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Hardware 2.0

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

Mozilla: We don't hate enterprise users!

By | July 19, 2011, 10:31am PDT

Summary: Given suggestions that Mozilla doesn’t care about enterprise users when it comes to Firefox, the company has set up an ‘Enterprise User Working Group’ to help get Firefox onto business machines.

Given suggestions that Mozilla doesn’t care about enterprise users when it comes to Firefox, the company has set up an ’Enterprise User Working Group‘ to help get Firefox onto business machines.

This seems like a pretty swift about-turn from Mozilla, as only a few weeks ago Asa Dotzler, community coordinator for Firefox marketing, had this to say:

Enterprise has never been (and I’ll argue, shouldn’t be) a focus of ours. Until we run out of people who don’t have sysadmins and enterprise deployment teams looking out for them, I can’t imagine why we’d focus at all on the kinds of environments you care so much about.

The announcement of the formation of the new working group was made on The Mozilla Blog:

Recently there’s 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. It will be a place to ask questions and get information about Mozilla plans.

What I find interesting is that Mozilla says that the discussions will ‘preserve the privacy of the participants’ to allow those involved to be as open as possible. Don’t worry about the privacy though; summaries of the discussions will be made public.

More information for those interested in taking part can be found here.

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Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is an internationally published technology author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology.

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Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

All opinions expressed on Hardware 2.0 are those of Adrian Kingsley-Hughes. Every effort is made to ensure that the information posted is accurate. If you have any comments, queries or corrections, please contact Adrian via the email link here. Any possible conflicts of interest will be posted below. [Updated: February 23, 2010] - Adrian Kingsley-Hughes has no business relationships, affiliations, investments, or other actual/potential conflicts of interest relating to the content posted so far on this blog.

Biography

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is an internationally published technology author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology -- whether that be by learning to program, building a PC from a pile of parts, or helping them get the most from their new MP3 player or digital camera.

Adrian has authored/co-authored technical books on a variety of topics, ranging from programming to building and maintaining PCs. His most recent books include "Build the Ultimate Custom PC", "Beginning Programming" and "The PC Doctor's Fix It Yourself Guide". He has also written training manuals that have been used by a number of Fortune 500 companies.

Adrian also runs a popular blog under the name The PC Doctor, where he covers a range of computer-related topics -- from security to repairing and upgrading.

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RE: Mozilla: We don't hate enterprise users!
jgm@... 20th Jul
@Mavtech You don't need a different plan to test more versions, just the same plan applied to more browsers. happy Automate the testing and it shouldn't matter how many versions Firefox puts out.
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HAHAHAHAHAHA!
Snooki_smoosh_smoosh 19th Jul
Mozilla has tarnished there reputation so badly, that we have completely removed their browser from our machines. The only Browser we now support is IE. Since Mozilla doesn't view Enterprise as being a concern of theirs, we don't feel that it is warranted to try to maintain a browser that will be out dated every 6 weeks.
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Message has been deleted.
DeRSSS Updated - 20th Jul
@DeRSSS I give up - they're attacked for updating too frequently by Snooki, then attacked for not having updated already by DeRSSS?

DeRSSS what you linked to isn't a bug report... it's a complaint-fest. There's no actionable information in the posts - rather like the ZDNet comment section. happy There's no specific report about doing X causing Y when website Z is open that a programmer could use to attempt to replicate the issue. There's no error message postings, no traces from debug builds... just people complaining about how much they hate Firefox. Again, much like things normally are here... lots of wholly unsubstantiated accusations that posters mistake for facts. This could be the fault of Flash, a plugin, Firefox, Win7, OSX (gasp!), users' imaginations, a bad website, or most likely almost all of the above as the complaints are wholly unspecific ("Firefox is slow..." "Firefox hangs...."). Then we get such helpful reports as "This is ********... I am getting sick of being their guinea pig [as if they paid for Firefox!]... Up yours! I'm posting this with Google Chrome". Charming.

Meanwhile, the only thing that counts - reality - has Tom's Hardware doing a browser competition and Firefox doing very well without any of the symptoms these people are (vaguely) complaining about. In fact, in the *reliability* test, only Firefox and Opera were able to open a set of 40 tabs and have all of them load successfully without needing any to be reloaded. IE was terrible, Chrome wasn't very good, and Safari had to be opened by hand one by one because attempting to load all 40 at once sets it in an infinite loop (and has for more than one version now and not been fixed). Firefox got touted as being the reliability champ, which puts the lie to anonymous people with potty mouths posting on the Internet.

Also, again, if they make any changes Snooki will throw a fit. They can't win.

Me, I just opened Firefox with 44 open tabs. No issues whatsoever. And that's with Opera already open with 42 tabs on a 2GB machine.
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@DeRSSS ... but I can't deny that FF4, FF5 and now FF6-beta are complete crap.

While FF3.x was stable, fast and worked smothly, ever since Mozilla decide to follow Google's stupidity, the versions delivered had being BUGGY, sometimes requiring multiple clicks to a link before it actually shows the page.

I dislike Chrome so no chance I will be switching any time soon. But if Mozilla continues to deliver buggy crap in an effort to play the version number game with Google ... who knows, I may start liking the idea of using a browser with built-in spyware that displays 1/2 of the websites wrong.
@Snooki_smoosh_smoosh You make decisions based on "tarnished reputation" then agree to support IE??? happy

A browser that's replaced every six weeks will be a moving target for hackers, as well as be more up-to-date against security vulnerabilities than one that's updated every three years.
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Which browser is updated every 3 yrs?

We should tell them to get on the ball. >_>
@Snooki_smoosh_smoosh
These are just what I want to say. I have removed firefox too and use IE and avant browser in my computer now
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Enterprise singularity?
KimTjik 19th Jul
Doesn't it more depend on what kind of IT decision enterprises have done in the past? I suppose complaints only apply to some enterprises. Since the ones complaining probably depends on an OS platform that isn't keen on adopting alternatives, like Firefox, and hence not interested in supporting it with features some request (Mozilla isn't proprietary and cooperation is possible and even welcomed), it does in my view more look like some chose to spin doubts in favour of a competitor. The one refusing to support complaints about the other not doing their job?

Mozilla has done a great job to at least establish better overall standards. This benefits enterprises more and on a greater scale than what these complaints are worth. Even if they choose IE they still benefit of the work done by Mozilla, so why complain and make so much fuzz?
Our issue with this is that we develop publicly available websites for our company. So, how does the QA department come up with a good plan to test version 3, 4, 5, and 6 along with IE 7, 8, and 9? They are causing quite an issue here with all of these versions.
@Mavtech You don't need a different plan to test more versions, just the same plan applied to more browsers. happy Automate the testing and it shouldn't matter how many versions Firefox puts out.

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