Firefox Is For "Regular" Users, Not Businesses 555
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.'"
Make the best browser (Score:5, Insightful)
If you make the best browser available, you'll serve the needs of both businesses and individuals.
Re:Make the best browser (Score:2, Insightful)
If that involves a bimonthly release cycle creating many many hours of overhead for system departments, I beg to argue that statement.
Re:Make the best browser (Score:5, Insightful)
Businesses need ActiveX for legacy junk. But a good browser would never run something as insecure as ActiveX.
LTS (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not do a LTS-version each 2 year? It works for Ubuntu.
Re:Asa does not speak for all of us (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Make the best browser (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
We don't want your business. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Assumes "regular users" don't have jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
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."
Doesn't matter any more (Score:3, Insightful)
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...
Re:Asa does not speak for all of us (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Make the best browser (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Make the best browser (Score:5, Insightful)
That's kind of what internal change control is for.
Re:Asa does not speak for all of us (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Got my business anyway...? (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
Re:Asa does not speak for all of us (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:We don't want your business. (Score:5, Insightful)
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".
Re:Kicking up a storm in a teacup (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Make the best browser (Score:5, Insightful)
And lose the plug-in AdBlock Plus? [adblockplus.org] - No thank you!
Damned if you Do, Damned if you don't (Score:5, Insightful)
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:LTS (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Make the best browser (Score:4, Insightful)
Except ... Mozilla has its own flavor of ActiveX called XPCOM ... works ... the ... exact ... same ... way ...
Of course, instead of actually understanding what was wrong with the IE SPECIFIC implementation of ActiveX, idiots like yourself will continue to ramble on about shit you clearly don't have the slightest understanding of.
ActiveX is nothing but a plugin system, in Windows it is a globally defined plugin system that apps can use without reinventing the wheel, and it allows plugins the ability to be shared among apps, not specific to a single app. IE installing and running plugins without asking, either due to stupid default configurations in OLD versions of IE, exploits, or stupid users clicking YES RUN THIS DANGEROUS PROGRAM ANYWAY were the reason 'activex exploits' were so rampant. Couple that with idiots building plugins for local apps and making them as safe for use in the web browser and safe to be accessed from javascript running in the browser for plugins that weren't safe and you have the mess that is IE.
It was never an ActiveX problem. It was the result of trying to make it easier to have web plugins and missing some very key security details and implementation ... which Mozilla learned from and was able to come out of the gate with a basically safe variation of the same thing. XPCOM plugins work exactly like ActiveX except they are specific to gecko browsers (or projects that use the XPCOM libraries really, as Mozilla isn't the only ones to use it).
And for reference, I've written ActiveX controls for IE and MS Office as well as extensions for both Firefox and Thunderbird which required compiled XPCOM objects in addition to Javascript. I've forgotten more about COM than most of slashdot knows about it since I started writing this reply.
PLEASE GET A CLUE AND STOP SPREADING THIS IGNORANCE ON A TECH SITE. Do it on some random blog where no one assumes you have a clue, not here where you'll just have 150 other morons who think Linus is god and Bill is teh debil following you up telling you how great and right you are just because its anti-MS and their as stupid and ignorant as you are.
Only on slashdot could a 100% factually incorrect in every way posting be rated at the highest rating. You, and everyone who follows your line of thought and everyone who modded you up are completely ignorant of what you are talking about.
Re:Bimonthly release cycle == overhead? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
This does not address the most obvious issue. (Score:4, Insightful)
"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.
I should use different browsers at home and work!? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.