Mozilla Launches Paid Premium Support for Enterprise Customers

Mozilla has quietly launched a new product for enterprise customers: Ability to buy paid premium support for Firefox. From a report: The premium enterprise support for Firefox costs $10 per supported installation and offers customers the ability to submit bugs privately, get critical security bug fixes, get access to a private customer portal, get access to the enterprise critical issues distribution list, and have the ability to contribute to Firefox and its roadmap. According to Mozilla, it will support Firefox installations as long as they are running on machines that meet the system requirements. Windows, Mac, and Linux based operating systems are listed in the systems requirements so all platforms should be covered by the premium support.

Re:

[jellomizer]

Assuming they get enough customers.

For a large organization 10,000 employees paying 100,000 a month I would think they would want to get bit more then what they are offering. $10 per month for 5 employees to get some extra service if needed is fine, but they are also not going to have too much say on what they want to see. So they will probably save that money and take what they can get for free. Once a company gets to a size where they are influential, the amount they are paying may be too much for the v

Here is how enterprises will play it

[guacamole]

A company with thousands of machines running Firefox will buy support for about a dozen of PCs that are used by the sysadmins. The end users will submit the requests for support to the IT staff, and then the IT staff submits a bug report to mozilla.

It's certainly an indicator ...

[CaptainDork]

... that Edge is not a serious competitor. Edge has tentacles all over Windows and Microsoft's not going to be able to get subscription services for Edge enterprise support.

Re:

[Ashthon]

I'm not following your logic. Edge's market share is rising [netmarketshare.com], increasing from 3.71% 24 months ago to 6.34% now. Meanwhile Firefox has fallen from 13.26% 24 months ago to 8.43% now. Edge has been picking up momentum in recent months and its market share has risen over 2 points in the last eight months, while Firefox is in continuous decline.

I therefore don't see how Firefox launching an enterprise service is a commentary on Edge. If anything, this looks like Mozilla are having to search for new revenue st

Re:

[koavf]

But Internet Explorer's has gone down from 11.80% to 7.50%. My guess is that of that 4.3%, a very large majority went to Edge, resulting in a net loss of at least 2.63% for both of Microsoft's browsers. While losing ground is never the goal, it's a lot bigger blow to Microsoft than it is to Mozilla. Agreed that this is not necessarily a commentary on Edge, tho--just providing color to your statistics in the first paragraph. Don't know about the arrogance part.

Re:

[CaptainDork]

Talking about splitting hairs ...

Compared to Chrome, Edge is noise.

I’d pay for firefox if

[xack]

They offered a version without pocket, telemetry, with xul support and the classic pre quantum interface, but i get for free with Waterfox.

Re:

[jellomizer]

I want a stripped down version of the software without all these new features, except for the new features I want, with a modern updated user interface that looks identical to the old version. It needs to be secure but hackable.
I want this so I can use it on my Thin and light laptop with 25 pin parallel and serial ports, USB A, B, and C slots Full Ethernet, Modems, which I can plug in ISA cards on the side. With quad i9 processors and 4k screen that has a 4x3 aspect ratio.

Re:

[markdavis]

>"They offered a version without pocket, telemetry, with xul support and the classic pre quantum interface, but i get for free with Waterfox."

No you don't. Because Waterfox is NOT QUANTUM. So it will be much slower, and lag way behind on security and on standards and feature improvements.

And in Firefox Quantum, you can already turn off pocket and telemetry. And using userChrome.css you can already recover most (but not all) of the pre-quantum user interface. So that leaves just XUL support. And that

Re:

[bjdevil66]

Going back and restarting support of the old Firefox would be like NASA going back and saying they'd like to focus their budget on restarting the space shuttle program and its old shuttles because it was "better" in certain cases.

Like Firefox with XUL, the space shuttle was better in some ways (it was more truly modular and could get more into space) - but it ultimately had huge flaws:

* It was slow and heavy.
* It had too many moving parts - making it increasingly expensive to maintain/fix.
* It would ultim

What is the cost?

[darkwing_bmf]

Is this $10 a one time fee, per month, or per year?

Shouldn't we all get those things?

[Bite The Pillow]

It's open source, right? Are those things not available? Other than a private customer portal, which makes no sense, these things are part of the open source idea.

Re:

[jfdavis668]

If a company finds a bug in Firefox which impacts the security of their systems, they can report it privately and have it fixed before it becomes widely known. Yes, then it will be released to the general public.

Breaking News from 1995

[Etcetera]

https://www.nytimes.com/1995/06/05/business/netscape-to-sell-internet-browsers.html [nytimes.com]

The Netscape Communications Corporation has beefed up its Internet browser and plans to sell the new version through retail stores for about $40, rather than let people have it free.

A browser is software that lets computer users get around the World Wide Web portion of the Internet without using arcane computer code.

The latest version of Netscape's browser, called Netscape Navigator Personal Edition, which will be available next week, features one-button access to four Internet gateways: the MCI Communications Corporation, Netcom On-line Communications Services, Portal or UUNet Technologies Inc.

Selling the product retail instead of making it available on the Internet, the global computer network, will definitely expand the browser market, analysts said.

Comment

[WallyL]

Wow, TFA links to the actual system requirements [mozilla.org], and those are actually reasonable, with the possible exception of the 2GB minimum RAM. I mean, we all know it takes that much to actually get a Firefox window operable, but it shouldn't. But the lib versions are reasonable.

I use my distro's Firefox package and my own custom-rolled packages for all the useful mozilla-derived browsers, so I wonder if I would be covered.

Re:

[markdavis]

>"Wow, TFA links to the actual system requirements [mozilla.org], and those are actually reasonable, with the possible exception of the 2GB minimum RAM. I mean, we all know it takes that much to actually get a Firefox window operable, but it shouldn't."

And yet all other [modern/multiplatform] browsers (which pretty much means Chrom*) all require that OR MORE RAM. So yes, it is crazy, but it is the modern web.... not much we can do about it. Can't pin that on being something unusual about Firefox, or re