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The Enterprise Is Wrong, Not Mozilla
There's been a lot of noise about Mozilla's new rapid release leading to
conflict with Enterprise users.
Kethinov found an Ars article that points out that "Now that Mozilla has released Firefox 5, version 4, just three months old, is no longer supported. Enterprise customers aren't very pleased with this decision, and are claiming it makes their testing burden impossible. We're not convinced: we think Mozilla's decision is the right one for the Web itself.'"
If the version number were 4.0.2 instead of 5.0 Enterprises wouldn't be getting their panties in a bunch over this.
No, they aren't. EOLing something after 4 months and breaking tons of user plugins for no reason is not good for users or the Web itself. It's needlessly churn to rapidly inflate version numbers for no gain for anyone.
We are witnessing "Mozillacide"
Damn "ordinary users", they don't need plugins that work.
Damn the enterprise, they are not the target market.
The version number is now Mozilla's priority.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
It's a browser, Firefox people. It doesn't need many new features. One new release every year or two is enough.
If so many new releases are needed for bug fixes, have longer betas. If the problem is security, beef up the sandbox design so that less of the code is security critical.
This is the reason IE continues to stay strong in enterprise.
Yes, corporate users are small-minded, and you're incurring in the same error.
Fix, stabilize, make a 'corporate version'. You don't need many resources for that.
Basically, sell a way for them to use Mozilla.
You're making IT people that root for you look bad. And making the dolts that only know IE look good.
how long until
Firefox's usage share has been slowly declining since quite some time. They introduced the rather universally hated moron-bar, and paid no attention to the feedback. Then they introduced the unwelcome changes in the UI with Firefox 4, and paid no attention to the feedback. Now they decided to piss off the plugin authors and enterprise customers. In the end, they may become a niche browser, and even Google could decide that their money is better spent elsewhere, than on a bunch of idiots.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
If a web-browser change causes a "mission-critical web app" to break, one of the words in "mission-critical web app" is a lie.
How about they use better development practices such as not breaking plugins for people by bumping a version number for no reason?
Or how about plugin authors using the Beta or, better yet, the Aurora release to get their shit updated for the final release? God forbid the extension/plugin authors actually do anything to alleviate a problem with a simple solution. No, they'd rather bitch about having to update it instead.
Using it. Right now I'm running pretty light- I only have 6 tabs open, but when I'm doing serious debugging it can easily be 20+. Some of them have video in them, others have google docs, etc. Right now it's "only" using 900MB, but it's not at all uncommon for FF to take up 2+ GB.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
I worked for a large corporation on a team that deployed software to ~50,000 desktops and ~10,000 servers. Whenever we wanted to deploy a new software package (Via Microsoft SCCM or Group Policies) it was a huge undertaking, even for the simpler applications. At minimum, it takes at least a month to develop a plan for and deploy an application, and that was just on our end. If it was something that involved websites, and/or browser plugins (Adobe Reader, Adobe Flash, etc) then it would take even longer because testing would have to be done on every internal web based application. That alone took several months and a dedicated project team. Once the software change was ready for deployment, it took a week to develop the scripting and deployment policies. After that, it was deployed to a pilot group for two weeks, and then a test group for a week. After that, it could be put into production. However, if there was the slightest hitch along the way, it could set us back several weeks. Enterprises move VERY slowly on their software deployments. If Mozilla is interested at all in keeping Firefox in the enterprise world, they're going to have to slow down, or at least release an "Enterprise" version so that deployment teams can keep up. Six week release cycles are just going to cause folks like me, who manage software deployments, to stop deploying it at all.
This is not good for the Enterprise. It's not good for Firefox or Mozilla, which is already losing marketshare and isn't going to benefit from pissing off very large users. It's not even good for "the web" despite their nebulous and poorly supported claim that it is.
In reality this is some blowhards like Asa making poor decisions and then trying to defend them when people point out that it's a poor decision. Normal users don't particularly benefit from more big downloads that break things more often and will sometimes get a new gee-whiz HTML 5 feature out the door a bit sooner (which then won't be adopted by any websites until a couple of versions of FF later because of the lag time required to, you know, develop stuff). Enterprise users clearly suffer because keeping up with this requires throwing testing out the window and will effectively just reinforce the idea that you should stick with IE (where Microsoft actually wants your business and doesn't give you a middle finger).
If driving people away from Firefox is "good for the web", then I guess this is good for the web. But here in reality it's good for IE and Chrome.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I experience the memory footprint problem also. It may be the sites I'm using are very heavyweight and remain in the cache, but it would be great to see some kind of graph that shows what memory is being used by which tabs, or is unreasonably persisting in the cache.
And who's call was it to change version numbers? And who was the asshole who told Enterprise users (paraphrasing) "We don't give a shit about you."
Mozilla went out of its way to pick a fight. And that one statement right there is all it takes. It's not what Mozilla changed. It's the fact that they dumped a codebase on its ass after 3 months. That's not credibility building. That's saying "We have no clue how to plan or beta test our products properly."
Putting those two things together is, in no way, "the right [decision] for the Web itself." It's fanboy smoke blowing up CIO asses. If it's so right, why is it that Opera, Safari, and Chrome are not on the hot seat? Chrome undergoes changes at a super-rapid pace automatically, but I hear nobody really screaming about it. Two reasons, really. First, it just works, which can be said of FF, but it is not an aura they present especially when they have to drop support after only 3 months of a major release. Second, Google has never said, "F#$% you, CIOs!" Google has made it clear that they want to be the one stop shop for cloud for business.
The question is, what the hell does Mozilla want? I don't see a vision. They're worse than UI devs who argue over who's system is better, forgetting what their goals actually are.
At Mozilla, all I see is mismanagement. They can't control their code. They can't control their staff. And they are continually lagging behind all competition, which is especially sad given their rock star performance not too long ago, with social buzz propelling a large install base.
They don't do anything news worthy anymore, except piss people off. MS learned how to change that, and most CIOs are excited about IE8/9 as a real evolution. Chrome continues to innovate and add support. Opera is continually pushing the mobile envelope.
Not only were they assholes, but the question quickly flies back into Mozilla's face, "What have you done for me lately?" That mobile app? It's a joke. Slow, bulky, and not appealing. It is not even comparable to other mobile browsers like Opera or Dolphin.
Nobody really cares about Mozilla anymore. And those that do are finding it harder to justify using it. This isn't about what's "right for the web", this is about a tech that's outlived its prime, by a team that's outlived its usefulness.
I8-D
Either maintain it, or take it down
Or develop for Chrome, which doesn't have a completely fucking retarded extension system. My code hasn't needed updating in a year and five major version numbers, it just works. And will likely do so a year from now, because it's based on web standards and not brain damage like XPCOM.
I could press a button right now and have FF5 on 40k desktops by midnight. I'd lose my job, but I could do it.
Testing isn't hard, it just takes a lot of time and money. We have to CERTIFY exactly which of the several hundred internal and external webapps FireFox works with, and which it doesn't, and then create copious documentation in several languages for help desk and field personnel. We have to plan and manage GPO settings for dozens of different groups. If code changes have to be made on servers to support the new browser, that has to be coordinated across the enterprise.
There's more to it than browsing to a few websites and then letting the code fly.
- Pithy comment goes here.
As a plugin author I'll tell you why.
I have better shit to do than keep up with testing against each new flavor of the day from Mozilla. I like to spend my time working on MY products and MY software, not retesting against someone elses interface constantly because they can't manage to write software in a way that it can maintain compatibility.
As of about 30 seconds ago, the decision was made by our company internally to drop support for Firefox until they pull their head out of their ass.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager