Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla Announces Enterprise User Working Group
Lennie sends this quote from an announcement at the Mozilla blog:
"Recently there has been a lot of discussion about enterprises and rapid releases. Online life is evolving faster than ever and it's imperative that Mozilla deliver improvements to the Web and to Firefox more quickly to reflect this. This has created challenges for IT departments that have to deliver lots of mission-critical applications through Firefox. Mozilla is fundamentally about people and we care about our users wherever they are. To this end, we are re-establishing a Mozilla Enterprise User Working Group as a place for enterprise developers, IT staff and Firefox developers to discuss the challenges, ideas and best practices for deploying Firefox in the enterprise."
Enterprise has never been (and I'll argue, shouldn't be) a focus of ours
is Asa Dotzler part of this workgroup?
In true Mozilla fashion, I'm sure that will mean "We'll pretend to listen while we continue to do whatever we want"
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Online life is evolving faster than ever
No, it's not evolving faster than ever. Everything works with IE7. All innovations beyond IE7 are just sugarcoating, most of them invisible on the deployed web. The slow players still decide which features are widely available. The other players are falling over their own feet trying to outrun each other and the users are getting annoyed by an ever changing environment that doesn't let them do their work, for no benefit at all. The browser is a tool, you tools!
No, one of the devs on one of the teams basically said "fuck enterprise", while several folks from the foundation showed up in the slashdot thread to say "He doesn't speak for all of us."
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
This was the story in 2007 when they first tried this: New Mozilla working group aims to simplify enterprise Firefox deployment
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
I'll follow and contribute as much as I can, hoping that something changes, but having the cold expectation that nothing will. On the windows side, FF essentially needs three things:
1. MSI for deployment.
2. GPO management.
3. Mozilla branding and support for the above, so I can automatically update the browser.
That's the peanut butter and jelly for enterprise. I can get the first two from other people, why not you guys? Why it has taken this long to get to this point is beyond me. Seriously, the 'battles' between chrome, opera, and firefox are like watching soccer moms fight to the death over the last tickle me elmo at a Walmart when there's a toy store next door with aisles full of the same toy, cheaper. Seriously, do you guys want to keep scratching with each other over grandma's machine, or do you guys want people like me to push your product to 50 machines at once, and let 50 people *see and use* your browser, learn for themselves that it's better, and take it home with them?
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Does this finally mean that there will eventually be complete Active Directory integration or something similar of a sort? Having a centralized way to manage Firefox clients would be brilliant.
o stop supporting enterprise deployments (by rapid release, no bug fixes only)
o start an enterprise working group
o profit! (charge for support)
1) Throw the MCSEs a bone: give them their MSIs and GPOs. Alternatively, bless FrontMotion's MSI and GPO projects as the "official" ways to get these things for businesses that need them.
2) From time to time (but no more frequently than once every two years), tag a release as Long-Term Support. This is exactly what it says on the tin: this release gets official support from Mozilla, including security fixes, until the next Long-Term Support release.
3) Support for a non-LTS release is not dropped until there have been at least two major releases since then. Under the current situation, that means FF5 support would not be dropped until the release of FF7, which in turn would not be dropped until the release of FF9.
I realize that long-term or even mid-term support is not sexy. Techies always want to live on the bleeding edge. But not every person or business is willing, or even able, to do that. They also need to be taken care of.
it is not surprising that many would be willing to slow progress in the name of stability.
Indeed. What many in the web development sub-industry don't seem to grasp is that progress that breaks existing stuff isn't progress, it's just random unmotivated thrashing around, aka, destruction. Progress means going forward, and that means adding features - not breaking existing ones.
In the software industry, we've somehow internalised a false idea, which is that all new development necessarily means changing the way we used to do things. But that's not actually true. If we did things right in the first place, and used extensible protocols, we shouldn't need to break anything; just add new stuff.
The unexamined implication of the "old is bad, all progress requires destruction" meme is that everything you are currently doing, you are doing wrong - because today's "new hotness" will always be tomorrow's "old and broken".
But it should be possible, at least in theory, for us to do things right the first time - or at least to know when we're doing them better than worse - and then stop changing it once we've got it right.
Conversely, if whenever we invent a technology, we have no way of telling if we're doing it right rather than wrong -- then sheesh, we shouldn't even be in the technology business, because we obviously don't know what we're doing, and we're going to just hurt ourselves.
The Latin alphabet, for instance, is around 2000 years old, and we're still using it, give and take a few tweaks. Is it bad because it's old? No. So why should a technology get outdated just because it's five or ten years old?
tl;dr: Quit breaking stuff, just get it done right, then stick with it. It's not broken because it's old, it's proven and trustworthy.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC