as in "we'll use IE instead") for most businesses.
10 PRINT "LOOK AROUND YOU ";
20 GOTO 10
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.
The problem is not that people are relying on a certain browser version. The problem is that the browser make is saying "upgrade today because the version you have is no longer supported, and you have to trust us that the new version works and has not introduced new bugs, and if we introduced new features then you have to trust us that they're for your own good."
In other words the browser maker is taking away control from the users. Previously you could stick with old versions and be confident that they worked and that you would get security patches if there were known security holes. By refusing to support older versions and not being smart enough to use source code branches they're essentially requiring all users to use the latest cutting edge releases. Mozilla no longer distinguishes between high priority patches and whimsical feature changes, they're all bundled together and Mozilla demands that you take them both together.
The issue isn't whether or not users can manage these upgrades, instead the issue is whether or not users should be decide when to upgrade. This applies to home users as well as business users. The reason Mozilla is trying to make a distinction here is not because of some enterprise features or support, but because Mozilla finds it easier to treat home users like children than business users.
"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.
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.