

Firefox's enterprise support version has now been released - AndrewDucker
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/

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allbutlost
A marked change of stance from the following?

"Mike, you do realize that we get about 2 million Firefox downloads per day
from regular user types, right? Your “big numbers” here are really just a drop
in the bucket, fractions of fractions of a percent of our user base.

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."

[http://mike.kaply.com/2011/06/23/understanding-the-
corporate...](http://mike.kaply.com/2011/06/23/understanding-the-corporate-
impact/#comment-10493)

~~~
hkolk
It looks more like this replaces the (now quite outdated) Long Term Support
version of 3.6, which even got updated yesterday: <http://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/3.6.26/releasenotes/>

Part of this new ESR process is that 3.6 will go EOL in April.

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JoachimSchipper
Proposed release schedule at
[https://www.mozilla.org/img/covehead/esr/release-
overview.pn...](https://www.mozilla.org/img/covehead/esr/release-
overview.png): one year of support, with ~12 weeks to get to the next version.

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ecaron
Without the Windows version being available as a MSI, this still isnt going to
get enterprise support. At least not support/migration from people deploying
FrontMotion's Firefox MSIs.

~~~
gcp
I think this ESR is purely about extending the release schedule/security fix
lifetime. Enterprisy features can be added in the normal releases just as
well.

~~~
commandar
The thing is, enterprise users have been begging Mozilla for official MSI
support for _years_ now.

The fact that they _still_ haven't done anything about it, even with a
supposed enterprise version kind of indicates that they're still not taking
the enterprise seriously.

~~~
azakai
Firefox is 100% open source, so even if Mozilla itself doesn't focus on making
MSIs, other people can. There is at least one company doing just that,

<http://bespokeio.com/>

~~~
commandar
FrontMotion mentioned in the GP post is probably the most popular one I'm
aware of. But it's absurd to have to rely on a third party for what's a basic
matter of packaging.

MSI is _the_ standard for packaging applications for deployment in enterprise
environments for Windows. Mozilla's prolonged refusal to officially support it
amounts to a tacit refusal to properly support enterprise.

This isn't a new issue, nor is it a minor one. The Bugzilla issue for this was
opened _eight years ago_ [1] and there still isn't a proper, official
deployment solution (and this isn't even getting into the lack of centralized
management support).

[1] - <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=231062>

~~~
azakai
It isn't a basic matter of packaging. You also need to do very exhaustive
testing to make sure it works exactly as it should in all possible cases.
Enterprise support is not easy to do.

~~~
untog
Of course it isn't. But Google do it just fine with Chrome:

[http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/chromebrowser.ht...](http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/chromebrowser.html)

~~~
azakai
Why is it surprising that Google can do it? Google has massive resources.

~~~
ebiester
Mozilla brought in over 100 million in 2009.

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teyc
Is 12 months enough? Especially when you consider enterprise software vendors
need time to test as well.

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CWuestefeld
So that's what "ESR" stands for. I had almost convinced myself that it's in
honor of "Eric S. Raymond".

~~~
wmf
No, this version of Firefox won't encourage you to buy guns and vote
libertarian.

