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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.
Why not do a LTS-version each 2 year? It works for Ubuntu.
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.
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
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.
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
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 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
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
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
My time sheet people actually care about having it work in Firefox (and Opera, and Chrome), mainly because the time sheet developer is a huge fan of Chrome.
My HR people are stuck in the stone ages, browser wise, though - they require a 32 bit IE browser running in compatibility mode (officially the software only supports IE6, but our ops people no longer support IE6). I've been told this will be true for many years to come, mainly because of a license squabble for upgrades (apparently the company that created the software we use wants millions of dollars for upgrades, and I've heard that the amount is roughly $1000/person, so I can see why that won't fly - yay, vendor and browser lock-in ftl).
I'll never accuse HR people for making poor decisions - I'll just congratulate them when they make a good one (and if you're wondering, no I wasn't hired by HR - I was hired when there was no dedicated HR and became part of a large company through acquisition).
"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
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.
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
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
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.
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
> For example, how much work would be involved in
> making an MSI installer and allowing preferences to
> be set as a group policy?
According to one of the Mozilla folks who looked into just the former, it needs build system changes, build and test infrastructure changes, additional test infrastructure resources, and ongoing QA time investment. That's not counting any ongoing maintenance that would need to happen.
Or did you mean doing something but not actually testing whether it works before releasing it with every release?
LWN has a good article talking about the policies some Linux distros are taking on Firefox updates.
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.
"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.'"
"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.