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.'"

Comments

Make the best browser

[Hatta]

If you make the best browser available, you'll serve the needs of both businesses and individuals.

Re:Make the best browser

[Stormwatch]

Businesses need ActiveX for legacy junk. But a good browser would never run something as insecure as ActiveX.

Re:Make the best browser

[Anrego]

I don't quite agree. The two have completely opposing sets of demands and objectives:

- Businesses want stuff that is stable and doesn't change much. Rolling something out in an enterprise is tricky. You have to test that all the (really shitty) in-house web apps still work, verify that it is compatible with the entire system base, sometimes get systems recertified (depending on the environment). IE6 is _still_ in widespread use.

- Users want the latest and greatest, and generally don't mind dumping support for legacy garbage after a reasonable amount of time. Additionally "rolling out the new version" is just clicking the "update now" button when the dialog comes up.. and you can even opt out of that and just have it automatic.

Re:Make the best browser

[Tridus]

Lots of business don't in fact need ActiveX for legacy junk. But most businesses of significant size do want some control over when the browser will update major versions and potentially break all sorts of things.

Re:Make the best browser

[Penguinisto]

No, not ActiveX. Instead, it's for:

* poorly-coded "web applications" written in-house
* SharePoint (blech)
* Exchange OWA (so you can get all the features, and not some stripped-down webmail setup. Microsoft has promised to fix this in Exchange 2010, but few businesses use it at this time).
* most commonly, some PHB's checklist, because it has more Group Policy controls in Microsoft's Active Directory.

Re:Make the best browser

[jedidiah]

That's kind of what internal change control is for.

Re:Make the best browser

[Daetrin]

Solution: Run Chrome

I've currently got three Firefox windows open with a total of about 35 tabs open between them. So i just started Chrome and created the same setup, three windows with 35 tabs between them. The one difference is that in chrome i just opened up 35 copies of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page. (I can try a more thorough test later but that seemed like a reasonable compromise for expediency's sake.)

Firefox.exe of course has one process open, which according to Process Explorer is consuming 461,952 K private bytes and 884,152 K virtual bytes.

Chrome.exe has five process running. Private byte usage for those processes ranges from 15,000 K to 166,000 K and totals 390,000 K. Virtual size ranges from 148,000 K to 283,000 K and totals 1,061,000 K.

I have one extension installed in Chrome and a little under two dozen plugins and add-ons installed in Firefox.

So base memory usage for Chrome really doesn't seem any better than Firefox, it just makes it harder to keep track of by splitting the usage up into multiple processes. Now i know that Firefox has issues with memory bloat during long periods of continual use. I can't personally speak for Chrome since i don't use it very much (i'm not fond of the minimalist approach to UI) but i do have reasonably tech-savvy friends who use it extensively and complain about having to shut it down on a regular basis to recover memory.

Re:Make the best browser

[Z00L00K]

And lose the plug-in AdBlock Plus? - No thank you!

Re:Make the best browser

[makomk]

That's what Microsoft's FUD would like to claim, but WebGL is not even close to as bad as ActiveX. You may recall that ActiveX was designed to allow websites to execute fully-privileged, unsandboxed native code. WebGL just allows websites to draw graphics using your GPU. Sure, in theory it's possible that a bug could exist in your graphics driver that WebGL could exploit... but the thing is that this already happens without WebGL - web browsers already allow websites to indirectly submit drawing commands to graphics drivers and this has been exploited in the past, as have bugs in core OS graphics functionality. About the only "unfixable" issue with WebGL is that it exposes users to minor denial-of-service issues, and even that can be reduced to a trivial annoyance.

Oh, and Microsoft have got their own proprietary equivalent of WebGL in Silverlight which has similar risks, except that Silverlight is also getting APIs that are approaching ActiveX levels of danger.

Asa does not speak for all of us

[jlebar]

(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.

Re:Asa does not speak for all of us

[lymond01]

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.

Re:Asa does not speak for all of us

[Anrego]

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.

Re:Asa does not speak for all of us

[Tridus]

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.)

Re:Asa does not speak for all of us

[lymond01]

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.

LTS

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not do a LTS-version each 2 year? It works for Ubuntu.

False

[eldavojohn]

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.

We don't want your business.

[the_raptor]

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.

Re:We don't want your business.

[the_raptor]

The complaint is about Firefox putting a major release as EOL a few months after its release. EOL means no more security patches, which means everyone has to upgrade from that release or get owned by the next JavaScript exploit that comes along. It has nothing to do with adding "Enterprise features".

It is a pain for me, not a Fortune 500 company, because I have to make sure all my friends and family have updated Firefox with updated addons. If I have to re-check that every 3-4 months Firefox will lose a dozen plus customers just off annoying me.

In addition it makes it harder for me to recommend Open Source solutions because PHB's will hear about how Firefox EOL'd after a few months. Mozilla are basically reinforcing "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM/Microsoft".

Education too

[i.r.id10t]

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.

Assumes "regular users" don't have jobs

[SirGarlon]

This mentality of separating "regular" users from "business users" makes a couple of flawed assumptions:

1. 1) The populations are distinct. This is demonstrably false, as I belong to both groups. Probably 95-99% of "enterprise" users are "regular" users in their free time.
2. 2) For those who do belong to both populations, it assumes a willingness to use separate browsers at work and outside of work. I question whether a non-technical user is going to accept the cognitive load of choosing and configuring (and installing plug-ins for and updating) a browser different from the one he or she is required to use at the office.

It's always disturbing to hear a software company say, "here's a population of users, and they don't matter to us."

Misguided

[siride]

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!).

This killed our attempt to get Firefox at work

[Tridus]

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.

Re:Got my business anyway...?

[the_raptor]

"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.

He's right. Not for my business.

[DogDude]

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.

Damned if you Do, Damned if you don't

[pavon]

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.

Re:Bimonthly release cycle == overhead?

[Darinbob]

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.

Re:This does not address the most obvious issue.

[ISurfTooMuch]

I wish I had mod points to mod you up!

And let me expand on that from a user perspective. I manage 17 machines in my department, and I just upgraded to FF4. Well, naturally, it broke several extensions, which have finally all been updated by the developers to work. Now, I'm getting those damn popup messages wanting me to upgrade to 5.0. But guess what? Doing so breaks all the extensions I'm using, and I can't keep the damn popup from appearing day after day after day.

I've used Firefox from back when it was in early beta, and I've stuck with it and recommended it to many, many people, but this is almost too much. So let me lay it out for the developers, and pay close attention as I yell this at the top of my lungs: ISSUING RAPID-FIRE UPDATES THAT BREAK FEATURES THAT PREVIOUSLY WORKED IS GOING TO PISS OFF HOME USERS, BUSINESS USERS, AND DEVELOPERS! I'VE GOT A GAZILLION THINGS ON MY PLATE AS IT IS, SO DON'T MAKE MORE WORK FOR ME BY BUGGING ME TO UPGRADE TO A NEW VERSION EVERY OTHER WEEK AND THEN MAKING ME HAVE TO WAIT FOR EXTENSIONS TO CATCH UP. SO GET YOUR HEADS OUT OF YOUR ASSES AND STICK TO A SENSIBLE RELEASE CYCLE!!!

And you can be damn sure that this will come up at one of our bi-weekly technology committee meetings, so if Mozilla wants to lose a few thousand desktops, keep this shit up.