angry tapir sends in a piece from Down Under which begins "Mozilla is readying a program that will allow companies to build their own customized browsers based on the next version of Firefox, which will be out in a few weeks. ... Through the Build Your Own Browser program, which will start sometime soon after Firefox 3.5 is released at the end of June, companies can use a Web application provided by Mozilla to specify certain customizations for the browser, such as bookmarks to certain sites or corporate intranets or portals. ... The bulk of enterprises still use Internet Explorer if they mandate a browser for company use, because Microsoft provides provisioning and installation software for IE that makes it easy for enterprises to control browser settings and install across all corporate desktops, said Forrester analyst Sheri McLeish. Mozilla has not historically done this, but something like the Build Your Own Browser program is a good start to encourage enterprises to use Firefox over IE."
At least they used to. Starting with Opera 7 you could import a set of bookmarks, setup the home page, etc. and then distribute your own customized version of Opera. Good to see Firefox starting to consider this as well.
Out of curiosity, when chronologically was this? I know I was building customized Internet Explorer 4 browsers using an NT 4 IEAK back in '98. I'm sort of vaguely remembering a comparable feature involving Netscape about then, also? By the way. I still think IE4 didn't suck in comparison to the competition when it came out. As a matter of fact, I would say that about Microsoft in general up until mid/late 2000. They got really squirrelly about then. Evil and monopolistic, sure. but in a useful way.
If I am selling widgets for $40 and my competition is giving away feature comparable widgets for free who are customers going to go to for their widgets?
Not you, obviously. Much like when I want a drink of water I grab it from the drinking fountain, not the guy hawking water bottles at a few bucks a pop.
That is why Microsoft was convicted of abusing its monopoly power.
Microsoft weren't the only company giving away widgets.
Netscape, by trying to charge for a web browser, were very much out of the ordi
by Anonymous Coward
on Monday June 08, @11:00PM (#28261331)
I dunno, I work for a Fortune 100 company and we use IE because all the crappy "enterprise" software we run requires stupid ActiveX or JavaScript or whatever that only runs on IE6. Good luck to FireFox, but customizations ain't got nothing to do with it where I work.
I dunno, I work for a Fortune 100 company and we use IE because all the crappy "enterprise" software we run requires stupid ActiveX or JavaScript or whatever that only runs on IE6. Good luck to FireFox, but customizations ain't got nothing to do with it where I work.
There's even more to it than that. The WebBrowser COM/.NET control is the IE control. Even if you manage to supplant IE as the browser of choice, all code which embeds the COM or.NET wrapped COM control depends on it. So for example, the Windows Shell and the help system, and Windows Update, Windows Media Player, third party apps integrating the system WebBrowser such as WinAmp, etc.
The Internet Explorer browser itself is really just a light weight set of UIs wrapped around the standard WebBrowser COM/ActiveX control. It's actually pretty fun to write.NET code that interacts with the WebBrowser. You can add some interesting features like web page scrapers, etc.
Blaming enterprise software for your inability to install FireFox is nothing but a cop-out. The solution to this problem is so simple, I can't believe people even see it as a problem anymore.
Install Firefox, then install ieTab. ieTab can be set to do nothing until you browse to a any of a list of domains. Once you enter a domain, ieTab takes over and runs that tab inside a native IE browser. IE is seamlessly embedded inside the tab, and the user won't even notice.
The best part is that once a lot of companies do this, the enterprise software companies can start developing their software to standards, since most companies will already be using FireFox. Using IE for every website, just because of one domain (usually local network) requiring IE is just stupid
This whole "We can't use FireFox because of enterprise app X" is bullshit. People need to learn how to properly manage corporate computer systems without coming up with these pathetic excuses for not doing their jobs properly.
The theoretical PHB problem here then is that there is no commercial support for ieTab. There is probably some money to be made for someone who manages* to make ieTab work seamlessly in a Mozilla installation in both RHEL (or another well-supported Linux distro) and Windows and providing commercial support for it.
*This isn't a scenario for me and I have no idea how difficult or easy it might be to do this.
IMO, IEtab for Linux is actually a great idea. Currently people use IEs4linux or just plain WINE or a virtualisation environment - having an IEtab for linux that can seamlessly hook into a virtualised / WINE version of IE could be useful for those migrating from a Microsoft OS to a Linux distro or those doing testing with IE.
Bonus marks if it virtualises IE6/IE7/IE8 and allows compatibility modes too and only shows as a tab in FF none of the virtualisation env being revealed.
Er, IE tab doesn't always work seamlessly esp. if said stupid enterprise software relies on a lot of popups, it starts behaving funny. Have you tested it against all the crappy.net custom apps out there?
Heck at work the all bling new BMC Remedy system they brought in, the web facing frontend doesn't work properly in firefox. Thats a serious $$$ app. IEtab? I refer you to my popup issues.
Also IETab is not a fully supported product, if something doesn't work well with it, tough.
"This whole "We can't use FireFox because of enterprise app X" is bullshit. People need to learn how to properly manage corporate computer systems without coming up with these pathetic excuses for not doing their jobs properly."
With that kind of attitude, I take it you don't run large enterprise environments (no, medium business with some branches or shops and one or two big sites doesn't count, where you get to be the grand wizard techie who overrules all).
Technical arguments aside there are plenty of practical reasons. Just resistance to change, lack of tangible benefits, lack of support (you already pay MS for support so thats 'free'), user inertia / retraining (yes every call to the helpdesk where they explain clicking on the orange icon not the blue E icon costs $$$). We're techies and we like our own browsers and love sh1tting on MS but that's not how management looks at it. What is the bottom line gain YOU CAN DEMONSTRATE to the company? zero, and don't start talking about security, the you can demonstrate bit is the most important bit.
What is the bottom line gain YOU CAN DEMONSTRATE to the company? zero, and don't start talking about security, the you can demonstrate bit is the most important bit.
You may be able to demonstrate a security flaw, depending on what it is and your skill level...if push comes to shove, round up some virus samples and put together a "crash dummy" PC/VM for demonstration purposes...
Enterprises support IE because it runs ActiveX controls. Until FF does this, it will not appear in desktop builds for the majority of Corporate America.
Enterprises support IE because it runs ActiveX controls. Until FF does this, it will not appear in desktop builds for the majority of Corporate America.
Get the best of both worlds, pretty trivial to add sites to the list of IE sites and it all happens automatically. Been building a plan to migrate to FF completely in my spare time. Build your own browser will make a huge difference as currently I'm relying on some custom scripts to make the app deployable and maintainable. It works, but I hate to admit that it just aint as easy as using the registry or belting links into the favourites folder. Unfortunately all the native te
Enterprises support IE because it runs ActiveX controls. Until FF does this, it will not appear in desktop builds for the majority of Corporate America.
Actually, what SHOULD happen is that companies need to stop using those old ActiveX controls. Otherwise eventually companies are going to find themselves in a situation where they run one browser and the rest of the world runs something else!
Oh, [computerworld.com] of [zdnet.com] course [scmagazineus.com] established [pcworld.com] companies [securecomputing.net.au] never [computerworld.com.au] release [techtarget.com] flawed [securityreason.com] software [computerworld.com], right? Their ActiveX control does not have to be malicious in itself, it is sufficient if it tears holes into your defense for others to abuse. ActiveX needs to die a very quick death already. And can we please club that idea that a browser, JavaScript and a bit of fairy-dust can fully replace any local application regardless of specific implications out of people's heads?
Other than the fact that relying on ActiveX ties to you to Internet Explorer. In many cases it even ties you to an obsolete and insecure version of Internet Explorer. Microsoft has essentially pulled the plug on ActiveX. It wants you to move to new technologies (and when you do migrate it will pull the plug on those technologies and force you to migrate again).
I would be that, in most enterprises, if you added up the costs of continuing to support IE6 it would become clear that relying on ActiveX was a very poor bargain. The advantages of using ActiveX over other competing technologies was relatively small, and the cost of choosing ActiveX has been quite high.
Microsoft will stop releasing security patches for Windows XP in five years. If your business relies on something that only works in IE6, you have until 2014 to figure out a new solution, or continue running an unsupported operating system with no security updates available.
However, you may have difficulty before then, if new PCs start shipping with hardware that isn't supported by WinXP. Of course this assumes you have an existing site license that covers the use of WinXP on new PCs; Microsoft has stopped selling WinXP, so when OEMs and retailers run out of copies, you won't be able to buy it - and the option to downgrade from Vista to XP will end in less than two months.
Within the context of internal applications that run with a Web interface on a company Intra net, there is nothing in particular wrong with ActiveX.
One of the original driving ideas behind making applications "web based" was to make the application independent of the specific operating system. ActiveX does the exact opposite. Now, many intra nets are probably already tied to Microsoft Windows in a large number of other ways so they don't see anything wrong with that - but changing the OS to a true commod
Actually, in every web based application I've developed, the driving reason was so to avoid the installation problems and support. It's easy to tell users to go to this or that URL to use a new application, a heck of a lot easier than rolling out apps everywhere. Independance from a specific operating system or browser has NEVER EVER come up.
Enterprises support IE because it runs ActiveX controls. Until FF does this, it will not appear in desktop builds for the majority of Corporate America.
Actually, what SHOULD happen is that companies need to stop using those old ActiveX controls. Otherwise eventually companies are going to find themselves in a situation where they run one browser and the rest of the world runs something else!
I don't think they'd care. For most companies, the browser is just a UI into various enterprise apps. E.g., instead of having to install a Peoplesoft Win32 executable client, Peoplesoft has a built-in web server and users access PeopleSoft through the intranet. This is extremely common - in fact, it may be the most common way for users to interact with enterprise apps these days. For most desktops, what the rest of the world runs is immaterial - it's whether the browser talks to application X, Y, and Z
Enterprises support IE because it runs ActiveX controls. Until FF does this, it will not appear in desktop builds for the majority of Corporate America.
People make this argument -- "enterprises" won't use Firefox until it has feature X, or Y, or Z -- a lot, and it's just wrong.
"Enterprises" are lagging indicators because their IT staff are generally guided primarily by risk aversion. Even if Firefox was 100% bug-compatible with IE, they wouldn't switch, because IE runs their crappy, poorly written "enterpri
I wonder if this will spawn a trend where every single distro ships with thier own branded firefox version. Meaning that in distro reviews, we'll have the mandatory screenshot of the login screen art, the defualt desktop background, and the firefox branding. Great.
I would welcome this for Arch, though, we have to rebuild firefox from source or we're stuck with the ugly "built from source code" icons.
Even more than before, ISPs will push "their" own flavor of a browser that comes bundled with those godforsaken coasters that unsuspecting victims dump into their machines, only to end up with an IE (or FF from now on, too) that blatantly advertises the ISP, rehijacks the "favorite browser" position every time you rip it from him and stuff all kind of browser addons into it that you strangely cannot get rid of anymore due to miraculously missing deinstall routines.
I like the idea. No really, I do. But this is what it will be (ab)used for.
So instead of offering one browser that can be configured by Group Policy in an Enterprise IT deployment they offer a web service to generate hard-coded branded browser installers? Sounds like a lot of work to avoid implementing what IT managers really want.
Yeah. It's not like the IT department is actually concerned with that "group policy" and "fine-grained control of all instances of the browser on the network" crap.
They're worried if they're able to slap their company's LOGO onto the browser! Way to set your priorities straight, Mozilla.
The intent is to get to a place where we can do just that. The challenge is creating MSI's that can do that without relying on the registry for configuration changes (Firefox keeps all of its configuration directives - with the exception of some plugin registrations - in the appdir and user profile). It's a solvable problem that requires some concerted effort, and I'm always interested in hearing what kinds of configuration options the provisioning groups within an enterprise are looking for.
The problem isn't that companies can't deploy Firefox - it's that most vendors are IE-centric. It's easy to put together a default Firefox profile with the requisite bookmarks and customizations, but tougher to get the same "experience" when it comes to things like Sharepoint and SAP, among others. Once you can get some of those vendors (ok, maybe not MS) to play more nicely, the rest will take care of itself.
I'm not saying it's all Mozilla's fault - in fact most of it isn't. But some corporate evangelism would go a long way towards getting traction within the enterprise.
Good point - but then you're hitching the proverbial wagon to not just one vendor now, but two.
While you could approach the problem this way, wouldn't it be a lot more efficient to just work with the web app vendor to build in compatibility?
Clearly it can be done - I'm betting that Hong Jen Yee would be up for a nice paycheck for this kind of work.
Depends on the vendor. If the business demands MS Exchange, then OWA in "Light Mode" is all you get in FF. It becomes very hard to justify a browser change if it's going to cost $$$ making a system supplied by $vendor that has a major business investment in it or even changing vendors when what comes with Windows "works" (term used very loosely there).
I prefer the "Best of Both Worlds" approach. Free to deploy our browser of choice and no fighting with vendors that will state that IEx is a requirement so b
I mentioned this in a post above, but IE Tab is your friend.
One of the great things about Firefox is that it is cross platform. Unfortunately Microsoft's Internet Explorer is for Microsoft Windows only. As such IE tab is, unfortunately, no friend to those using Mac, Linux, or any other platform. For Windows users it is a crutch, that should be used only as a temporary measure until whatever IE-only site is brought in to this century.
Was just having a discussion with the boss, in that what ever we do, we need to start changing the applications people use to things more cross platform. When it becomes feasible to change the underlying OS, then the change won't come as much of a shock to the users.
At UW-Milwaukee [uwm.edu]'s dorms, I used FFDeploy [dbltree.com] to do just this: create a silent Firefox installer for student and faculty machines with some built-in bookmark buttons for our student service websites, e-mail system and so on.
Doing this saves time and installs FF with a nice student-friendly UI right off the bat -- very useful in converting otherwise IE-centric students who don't care what browser they're using to Firefox.
I looked at this, but it appeared really really out of date. Mozilla release official MSI packages, so you can generally alter the MSI using Orca to do much of what you need to do.
It is indeed out of date, but I was able to get it working with FF 3 without too much issue... I can't remember exactly what it took, but it works well to this date (and the original "image" doesn't need to be updated when FF releases minor revisions, since I install FF over the top of the FFDeployed installation to finalize all the Windows shortcuts and things like that.)
Firefox has earned a lot of goodwill among the general population, but it's probably nearing a plateau in terms of brand recognition and new users. MS is starting to close the gap in features and security perception, so now is the time for FF to make some inroads in the enterprise software market. Users migrated to FF because they were dissatisfied with IE. If Modzilla solves shortcomings in IE for businesses and organizations they'll make some traction. If everyone's generally happy with IE, I don't see any new features that will compel them to invest in the change.
I do see a lot of companies using login scripts to control IE settings, and Active Directory's group policies tend to be an all-or-none (no plug-ins or all plug-ins, can't change homepage or can change it to anything, etc.) so there may be a few things Mozilla can improve on.
What would be more useful to enterprises who want to distribute Firefox is an MSI package and a group policy template - like the version distributed by FrontMotion (Firefox Community Edition).
OK, for those who don't read the discussion, let's repeat the obvious [slashdot.org] The latest version of FirefoxADM [sourceforge.net]release notes [wordpress.com] specifically list the feature Added: Ability to replace certificates for all user profiles.
Thank you very much for proving us women absolutely correct when we complain about the abusive, sexist hostility we receive on male-dominated sites like this.
Oh please. Everyone gets abused here.
If you can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen.
Opera did this too (Score:5, Informative)
At least they used to. Starting with Opera 7 you could import a set of bookmarks, setup the home page, etc. and then distribute your own customized version of Opera. Good to see Firefox starting to consider this as well.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Out of curiosity, when chronologically was this? I know I was building customized Internet Explorer 4 browsers using an NT 4 IEAK back in '98.
I'm sort of vaguely remembering a comparable feature involving Netscape about then, also?
By the way. I still think IE4 didn't suck in comparison to the competition when it came out. As a matter of fact, I would say that about Microsoft in general up until mid/late 2000. They got really squirrelly about then.
Evil and monopolistic, sure. but in a useful way.
Re:Opera did this too (Score:5, Informative)
Out of curiosity, when chronologically was this?
Actually, it was back in Opera 5 days. The URL http://composer.opera.com/ [opera.com] seems to date back to June 30, 2001:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://composer.opera.com [archive.org]
Checking the main Opera site as of that date shows Opera 5.12 was released for Windows.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If I am selling widgets for $40 and my competition is giving away feature comparable widgets for free who are customers going to go to for their widgets?
Not you, obviously. Much like when I want a drink of water I grab it from the drinking fountain, not the guy hawking water bottles at a few bucks a pop.
That is why Microsoft was convicted of abusing its monopoly power.
Microsoft weren't the only company giving away widgets.
Netscape, by trying to charge for a web browser, were very much out of the ordi
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And more appealing for other people. Corporate management can be weird.
Not for us (Score:4, Insightful)
I dunno, I work for a Fortune 100 company and we use IE because all the crappy "enterprise" software we run requires stupid ActiveX or JavaScript or whatever that only runs on IE6. Good luck to FireFox, but customizations ain't got nothing to do with it where I work.
Re:Not for us (Score:5, Interesting)
I dunno, I work for a Fortune 100 company and we use IE because all the crappy "enterprise" software we run requires stupid ActiveX or JavaScript or whatever that only runs on IE6. Good luck to FireFox, but customizations ain't got nothing to do with it where I work.
There's even more to it than that. The WebBrowser COM/.NET control is the IE control. Even if you manage to supplant IE as the browser of choice, all code which embeds the COM or .NET wrapped COM control depends on it. So for example, the Windows Shell and the help system, and Windows Update, Windows Media Player, third party apps integrating the system WebBrowser such as WinAmp, etc.
The Internet Explorer browser itself is really just a light weight set of UIs wrapped around the standard WebBrowser COM/ActiveX control. It's actually pretty fun to write .NET code that interacts with the WebBrowser. You can add some interesting features like web page scrapers, etc.
Parent
Re:Not for us (Score:4, Insightful)
You can add some interesting features like web page scrapers, etc.
... security holes, 90's UI paradigms, Active X controls, proprietary extensions, ...
Yeah, I can see the appeal ;-)
Parent
Re:Not for us (Score:5, Informative)
Blaming enterprise software for your inability to install FireFox is nothing but a cop-out. The solution to this problem is so simple, I can't believe people even see it as a problem anymore.
Install Firefox, then install ieTab. ieTab can be set to do nothing until you browse to a any of a list of domains. Once you enter a domain, ieTab takes over and runs that tab inside a native IE browser. IE is seamlessly embedded inside the tab, and the user won't even notice.
The best part is that once a lot of companies do this, the enterprise software companies can start developing their software to standards, since most companies will already be using FireFox. Using IE for every website, just because of one domain (usually local network) requiring IE is just stupid
This whole "We can't use FireFox because of enterprise app X" is bullshit. People need to learn how to properly manage corporate computer systems without coming up with these pathetic excuses for not doing their jobs properly.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not for us (Score:5, Insightful)
ieTab doesn't work in Linux because there's no IE to load in the tab in Linux. That's all ieTab does...
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
IMO, IEtab for Linux is actually a great idea. Currently people use IEs4linux or just plain WINE or a virtualisation environment - having an IEtab for linux that can seamlessly hook into a virtualised / WINE version of IE could be useful for those migrating from a Microsoft OS to a Linux distro or those doing testing with IE.
Bonus marks if it virtualises IE6/IE7/IE8 and allows compatibility modes too and only shows as a tab in FF none of the virtualisation env being revealed.
Currently I use dual-boot and vi
Re:Not for us (Score:5, Informative)
Er, IE tab doesn't always work seamlessly esp. if said stupid enterprise software relies on a lot of popups, it starts behaving funny. Have you tested it against all the crappy .net custom apps out there?
Heck at work the all bling new BMC Remedy system they brought in, the web facing frontend doesn't work properly in firefox. Thats a serious $$$ app. IEtab? I refer you to my popup issues.
Also IETab is not a fully supported product, if something doesn't work well with it, tough.
"This whole "We can't use FireFox because of enterprise app X" is bullshit. People need to learn how to properly manage corporate computer systems without coming up with these pathetic excuses for not doing their jobs properly."
With that kind of attitude, I take it you don't run large enterprise environments (no, medium business with some branches or shops and one or two big sites doesn't count, where you get to be the grand wizard techie who overrules all).
Technical arguments aside there are plenty of practical reasons. Just resistance to change, lack of tangible benefits, lack of support (you already pay MS for support so thats 'free'), user inertia / retraining (yes every call to the helpdesk where they explain clicking on the orange icon not the blue E icon costs $$$). We're techies and we like our own browsers and love sh1tting on MS but that's not how management looks at it. What is the bottom line gain YOU CAN DEMONSTRATE to the company? zero, and don't start talking about security, the you can demonstrate bit is the most important bit.
Parent
You can demonstrate that. (Score:3, Insightful)
What is the bottom line gain YOU CAN DEMONSTRATE to the company? zero, and don't start talking about security, the you can demonstrate bit is the most important bit.
You may be able to demonstrate a security flaw, depending on what it is and your skill level...if push comes to shove, round up some virus samples and put together a "crash dummy" PC/VM for demonstration purposes...
ActiveX (Score:4, Insightful)
Enterprises support IE because it runs ActiveX controls. Until FF does this, it will not appear in desktop builds for the majority of Corporate America.
Re: (Score:2)
Enterprises support IE because it runs ActiveX controls. Until FF does this, it will not appear in desktop builds for the majority of Corporate America.
Then they need to find: IE TAB [mozilla.org]
Get the best of both worlds, pretty trivial to add sites to the list of IE sites and it all happens automatically. Been building a plan to migrate to FF completely in my spare time. Build your own browser will make a huge difference as currently I'm relying on some custom scripts to make the app deployable and maintainable. It works, but I hate to admit that it just aint as easy as using the registry or belting links into the favourites folder. Unfortunately all the native te
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, what SHOULD happen is that companies need to stop using those old ActiveX controls. Otherwise eventually companies are going to find themselves in a situation where they run one browser and the rest of the world runs something else!
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, what SHOULD happen is that companies need to stop using those old ActiveX controls.
Within the context of internal applications that run with a Web interface on a company Intra net, there is nothing in particular wrong with ActiveX.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Ya kidding right? The intranet/internet distinction is DEAD. Malware runs on the client, the client is on the intranet, end of story.
Re:ActiveX (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, [computerworld.com] of [zdnet.com] course [scmagazineus.com] established [pcworld.com] companies [securecomputing.net.au] never [computerworld.com.au] release [techtarget.com] flawed [securityreason.com] software [computerworld.com], right? Their ActiveX control does not have to be malicious in itself, it is sufficient if it tears holes into your defense for others to abuse. ActiveX needs to die a very quick death already. And can we please club that idea that a browser, JavaScript and a bit of fairy-dust can fully replace any local application regardless of specific implications out of people's heads?
Parent
Re:ActiveX (Score:4, Insightful)
Other than the fact that relying on ActiveX ties to you to Internet Explorer. In many cases it even ties you to an obsolete and insecure version of Internet Explorer. Microsoft has essentially pulled the plug on ActiveX. It wants you to move to new technologies (and when you do migrate it will pull the plug on those technologies and force you to migrate again).
I would be that, in most enterprises, if you added up the costs of continuing to support IE6 it would become clear that relying on ActiveX was a very poor bargain. The advantages of using ActiveX over other competing technologies was relatively small, and the cost of choosing ActiveX has been quite high.
Parent
Re:ActiveX (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft will stop releasing security patches for Windows XP in five years. If your business relies on something that only works in IE6, you have until 2014 to figure out a new solution, or continue running an unsupported operating system with no security updates available.
However, you may have difficulty before then, if new PCs start shipping with hardware that isn't supported by WinXP. Of course this assumes you have an existing site license that covers the use of WinXP on new PCs; Microsoft has stopped selling WinXP, so when OEMs and retailers run out of copies, you won't be able to buy it - and the option to downgrade from Vista to XP will end in less than two months.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
One of the original driving ideas behind making applications "web based" was to make the application independent of the specific operating system. ActiveX does the exact opposite. Now, many intra nets are probably already tied to Microsoft Windows in a large number of other ways so they don't see anything wrong with that - but changing the OS to a true commod
Re:ActiveX (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, in every web based application I've developed, the driving reason was so to avoid the installation problems and support. It's easy to tell users to go to this or that URL to use a new application, a heck of a lot easier than rolling out apps everywhere. Independance from a specific operating system or browser has NEVER EVER come up.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, what SHOULD happen is that companies need to stop using those old ActiveX controls. Otherwise eventually companies are going to find themselves in a situation where they run one browser and the rest of the world runs something else!
I don't think they'd care. For most companies, the browser is just a UI into various enterprise apps. E.g., instead of having to install a Peoplesoft Win32 executable client, Peoplesoft has a built-in web server and users access PeopleSoft through the intranet. This is extremely common - in fact, it may be the most common way for users to interact with enterprise apps these days. For most desktops, what the rest of the world runs is immaterial - it's whether the browser talks to application X, Y, and Z
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
People make this argument -- "enterprises" won't use Firefox until it has feature X, or Y, or Z -- a lot, and it's just wrong.
"Enterprises" are lagging indicators because their IT staff are generally guided primarily by risk aversion. Even if Firefox was 100% bug-compatible with IE, they wouldn't switch, because IE runs their crappy, poorly written "enterpri
And in the Linux world ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder if this will spawn a trend where every single distro ships with thier own branded firefox version. Meaning that in distro reviews, we'll have the mandatory screenshot of the login screen art, the defualt desktop background, and the firefox branding. Great.
I would welcome this for Arch, though, we have to rebuild firefox from source or we're stuck with the ugly "built from source code" icons.
Re: (Score:2)
No. Debian still has the original Iceweasel. GNU Icecat nee GNU Iceweasel is a fork of the Debian fork.
Nice idea... but I already know how this will end (Score:4, Interesting)
Even more than before, ISPs will push "their" own flavor of a browser that comes bundled with those godforsaken coasters that unsuspecting victims dump into their machines, only to end up with an IE (or FF from now on, too) that blatantly advertises the ISP, rehijacks the "favorite browser" position every time you rip it from him and stuff all kind of browser addons into it that you strangely cannot get rid of anymore due to miraculously missing deinstall routines.
I like the idea. No really, I do. But this is what it will be (ab)used for.
Spinning an outstanding deficiency (Score:5, Insightful)
So instead of offering one browser that can be configured by Group Policy in an Enterprise IT deployment they offer a web service to generate hard-coded branded browser installers? Sounds like a lot of work to avoid implementing what IT managers really want.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah. It's not like the IT department is actually concerned with that "group policy" and "fine-grained control of all instances of the browser on the network" crap.
They're worried if they're able to slap their company's LOGO onto the browser! Way to set your priorities straight, Mozilla.
Re:Spinning an outstanding deficiency (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Spinning an outstanding deficiency (Score:4, Insightful)
Great, but that's not an official package from Mozilla, and hence it can't be trusted by us more paranoid types.
Can someone at Mozilla tell us why you haven't started distributing your own MSI and ADM files yet?
Parent
Re:Spinning an outstanding deficiency (Score:4, Informative)
There's FirefoxADM: http://ick2.wordpress.com/ [wordpress.com]
This stuff really needs to be in the core of Firefox for it to gain corporate users.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You might not be focusing on the right target... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not saying it's all Mozilla's fault - in fact most of it isn't. But some corporate evangelism would go a long way towards getting traction within the enterprise.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Clearly it can be done - I'm betting that Hong Jen Yee would be up for a nice paycheck for this kind of work.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I prefer the "Best of Both Worlds" approach. Free to deploy our browser of choice and no fighting with vendors that will state that IEx is a requirement so b
Re: (Score:2)
One of the great things about Firefox is that it is cross platform. Unfortunately Microsoft's Internet Explorer is for Microsoft Windows only. As such IE tab is, unfortunately, no friend to those using Mac, Linux, or any other platform. For Windows users it is a crutch, that should be used only as a temporary measure until whatever IE-only site is brought in to this century.
Re: (Score:2)
I do this already (Score:4, Interesting)
At UW-Milwaukee [uwm.edu]'s dorms, I used FFDeploy [dbltree.com] to do just this: create a silent Firefox installer for student and faculty machines with some built-in bookmark buttons for our student service websites, e-mail system and so on.
Doing this saves time and installs FF with a nice student-friendly UI right off the bat -- very useful in converting otherwise IE-centric students who don't care what browser they're using to Firefox.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It is indeed out of date, but I was able to get it working with FF 3 without too much issue... I can't remember exactly what it took, but it works well to this date (and the original "image" doesn't need to be updated when FF releases minor revisions, since I install FF over the top of the FFDeployed installation to finalize all the Windows shortcuts and things like that.)
Striking while the iron is hot (Score:5, Insightful)
I do see a lot of companies using login scripts to control IE settings, and Active Directory's group policies tend to be an all-or-none (no plug-ins or all plug-ins, can't change homepage or can change it to anything, etc.) so there may be a few things Mozilla can improve on.
Fine, but... (Score:4, Informative)
Set Top Box Browser (Score:2)
Now this would have been super useful about 6 months ago for me, when we needed an embedded linux browser.
Why don't Distros do this? (Score:3)
Maybe I'm missing something, but I've yet to see a "burn install CD with current configuration" button, or similar.
Re:SSL CA certs! (Score:4, Informative)
The latest version of FirefoxADM [sourceforge.net]release notes [wordpress.com] specifically list the feature Added: Ability to replace certificates for all user profiles.
Parent
Re:Flash (Score:4, Funny)
Thank you very much for proving us women absolutely correct when we complain about the abusive, sexist hostility we receive on male-dominated sites like this.
Oh please. Everyone gets abused here.
If you can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen.
(Oh, the irony!)
Parent