Firefox Struggling to Compete as Corporate Browser 364
ericatcw brings us an article describing some of the obstacles Firefox is facing while competing with Internet Explorer for business use. Quoting Computerworld:
"Now nearly three-and-a-half years old and nearing the release of Version 3, Firefox no longer can be accused of being callow. And while many IE-only apps remain, plenty of others have been overhauled to support Firefox as well. However, other obstacles to broader adoption have emerged. Mozilla thus far has neglected to develop tools to help IT departments deploy and manage Firefox, and it doesn't offer paid technical support services to risk-averse corporate users. Janco Associates Inc. in Park City, Utah, currently gives Firefox a 16% usage share among visitors to 17 business-to-business Web sites that it monitors. Janco puts IE's share at 67% while giving 9% to Netscape and 3% to Google Desktop."
dude... (Score:4, Funny)
But more importantly, who cares? It's not like Firefox's stockholders are going to revolt.
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Loosen your smarty pants (Score:3, Insightful)
Agreed. I think the GP post also shows narrowmindedness in calling a non-tech savvy CEO an "idiot."
My bosses don't understand a lot of what I do, but they obviously understand business enough to build a successful company. Leadership is not knowing everything, but finding people with the knowledge you need, and fitting them together into the "big picture."
My bosses have a
Re:dude... (Score:5, Interesting)
Who cares? Those of us that hope that Firefox gains enough market share that people will stop being morons and developing websites that only work in IE. Then maybe we'll get back to standards instead of browser specific webpages and extensions.
Re:dude... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Dev: "So, what browser are we going to use?"
Corp: "Well, we run Windows on the desktop, so Internet Explorer is already installed. Plus all our other in-house uses IE"
Dev: "Have you considered Firefox? We can make it standards compliant, then you can use any browser!"
Corp: "You were outbid, the low bidder is only testing against the platform we use, IE."
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That is never going to happen though - nothing pushes corporate developers to work with the standards.
Large numbers of their customers using FF would force them to consider working with the standards. Don't know how much help that would be with in-house apps (though is there a rule that says it's automatically more expensive and time consuming to design an in-house site for more then just IE?) but it'd be a huge boon to those of us that can't even use our fucking online banking sites in FF.
Re:dude... (Score:5, Interesting)
I know of at least one company that didn't want to develop/test their internal apps for more than 1 browser, but they have a number of mac and solaris based workstations in the company... Their solution was to have firefox installed on every machine and make people use that. Several of their internal apps don't work with ie at all.
Authentication - the major obstacle (Score:3, Informative)
In addition to the ActiveX nonsense, the major hindrance to Firefox acceptance is the lack of support for certain Windows-only authentication method(s). Somehow IE is able to pass the Windows-user's credentials securely to an intranet server, while firefox can't...
My understanding is, the method(s) aren't entirely secret, and it may even be possible to patch/rebuild your own firefox binary to support the method. But of the quoted 17% of the business users, ho
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Re:Authentication (Score:5, Informative)
Type "about:config" into the address box in Firefox and the list of registry settings will appear.
Then type "ntlm" into the filter box, and the list of settings will shrink to three. Choose:
network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted.uris
by right-clicking it, and choose Modify. Add to this string a list of URL's for sites that require NTLM authentication, separated by commas (eg, "http//intranet, http://wwwpost/ [wwwpost]"). URL's "below" the ones spoecified (such as "http://intranet/news") will inherit the authentication).
Since it helps keep users from picking up malware, Firefox has been adopted as the Windows browser of choice at our 2000-employee computer firm.
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Re:Authentication (Score:5, Interesting)
That's great information; but at the same time it's actually a really good example of lack of support contributing to so many corporations /not/ willing to use FF.
After all, it's not really practical for organizations that rely on NTLM for multiple servers to manually configure several hundred or thousand firefox installations to accept those specific servers -- never mind if the list of servers changes. Too, it's even more unlikely that they'll be able to trust the users to properly maintain and configure those settings themselves.
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Heck, I urge my users to use it and I have a coming headache where upper level management wants me to dictate our intranet site as the startup homepage. I can do it in five minutes on IE with a GPO. Firefox . . . well even if I go around and change it for everyone, how hard is it for them to change it to whatever they want?
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After all, it's not really practical for organizations that rely on NTLM for multiple servers to manually configure several hundred or thousand firefox installations to accept those specific servers -- never mind if the list of servers changes. Too, it's even more unlikely that they'll be able to trust the users to properly maintain and configure those settings themselves.
If the administrator is too incompetent to add the line user_pref("network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris", "someserver.com"); to a
GUI? (Score:3, Funny)
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Most of the so called evidence that this article points to are articles on computerworld.com too...
I'm seeing about 27% Firefox/Mozilla on my sites (about 60k uniques / day) and there has not been a month in the last year that that number was lower or equal to the month before it. IE has gone down to about 66%, if the current rate of FF/Mozilla/Iceape/name your flavour continues then within 2
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And all of your evidence is based on your log file. Hardly a scientific poll, so what's your point?
Why is it sad? (Score:3, Insightful)
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I've been using FF for quite a while now. (Score:2, Insightful)
Not very well researched article (Score:3, Interesting)
Doesn't Firefox do that by itself since 2.0 ?
Granted using an internal repository might be more rational in a large organisation (although that's presumably hackable) but from what I've seen Firefox just updates itself (In Windows and Mac OS at least IIRC).
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Which would be disabled day one in any pre rollout testing in a coporate environment. The last thing you want is apps updating themselves all over the shop without any testing of the changes against your configs and toolsets.
Re:Not very well researched article (Score:4, Informative)
Automatic updates in Firefox can be turned off, but you still somehow need to deploy them in an automatic fashion. I'm guessing, though, that a tool could be developed fairly easily that puts the updates in the correct directory so that FF sees them the next time it starts and then installs them automatically.
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Too bad, a common problem lies in a certain OS being anything but reasonable, but that's not a problem with FireFox i
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Then once you've tested the new version, you put it on your intranet server, and everybody updates.
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So you're left having to use third party packaged MSI packages or other hacks to run the installer.
I understand this is slated for improvement in FF3 though, so with luck we'll see the user base increase further still when that happens.
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It's beneficial to be able to push out updates at a time where it's a little more quiet (lunchtime, night time) than having the network congested with update traffic and users systems slowing down during working hours.
I think better, more official active directory integration would help no end. Pushing out updates is slightly more diffi
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I agree with the other replies to this, but I'll also point out that FF's auto updates are entirely dependa
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Those systems won't need Firefox. If they do need to access an internal web application, this app will work with IE. It may work with Fx, too, but currently no medium to large web apps are built without IE compatibility in mind.
Anyways, since the amount of sites has been reduced to a trusted circle, it'd actually be a rather bad idea to use Firefox. IE does launch faster, IE will render most pages f
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IE (Score:4, Informative)
firefox in corporate environments faces this issues (in no particular order):
*no activeX
*not backed by a huge company so perceived lack of support
*legacy web applications produced in ASP and older ASP.net that break horribly in firefox (and even latest IE7! yes ive seen it happen)
*it depertments are slow to change and adapt and are very conservative
*users complain of the fonts and sites looking/feeling different than what they are used to
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The departmental website that I manage is (perhaps not that great) fully
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tho there are cases where corporate developers only test the site in IE because they are on very tight schedules and budgets, and just want to get the job done, as such its not their fault that the middle management are eggheads
Phasing out of XP might actually help FF (Score:5, Insightful)
*no activeX
Many of my employer's web-based products followed a late-1990s design philosophy--they are absolutely infested with ActiveX garbage--mostly because they were quickly "webified" versions of early products that were not web-based but employed ActiveX components extensively. In the early days, MSFT did a good job of enticing software developers into IE lock-in by allowing Activex to be embedded into web pages, because if you were big into ActiveX/(D)COM/OLE in your client-server apps you could throw together some pseudo-HTML ActiveX wrapper around that crap and marketing could sell it as "web-enabled" right around the time the
However, IT departments weren't enamoured with ActiveX to the same degree as (lazy|pressured) developers, and whatever fondness they might have had wore off quickly. Even 3 or 4 years ago IT departments were cringing at the mess of ActiveX in those products. There's been heavy pressure to remove it and in the latest releases it's now completely gone. Internally, the web interfaces to our business systems are completely free of ActiveX--though they rely far too much on Java applets. In any case at present (and moving forward) not supporting ActiveX is a GOOD thing in IT department's eyes, because it actually is less work for IT (they don't have to worry about restricting ActiveX in FF the way they have to on IE).
*not backed by a huge company so perceived lack of support
This is really a non-issue for all but the most clueless PHBs. IE6 was a dead product--MSFT figured discrete web browsers were obsolete and that they could hijack the WWW and make it the vehicle to deploy distributed apps based on their own XML formats. There was no innovation and the most minimal support for IE6. Honestly, I've not heard once about a company that has had to make an urgent supoprt call about their web browser, not have I heard once about MSFT stepping up and making a critical fix to IE due to a request from a specific customer. IT people KNOW that there is probably more "community support" for Mozilla browsers than there is corporate support from MSFT for IE, and FF code is under more close scrutiny than IE by far.
*legacy web applications produced in ASP and older ASP.net that break horribly in firefox (and even latest IE7! yes ive seen it happen)
Not only do many ASP(X) apps break in IE7, they actually break WORSE in IE7 than they do in FF...quite embarrassing for MSFT actually. However that is the key point to note: There isn't a dependency on IE in general--it is on IE6 SPECIFICALLY, and the days are numbered for IE6, being Vista is equipped only with IE7. MSFT is sure to extend the 7-year promised lifespan of XP, but it won't do so indefinitely. I figure this year MSFT will draw a line in the sand and insist new computers NOT be available with XP pre-installed (probably this fall--end users will have to perform the downgrade--err, "upgrade to a more familiar experience", themselves).
As I said, with FF having a significant minority presence in the market and efforts required to make apps work in IE7 anyways, this provides a promising opportunity to make apps STANDARDS-compatible.
*it depertments are slow to change and adapt and are very conservative
Those sort of outfits are basically the ones that abdicate their strategic planning to their vendors--they're the same ones managed by the clue
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It's doesn't fit 'the model' (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Is it secure? TICK
2. Does it work in our environment? TICK
3. Do they have guaranteed response times on support calls? CROSS
OK, forget that one. Next?
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Is that so bad? (Score:2)
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idiot
Deployment Tools? (Score:2)
Re:Deployment Tools? (Score:5, Informative)
Likewise, Toyota's "Dealer Daily" site (which is pretty much the only web-based toolset provided by Toyota and is used pretty much constantly by salespeople) doesn't work worth a damn under anything but IE.
I'd love to implement Firefox across the dealerships. I even found some GPOs to control it and force it to use the in-house filtering proxy. But I simply can't set it as the default browser when half the sites that the salespeople use are IE-only.
I suspect I'm not alone in this problem.
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I suspect they haven't changed since then, and in a company as big slow and dumb as UPS I suspect it will take them a VERY long time to consider any alternatives.
Mo money (Score:5, Insightful)
Failing that, I think the ideas pointed out in the article are legitimate reasons that IE, albeit an inferior product in most reguards (or maybe all reguards), is dominating the corporate market. I think just the fact that it is a free product hurts them on some level. From my experience in the public sector, the brass always gets a little nervous when you start using the F-word of economics. They would rather dish out a couple grand to have a support and maintenance contract, if not only for the accountability aspect. I can't say that I've ever used FirefoxADM, but as a third party product, it looks like it suffers from the same lack of a guarantee for support and maintenance that the browser does.
I think the application compatibility is becoming less of a problem. A lot of GUI developers have already been throwing in browser checks for years because of Netscape, so I don't see Firefox as being that big of an issue. I haven't used any webpage IDEs in a while, but I'm willing to bet they already have that integrated as well. I can't recall in the past couple years that I've had a problem loading a page in Firefox.
Needless to say, I think Mozilla has their work cut out for them. Even if they do end up offering a superior enterprise class product, I think it's gonna be hard to get a lot of companies that have been partnered with M$ for years to move away from IE.
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Yup. For the longest time, Firefox had a bug where it put its cache in the "Application Data" directory instead of the "Local Settings" directory. For those who are unfamiliar with Windows, what this means it that Firefox was saying that the web cache was important data that should be migrated to follow the user, in
Excellent reason FF is not deployed (Score:5, Informative)
That, right there, is probably the number one reason more folks in the corporate world don't deploy FF. As far as I know, there is no easy way to push FF out to a desktop regardless if it's Windows, Mac or Linux.
The other reason is this narrow-minded mindset that some folks higher up the food chain than the IT department have about anything that isn't Microsoft. I know of one place where I worked that the CIO all but had an apoplectic seizure when she found FF was being used by some of the IT folks (fortunately, after I left). She then ordered that only IE will be used.
I, and several others where I currently work, use FF. The only thing we have to do is make sure we keep up with the updates as per our Bureau head. In fact, the only time I use IE is when I am on our intranet. For external sites, it's FF all the way. Never had a problem, not even on Microsoft's site when pulling down patches or updates.
If those two issues can be resolved, easy way to deploy and breaking of the mindset, you would see FF's usage climb. Granted, you'd still have to deal with people who don't know what a browser is but that's a whole other issue.
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I know of one place where I worked that the CIO all but had an apoplectic seizure when she found FF was being used by some of the IT folks (fortunately, after I left). She then ordered that only IE will be used.
I'm curious: why? Just because it wasn't "approved"? Or because they had specific reasons why IE was better?
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As far as I know, there is no easy way to push FF out to a desktop regardless if it's Windows, Mac or Linux.
No easy way for Linux? That's a strange thing to say given than (a) it's the default browser on most modern Linux distros and (b) there is an easy way to install anything to a large set of Linux desktops -- just script it. If you're using RHEL, there's an even easier way, just use the enterprise management tool. For Debian/Ubuntu, you should really have an internal package repository (and automatic updates turned on), so just add the FF package to that and mark it as required.
It seems like point (b) a
Google Desktop? (Score:2, Funny)
Mozilla could do some things better (Score:5, Informative)
1. No first part MSIs. The majority of our workstations here are Windows XP. Mozilla doesn't put out an MSI build. There are a few groups that do, such as Frontmotion, but there is always some delay for them to rebuild.
2. Management through group policy, or some other way to lock it down. IE does this very well, Mozilla's default install really doesn't offer anything, Frontmotion's build has some options, but it's not as good.
3. Better support for restricted users and roaming profiles. We turn auto updates off, but our users still manage to try to run it occasionally. If they do Firefox downloads the update, fails to install due to lack of permissions, and then gives them an error until someone goes into the user's profile and deletes it. There can be some wackiness for people moving around between workstations as well.
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As an admin of a medium-sized corporate network of XP boxes, might I ask why that matters? Personally I encourage my users to use the Portable Edition [portableapps.com] of Firefox, as it doesn't require any installer (I can preconfigure it exactly as I want, and just copy the installed dir to any machine), but even if I needed to use the old-fashioned
Management through group policy, or some other way to lo
Mozilla needs to grow up (Score:2)
At my workplace, we did some testing of Firefox and found that it worked fine, but had a number of problems, including:
- Lack of a good, scriptable installation system
- No patches, only automatic downloads which pull down full installations that take place seemingly every other day
- Lack of documentati
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Last time i checked, it downloads patches, they got rid of full install downloads when 2.0 came out
If You Build It, They May (Or May Not) Come... (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, four years later (just about), I'm a solid Firefox user and only use IE through the IE tab function (when on Wintendo) and Wine/VMWare (under Linux). IE 7 doesn't even work as well as firefox, IMO, in most circumstances.
Yet, the corporate adoption problem still remains. I am now a division manager over IT development and deployment for a 1,200-person department in a large County organization. Our official policy is "IE-Only." Do I run Firefox? Yes. Do I have staff which runs firefox? Yes. Are they officially allowed to run Firefox from the CIO? No. The problem is - Firefox doesn't come bundled with Windows XP/Vista and therefore isn't even on the minds of most non-IT folks in my organization. As it is, recent applications I've overseen are more Firefox-compliant, but still run "better" with IE or at least the IE-tab.
You can forget about running Linux on the desktop where I work. The CIO thinks Linux is a four-letter-word. (They freak out whenever I trot out my new HP laptop which had Vista and was upgraded to openSUSE.)
In any case, the article has some good points - no Mozilla-developed.msi file for rapid deployment, no central support function from Mozilla(yes, we do yell at Steve B. once in a while), and no corporate push from Mozilla.
One thing it doesn't mention - the CIO's of the world which I know are generally not that tech-savvy. They've been out of the trenches for so long that they tend to lose sight of the "latest and greatest" while paying attention to those who have the most marketing dollars.
True Story.... (Score:2)
No, I'm not kidding.
SharePoint Irony (Score:2)
Sadly we have a lot of web-based vendor products that don't work with Firefox, but I love breaking it out for these sorts of things. It's also great for validating Internet pages, making sure they'll work with other sta
Paid technical support? (Score:2)
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That's a really tough question to answer... The support cost for most products varies from contract to contract, based on number of licensed products, level of support, duration of support, 24/7 vs 9-5, guarantee of response times, etc.
I don't think Microsoft has it's own support for just IE, but it all gets bundled under a Microsoft Product Support Services [microsoft.com] contract (whi
Internal web apps (Score:2)
So at times
Official (Score:2, Insightful)
There are of course the usual technical neandertals who boast that IE is a much better tool for them to use, and Firefox is too complicated - even though (a) they've never used it and (b) IE7 has ripped most of th
Does it matter (Score:2)
I'm not sure this matters. My personal crystal ball shows the following future: Microsoft will continue to be the choice for large enterprise desktops for at least the next decade. The home user and smaller business market will however become increasingly diverse, with Apple and Linux gaining share and Linux becoming more and more popular in gadgets and devices. Eventually Microsoft's hold will crumble, but not until there is such a gap in innovation between the enterprise market and the home/small business
firefox sucks (Score:2, Funny)
then ff became the enemy, google: they pay their ceo more then they spend on rnd and they are now a google captive, that will NOT be net neutral but will help google sell ads
no more ff for me,until it forks into something reasonable.
maybe this is the way o
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FF is too safe (Score:2, Informative)
My IT Guy heckled me... (Score:2, Insightful)
Back from the dead (Score:2)
IE7 (Score:2)
I don't even have IE7 at home but once I got the message that they were forcing IE7 on me this week I decided to make a change. Now I'm attempting to use Firefox exclusively at work. Before I was using IE6 for the intranet and Firefox for the internet. I'm also discovering that a lot of internal sites do not work with Firefox, just a moment ago I found out our timekee
I have been meaning to fix this (Score:3)
I have been tinkering with this myself but.. busybusy and I haven't made much progress.
ActiveX support (Score:2)
A lot of applications we use require ActiveX. This is probably true in a significant number of big businesses.
Firefox doesn't support ActiveX. The ActiveX plugins available don't fully support ActiveX- they're just set up to run embedded media files.
Some of the applications run using add-ons like IE Tab, but you still have to have IE installed, which means support for two browsers instead of just one - in which case Firefox gets dropped.
Perhaps if there were essential applications or environments that Fi
FF in my office (Score:4, Interesting)
My immediate office and domain of responsibility is now about 55 users (started around 45). When I started in July 04, all but two users used IE. And over 80% of systems had a wide and various host of viruses, backdoors, and trojans. Within two weeks, installing Netscape 7.2 and FF .9, and an aggressive training schedule coupled with long hours after close of business, I was down to under a dozen problematic systems.
I installed FF1.0 when it came out, and have been able to keep users up to date pretty easily. Some of the savvy ones do it themselves; others need a little handholding. Which I don't mind, it gets me off the phone ;) More recently, I was praised by one of our netop managers in NYC for doing so, because the virus/spyware etc problems in my office are 9/10ths of other offices he oversees.
But I do agree with the article. One of the things holding back some of my sister offices is the very fact that, with 100+ users, it's inefficient or dangerous to have (certain) users as full desktop administrators, especially when they can't figure out which mouse button is the "right" button. So finding a way to easily deploy FF would make a lot of techs happy, in my corner here, if not necessarily the intraweb coders. :)
It's because of Sharepoint (Score:2)
I Only Use IE When I Have to Use IE (Score:2, Informative)
. . . and for the most part that's for small in-house apps written (badly) in asp.NET with ActiveX controls (bleh!)
Of course, if I have to develop a web app, I test it in IE, because it's still the main browser, but I make sure it runs in Firefox too.
I think there's a great future for Firefox as more and more developers kick the .NET habit.
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The only thing that will really make an asp.net app not work in firefox is the html/css/javascript code that you write manually...and thats
The Slashdot story they wouldn't run. (Score:4, Informative)
Many people depend on Slashdot to help them learn about important events in computing. But this event hasn't been covered, and apparently is being ignored: It appears that Firefox does not have more market share because Firefox development has been very poorly managed.
Here is the Slashdot story submission:
Winifred Mitchell Baker [wikipedia.org] has given up her position [macworld.com] as CEO of Mozilla.
Firefox is now partly a profit-making [desktoplinux.com] effort. There has been considerable discussion about the possibility of Firefox issuing stock [alleyinsider.com] and becoming a public corporation. Firefox made a profit [alleyinsider.com] of $47,000,000 on revenues of $67,000,000 in 2006.
That enormous profit percentage that raises a question: Why did Firefox take in $67 million, but only spend $20 million? What is happening with the rest of the money?
Firefox development has been glacially slow. For example, in 6 years the CPU hogging and memory hogging bugs are still not fixed (although there has been considerable improvement).Thunderbird development has been abandoned. Opera is able to restore sessions, but the Firefox session restore feature throws away URLs if response is slow. Why is that, when millions of dollars are spent on development each year?
Firefox makes money when people use it to visit ads. Google pays because Firefox uses Google as the default search engine. It seems likely that a profit-making Firefox will eventually prevent add-ons like AdBlock Plus [mozilla.org] that stop the display of ads which many users find annoying.
The former CEO, Winifred Mitchell Baker, has no technical knowledge. She is a lawyer. She took the job when no one thought there was money in development of Netscape/Firebird that became Firefox.
Will the new CEO manage better? Or will Firefox development begin to be unfriendly to the user so that it will make money?
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I remain curious. How would one see one of these supposed CPU or memory hogging problems? If you can describe the circumstances under which the problem occurs, someone can file a bug report so the problem can be fixed. If no one can explain what the bug is, you should not be surprised if it has not been fixed.
On the other hand, perhaps you're experiencing a problem that is not a bug in Firefox that can be easily fixed by s
Wait a minute, no tools? WRONG (Score:3, Informative)
I beg to differ. Check out the Firefox Client Customization Kit (CCK).
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/cck/ [mozilla.org]
IT is the Enemy of Change (Score:2)
Additionally, the extensibility of FireFox presents a problem where users can easily add on to Firefox, and OH MY GOD change the w
Already won here (Score:2)
However there has been an alarming increase in the (mis)use of Microsoft products of late. We seem to be stuck with Sharepoint now, which does not play nice at all with Firefox.
I'd rather use a wiki.
Well, that and IE7 is not that bad (Score:2)
IE makes the most sense in a Windows environment (Score:3, Insightful)
When writing and deploying internal web apps we don't need to be spending the time (i.e. money) to make them work on multiple browsers and multiple versions. IE of some form is installed on all the desktops by default. This eliminated development time and saved the company money.
Firefox was installed on most desktops but there were always a few that didn't have it for some reason. IE is always there.
For security reasons most users are not given admin rights on their desktops (so they can't install every spyware and trojan loaded gizmo on their systems.) This means the firefox updates cannot be installed by them. While we certain could have come up with a solution to do this it really doesn't make sense to spend the time on it when IE is there and is automatically updated by WSUS giving us a consistent platform to work on.
My job was to give the users the ability to use the web and intranet at the lowest cost with the least IT overhead. IE was the way to go. Firefox is installed if they want to use it but it isn't the default nor will it be any time soon.
My company is standardized in FF (Score:2)
not Mozilla's fault (Score:4, Insightful)
IT departments are overworked, understaffed and in the windos department, most of the so-called admins are young people, university drop-outs, MSCE holders and others that are somehow seen as "good enough" to run the corporate desktop infrastructure but that you wouldn't let near the important SAP, Unix servers or other "real" computers. Sorry if that sounds sarcastic, most of the boys aren't at fault, but that's what they are: Boys. Very few corporations pay for real (read: more expensive) windos admins.
So the result is a department that struggles daily to keep things running, often with more hacks than strategy, and where deploying any additional software will be fought tooth and nail because it adds to the already overwhelming workload (did I mention they are almost always understaffed?).
In comes MS and includes the browser in the OS. End of game for all other browsers, because the IT department now sees them as additional software, and unnecessary to boot because "there's already a browser on there".
I don't blame the windos admins. I blame the justice department for essentially dropping their case and the judge for not seeing through the full game. Despite their bundling being found illegal, MS still played and won the game.
And no matter how easy or automatic Mozilla makes it, how many tools they build or how much ads they run, Firefox will always be an additional piece of software that doesn't do anything that a built-in piece of software doesn't already do. And with that scenario, IT departments will be very reluctant to deploy it, no matter the support options, tools, whatever.
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Why? Simple, we are aready so locked down, scanned, and updated, that the risk of IE is down to levels not worth going beyond. In other words, going to a new browser gains nothing but incurs cost, training, and support.
Can firefox be locked down so users cannot add plug ins? As the article mentioned there isn't support for risk adverse let alone push services.
Re:I would blame this on... (Score:5, Insightful)
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But really, if you already lock down the internet, what risk is there of them installing add-ons?
Re:I would blame this on... (Score:5, Informative)
Well, here's something that may help. We use this to deploy FF in our AD environment.
FF Community Edition [frontmotion.com]
Allows you to install over AD and has a snap-in allowing certain settings to be controlled over AD. The packages are free, or you can have them make a custom package with specific extensions for a fee.Re: (Score:2)
Wish I could use the karma points I have to mod you up...
Re:I would blame this on... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's the real problem for me. I can't put FF on the list of products approved for general distribution out of fear that some dolt will blithely install a malevolent extension. Which is really a shame because FF + NoScript is awesome. As it is, I approve use of FF on a case by case basis, limiting it to people who have a history of following instructions...
I'm told that that there *is* a way to block installation of extensions and plug-ins, but it's labor intensive, and I frankly don't have the authority to obtain the labor required. So if that could be made easier, well, I think this could take off in a big way.
Re:I would blame this on... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, it's not quite as easy as just installing FF and making it the default browser. Firefox on it's own in the default configuration will protect your users from a lot of stuff (ActiveX installers come to mind), but I've found that some stuff will still get through.
FF with NoScript [noscript.net] installed is a much better option if you don't mind spending a few minutes with your end-users and explaining what Javascript is, why it's abused and only to enable it for trusted websites. Amazingly enough I've found that even most of my computer-illiterate users are able to grasp this concept and I haven't had a single machine using the FF/NoScript combo infected with anything nasty.
Re: (Score:2)
Firefox on it's own in the default configuration will protect your users from a lot of stuff (ActiveX installers come to mind), but I've found that some stuff will still get through.
Of course, as TFA observes, so-called protection of users from legitimate ActiveX-based systems on numerous corporate intranets may also have something to do with it not being adopted. I'm writing this in Firefox on my lunch break, but if I log into our corporate intranet this afternoon, I'll be using IE, because Firefox simply doesn't work. Security issues don't much matter if the necessary functionality isn't there at all.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Insightful? C'mon... (Score:3, Insightful)
As a company, considering the web browser is the front-end for a large number of products being developed, the most used application by your employees, and the #1 gateway for potentially devastating viruses, I would say yes.
So you think having a couple of tech monkies getting paid $50k plus per year to sit around playing solitaire and waiting in case something goes wrong, even though th
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So...you're saying waving your twee little support contract at the mighty Redmond is sufficient for them to drop whatever they're working on, abandon any strategic assumptions that factor into their release schedules, and do a code drop for your specific benefit?
Bollocks. You're either incredibly power
Re:Insightful? C'mon... (Score:4, Informative)
Find a copy of a support contract (Microsoft or any other large vendor's, it doesn't matter.) Find the section or clause in it that obligates the vendor to respond to your issue with a functional remedy to your satisfaction and what period the remedy will be provided within. Note that "acknowledgement of" or "recording of" or "response to" the issue does not constitute a remedy, for purposes of this discussion. A remedy is something that mitigates the issue, nothing less.
Still looking?
Still looking?
Given up yet? Probably should, as you won't find it (unless your relationship with the vendor truly does fall into the "incredibly powerful" category I mentioned previously.) No vendor, not one, will contractually surrender such an amount of freedom for any but the most extraordinary relationships. That is the whole of the point I was making, which presentation so offended you. You are guaranteed nothing in terms of a functional remedy by such a contract; whatever is provided is provided at the vendors discretion and generally on their timetable. Nothing in this represents a rubbishing of Microsoft or any other vendor; it is simply what is. Were I running a company, I would be loathe to give up that kind of control of my timelines, I certainly can't fault any other vendor for having the same view.
There are many valid reasons to purchase a support contract, not the least of which is having de-facto access to other customer's tales of woe and the vendor's attempts to help said customers. Such means can indeed provide an appropriate resolution, and often do, and that may be worth the associated expense. Note though in this case, the vendor is providing something they already have, at their convenience, which is quite another case from what you're positing.
I also do indeed believe that support is taken seriously by many vendors, who do indeed view it as part of the brand experience and reply accordingly (sadly nearly offset by the set of vendors who view it otherwise, but that's another discussion.)
The above notwithstanding however, the notion of entering into a support contract as a mechanism to force timely mitigation behavior from a major vendor like Microsoft...my apologies if I don't lend that much credence.
(Any may God help me if I feel the need to stoke the techno-populist fires on Slashdot to reinforce my own self-esteem...)
IT Support needs support too sometimes (Score:3, Interesting)
So what I hear you saying is you've never tried to configure kerberos authentication within Firefox?
I would GLADLY pay $500 just to figure that out. (but not to buy software that does it, I'd rather learn
Re:More secure, though. (Score:5, Insightful)
When faced with internal corporate applications, there are still some that do not work well with Firefox. Through no fault of the browser, the corporate web application could be designed specifically with IE in mind and, hence, doesn't work as well with Firefox. In order for Firefox to obtain a larger marketplace within corporate infrastructures, there needs to be significant uptake by the companies designing internal corporate web applications.