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

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:Make the best browser

[Stormwatch]

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

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.

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.

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: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".