Less than a month after Mozilla evangelist Aza Dotzler blew off enterprise users of the company’s Firefox Web browser, triggering an avalanche of angry responses, the Mozilla Foundation is seeking to make nice with corporate America.
The Foundation has announced that it’s re-establishing the Mozilla Enterprise User Working Group (MEWG).
This group will provide a forum for enterprise developers, IT staff and Firefox developers to discuss the challenges, ideas and best practices for deploying that browser in the enterprise.
“The Enterprise Working Group is a step to continue the dialogue with enterprise IT departments,” Stormy Peters, head of developer engagement at the Mozilla Foundation, told LinuxInsider.
However, Mozilla may find the going rough with the MEWG, which withered from lack of interest shortly after being set up in 2007 by Mike Kaply of Kaply Consulting, who was then working at IBM.
“Unless there are some practical results out of the group, I don’t see it mollifying anyone,” Kaply told LinuxInsider. “I think it’s a damage control move.”
The MEWG doesn’t look as if it will tackle the main problem enterprises have with Firefox, which is its rapid release cycle. Many cmpanies can’t cope with a new release every couple of months and were outraged when their complaints were blithely dismissed by Dotzler.
Resuscitation Is for Revivalists
The MEWG will set up a discussion list for conversations. Members will discuss topics listed in the forum as well as during in-person meetings. There will also be monthly phone meetings which will focus on one particular topic.
That setup’s almost identical to the one Kaply laid out when he launched MEWG in 2007.
Mozilla didn’t involve Kaply in its decision to restart the MEWG, Kaply said, adding that he first learned about it when he read the Mozilla blog.
The next meeting will discuss the release cycle and how enterprises can use Firefox in a way that fits into their own testing and release cycles.
A Real Working Group or Just Kitty Litter?
Whether or not MEWG will be able to achieve anything is open to question.
The original MEWG was disbanded mainly because of a lack of participation combined with a lack of support from Mozilla., some of which Kaply has outlined in a blog post.
Companies need a stable release rather than the latest technology per se, Kaply wrote. Updating a browser requires lots of testing and certification and can be an expensive process.
Indeed, the MEWG may be able to help smooth the way for enterprises to upgrade to the latest version of Firefox, Mozilla’s Peters contended.
For example, members will be able to develop and share solutions that help organizations adopt automated testing to make certification easier, he said.
“Since the amount of changes between releases is much smaller than the prior release cadence, the use of automated tests that target those changes could help mitigate certification and deployment issues in a managed environment,” Peters stated.
Mozilla Gets It, Maybe
“I have memories of sitting in meetings about 10 years ago with Mozilla, Sun, IBM and Google telling Mozilla why enterprise was important,” Kaply said.
Perhaps the Mozilla Foundation underwent a radical change after the outcry from enterprise users following Dotzler’s comments on June 23.
Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs tweeted June 28 that “enterprises are built of people and Mozilla is fundamentally about people.”
The same day, the Mozilla blog stated that the foundation’s exploring solutions that balances enterprises’ needs for certification of their browser-related technology on the one hand, and security on the other.
The establishment of MEWG may prove to be a step in the right direction.
“It’s so difficult to separate the consumer from the enterprise these days, especially with the consumerization of IT, that you have to pay attention to both sectors simultaneously,” Jim McGregor, chief technology strategist at In-Stat, told LinuxInsider.
Security Remains the Snag
It’s not likely that Mozilla will slow down the refresh cycle for the Firefox browser.
“It’s a requirement these days to bring out browsers rapidly because of security issues,” In-Stat’s McGregor pointed out. “Even if Mozilla wanted to slow down the pace of new browser releases, they couldn’t do so.”
One possible solution is to provide a long-term support release and ensure there’s overlap between the old and new versions of the browser, Kaply suggested.
“That’s what’s missing with rapid release,” Kaply said. “The moment Firefox 5 came out, Firefox 4 was out of support.”
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An enterprise should control its software and the deployment of that software. Both Chrome and Firefox are open source products and an enterprise can take the source code and create their own browser, along with an appropriate corporate warning page, a domain exclusion list, etc. They can wind out security fixes in their time and pattern. So if I were Oracle, my browser would be called Oracle!
Probably, Mozilla isn’t enterprise oriented, and probably they are feeling Chrome Heat. So what? Most open source developers are anti-enterprise in perspective, so Mozilla’s attitude and behavior is understandable if not defensible.
And frankly I don’t blame them. It all comes down to "ZOMG! Chrome has higher numbers ZOMG!" which is about as childish as you can get. I used to think I would be on Firefox for as long as it exists, after all I was using Firefox before it was even called that, and the Moz Suite before that.
But I had to move away from FF to the Chromium based Comodo Dragon, which I chose after trying several browsers. Why did I switch? Because in their ‘ZOMG! Me Too!" race with Chrome they’ve frankly made the browser unsuitable for purpose. I have to support a VERY wide range of machines, from netbooks and midrange P4s all the way to the latest multicores and since 3.6.x I’ve found that FF is simply unusable on less than a 3GHz P4 with HT.
I’ll give an example: I have a 1.8GHz Sempron I keep in the shop as a nettop, this is a great testbed for netbooks and older machines since it is slightly faster than a single core Atom. With FF launching a tab will cause the CPU to slam for up to 30 seconds where the machine is unresponsive and if the tab contains video it can lock for up to two minutes and the video will be a slideshow regardless. With Dragon the browser tops at 60% CPU, SD video plays perfectly, and most importantly it doesn’t gobble memory or take control away from the user like FF does.
IMHO Moz blew it, folks use something at work and then end up using it at home. I knew many IT guys that were switching the corp over to FF, now that is over. I myself gave out FF on every repair and new build, but that is over too. Instead of focusing on being the best light browser, their original mission statement, they have become the bloated mess that they said they were getting away from in the first place! And their attitude to businesses is the height of arrogance but their code can’t back up their attitude. Sorry Moz, but you have become Netscape all over again. So long, and thanks for all the fish.
This current paradigm at Mozilla is sheer nonsense. If they are saying it is because of security updates, then they should do the updates with point releases as in the past. Users did not then lose extensions, themes, etc.
This is really about Chrome browser. Mozilla is telling the public that they are a pack of idiots when they go to this rapid release. They think that the public buys into this as a necessity.
In truth, Chrome is nothing like Firefox, (or IE, or SeaMonkey), all of which for the user are quite similar (I am not an I/T person, so all I can speak to is usability).
I tried Chrome (and Safari and Opera). Sorry, Chrome looks and acts – for me – like a toy. A tinny toy.
Mozilla should go back to the point release paradigm for security releases.