Mozilla Announces Enterprise User Working Group 156
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."
LOL (Score:3, Insightful)
Enterprise has never been (and I'll argue, shouldn't be) a focus of ours [slashdot.org]
In other words (Score:5, Insightful)
In true Mozilla fashion, I'm sure that will mean "We'll pretend to listen while we continue to do whatever we want"
Are you on the same planet? (Score:2, Insightful)
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!
Re:LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
Enterprise has never been (and I'll argue, shouldn't be) a focus of ours [slashdot.org]
I wonder if that guy is still the community coordinator for marketing...
Hope 1 Expectations 0 (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
The real plan? (Score:4, Insightful)
o stop supporting enterprise deployments (by rapid release, no bug fixes only)
o start an enterprise working group
o profit! (charge for support)
Re:In other words (Score:5, Insightful)
How long have people been begging for an MSI based installer, and some Group Policy support that is "official".. sure there are scripts that can hack GPO support in, and 3rd party builds of the MSI installer.. but people have been asking since Firefox 2...
Re:In other words (Score:3, Insightful)
Yup. Why should an open source project be constrained to the demands of corporations that aren't involved or contributing to their effort? After all, the Linux kernel doesn't wait for anyone, but that doesn't seem to be a huge problem for corporations (well, except those wanting to deliver closed source drivers.)
Now if they want to take those concerns into consideration (like it seems they're doing) then more power to them.
You don't need anything particularly fancy. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:In other words (Score:2, Insightful)
For the same reasons they should listen to users who are neither involved or contributing to their effort. The whole point is to have a good product used by as many people as possible. Corporate users are still users. If you can add features that they want and get a larger distribution for your product, why would you ignore them?
Firefox has had little corporate use because they are missing vital components that most corporations need (an easy way to roll out the program, updates, and a way to centrally configure and control it). IE is still the primary corporate browser because it has these features. Why would they not want to make a stab at a huge section of the market that so far no browser, other than IE, has cracked?
Re:In other words (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, It sounds like their are doing a lot of crazy work where all they need to do is back track and go with a normal version numbers to fix the problem.
Mozilla JUST ADMIT YOU WERE WRONG! and go back to what was working before. Being wrong isn't a sin that is how we all learn, if you are going to bull headed and just make a lot of extra work just to cover your mistake, so you can save face, is plain stupid.
Hey, that's great! (Score:2, Insightful)