Firefox Struggling to Compete as Corporate Browser

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...

Already, IT people who use or promote IE are considered bitches, and everyone knows it.  Is there any more powerful incentive to use Firefox?

But more importantly, who cares?  It's not like Firefox's stockholders are going to revolt.

Re:dude...

But more importantly, who cares? It's not like Firefox's stockholders are going to revolt.

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...

standards? when have we been there?

Re:Authentication

There's a Firefox registry setting you can use to turn on automatic NTLM authentication.

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.

Re:Authentication

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.

Re:dude...

However there are similar situations which go the other way...
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.

Not very well researched article

From the article :

The big downside is the difficulty of managing Firefox, especially in comparison to administering IE, according to the CIO. For example, he said that the IT department can patch IE via automated central updates. On the other hand, "we have to send an e-mail and have users manually download Firefox updates, which is not ideal," he said.

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).

Re:Not very well researched article

You don't want users doing their own updates. You need for IT to do the updates so that you have time to do integration testing on the updates in order to make sure that company intranet sites, etc., don't break because of an update. This will give you time to, for example, fix the internal web application before going to production.

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.

IE

from personal corporate experience

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

Phasing out of XP might actually help FF

The reasons you give for the inertia in corporate environments are actually indicators of the stagnation in Microsoft's OS line (XP being around for so long, with no major updates except for the browser). If there is one good thing about Vista it is that it moves things forward for the MSFT platform as well as for interoperability. IE7 is proving to be as different a browser from IE6 as FF is in terms of compatibility. Since an effort has to be made to make it IE7 compatible might as well make it standards-compatible with pretty much the same effort.

*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 .com bubble was near fully-inflated.

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

It's doesn't fit 'the model'

IME medium and upwards sized firms are used to a certain way of working and if anything doesn't fit the model, it has zero chance of being used.
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?

Mo money

What Mozilla needs to do is create their own operating system and incorporate Firefox into it in such a way that it cannot be uninstalled =P

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.

Excellent reason FF is not deployed

Mozilla thus far has neglected to develop tools to help IT departments deploy and manage Firefox,

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.

Mozilla could do some things better

I currently deploy Firefox to our corporate workstations, however there are definitely things that Mozilla could do to make Firefox more corporate friendly.

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.

FF in my office

I've had this job for a bit over three years, working dual phone support and in-house desktop/network support.

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. :)

The Slashdot story they wouldn't run.

Here is a Slashdot story submission that helps explain why corporations have not adopted Firefox. The submission was rejected: "008-01-09 02:36:24 Mozilla gets a new CEO (Features,Mozilla) (rejected)".

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?

not Mozilla's fault

I'll tell you what the real reason is: Microsoft's plan has worked.

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.

Re:

I would this squarely in the category of "its not worth the effort"

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 inc

Re:I would blame this on...

I agree. I might switch all my users to FF if I could manage all the settings from Active Directory (such as not adding plug ins, security settings, etc), but I'm not aware of any way to do this right now. And as you said, we already lock down the Internet, so why bother (we are also a MS shop, although I'm installing a Fedora server right now.)?

Re:I would blame this on...

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:I would blame this on...

"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."

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...

No, really, these kind of people spend millions of dollars in anti-virus, anti-spyware and other kind of crap that doesn't work when they could use FF and solve 90% of their problems.

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:Insightful? C'mon...

There are many, many possible ways to reply to this. I'll go with what I believe to be the most direct and simple.

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...)

Re:More secure, though.

With more companies adopting security practices such as web proxies, blocking broad Internet access, removing administrator privileges to user desktops & laptops, browser security receives less of an emphasis that feature functionality. In general, corporate IT staff are not tasked by their management to make sure a user's browser works well with Yahoo! or MSN Groups or even Slashdot. They are tasked to ensure the user's browser works with the myriad of applications that the managers expect the users to use throughout his/her work day.

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.

Re:Deployment Tools?

Bingo. I work for a couple of car dealerships that sell GMs. ALL of GM's web-based stuff is IE-only. Furthermore, it's IE6-only. IE7 won't render the GM Dealerworld site correctly, and GM won't provide support for you if you're using it.

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.