Corporate users we don't care about you - Says Mozilla | Hacker News Reader

Corporate users we don't care about you - Says Mozilla

browsomatic.com

22 pointsgirishmony31 comments

Corporate users need to seriously rethink their glacial technology adoption cycle. In the BigCos I've worked at in the past, we're usually told it's due to security, yet we're almost always stuck on versions with glaring security holes that were solved years ago.

The problem indicated in the blog post (and the comments) is that the software ecosystem, add-ons, various vendor web sites, etc., take too long to bring up to speed. I can also attest to this, I worked at one organization that was stuck on IE 6 because the bloated and ridiculous expense reporting system wouldn't work on anything newer. They finally had to upgrade to some newer version because a major customer site simply refused to work with IE6 and we couldn't turn in our work. The weeping and whining from the corp IT department over having to upgrade the enterprise lasted for a year at least. It was actually a major contributor to me leaving the company I found it so absurd and annoying.

Strange that the vast vast majority of web sites on the open web don't seem to have a problem with this. Could it be because they write to standards? I always wondered what bizarre things were going on in that old expense system that just broke on new browsers.

> Strange that the vast vast majority of web sites on the open web don't seem to have a problem with this. Could it be because they write to standards?

I believe ther's a better answer: the owners/operators of the websites are incentivized to update them to current popular browsers. Let's face it, writing to standards helps, but does not guarantee good cross-browser compatibility if the website is somewhat complex.

Also the owners/operator usually are themselves -- or have on hand -- the people that can modify the site's code right away. May have something to do with popular sites being either very simple, or being developed all the time.

To contrast, the corporate IT is the embodiment of ``don't touch it if itsn't broken'' and ``fill in those three forms before you check any new code in'' mindset. Os just outright procurement of huge systems from external vendors with no contractual provisions for updates to match current software.

(which was one of the ills of my previous workplace, sigh)

To contrast, the corporate IT is the embodiment of ``don't touch it if itsn't broken'' and ``fill in those three forms before you check any new code in'' mindset.

I agree 100% with this and I think that this is the mindset that needs to change.

Back in college I took a course in Enterprise Architecture where this mindset was ingrained as good practice. I finished the class thinking that this was all terribly terribly wrong headed.

Corporate users need to seriously rethink their glacial technology adoption cycle. In the BigCos I've worked at in the past, we're usually told it's due to security,

That's not the main reason (security). It's usually getting stuff working at all given the sheer size. There was a Fortune 100 company I was consulting at and they had more "important" LOB apps than they had employees. And this was a big company. The sheer amount of code they had internally would dwarf the amount of code that MS ships.

They build this code against a given browser (although a lot of it isn't browser based, but for the sake of this discussion). They can't just take a new browser and break half (or even 10%) of their apps. At the same time, it will take a year or two to get their apps all working.

And these transitions do happen, but they're multiyear affairs. And in particular the one I worked on got 15 year support guarantees from a couple of companies before they moved forward -- they don't want to do this effort every six weeks. They want to do it once, and be able to stay on it 6-10 years (if not longer).

Strange that the vast vast majority of web sites on the open web don't seem to have a problem with this.

Again, for major companies 75% of their apps or even 90% working isn't sufficient. Today 100% of our apps work -- tomorrow 100% better also work.

I agree that this is how corporations operate. The reasoning is that IT is thought of as a necessary evil, "lets just get it over with". But this mindset has to change, just like a company wouldn't let their physical buildings fall apart, corporate IT systems need a proper maintenance mindset.

Why write to a browser? Everybody knows this is dumbheaded. Write to "browsers" and put in place a plan to keep the web-based software up-to-date with modern standards. It costs way more to build a new system, migrate over (in a multi-year migration process), then tear down the old system then to just keep your crap up-to-date with a maintenance staff.

It's akin to building a new office building after 5-6 years and moving everybody around, then tearing down the old building, because the county put a mandatory recycling program in place and the corporate trash policy didn't know what to do with the recycle bins. As a result the old office just filled up with glass bottles and aluminum cans...so they had to move to an empty office building...for the space.

The concern is coming because Mozilla announced that they will soon stop supporting Firefox 4 and the enterprise has a problem with this.

Personally, I'm fully supportive of this. I feel that as the browser world is rapidly changing along with HTML5/CSS3, there's not much room to continue supporting (and thus encouraging continued use of) old browser versions.

If gaining support of the corporate world (which Mozilla has never had much luck getting into) means leaving developers, support and security resources working on old products this really isn't surprising.

As I said in the blog post, there may be solid reasons behind Asa's comment. But its not the way to express it. Am I correct?

I think it was the most honest way he could have described it. Every day that passes I experience more cases where being honest is not the right thing to say, in the corporate world, because of politics.

I have a problem with that.

He's making it clear that Firefox is not an enterprise solution. What's wrong with that?

If mozilla genuinely does not consider enterprise a priority, would you really prefer them to give you some bullshit where they pretended it was?

I think the explicit honesty would be pretty helpful for a sysadmin who needs to make decisions about which technology to use. Yeah, it's blunt, but the bluntness does a pretty good job of not encouraging false hope. Obviously the sysadmin would prefer support, but mozilla just gave a very clear and understandable reason why that shouldn't be their priority.

Software delivery is changing. Heavily influenced by web-based software and easy delivery mechanisms (App Store, Steam, soon-to-be-Windows App Store), we are moving into a software delivery and support system of latest and greatest only.

This is at odds with the standard operating procedure of large corporations. What Mozilla seems to be saying is that they no longer support the old way of doing things because they think the new way is better (and I agree with them).

It is open source; they are corporate users. Why don't they collectively hire someone to backport security patches? Sounds like a businessmodel to me. You can't really expect support and consideration for your minority use-case for free, if you aren't paying for the software in the first place.

This is a good idea. Like an OS-independent RedHat, focusing on the apps.

Reading the comments on Mike Kaply's post, this is my favorite quote:

«Alienate the corporate users and you’ll alienate home users.»

It appears these corporate IT types honestly don't understand why Apple are doing so well.

How is Apple alienating corporate users?

There are really two problems here

* enterprise app development that assumes that there will be no need to maintain an application once developed

* corporate IT people needing to justify their existence.

Web applications benefit from being easier to install and can be run from a central location; but, as a result of that you can't just toss the running of an app over to IT. You need a small core to maintain it. For most applications this makes the most business sense as the trade off of having one or two people still on the project is less expensive than having IT manage the installs of native applications. The result of moving the enterprise to web apps should have been a massive shrinking of corporate IT head counts and a small increase in dev head counts. Instead we see them defending their budgets by inserting themselves between the user and the browser and performing these massive test cycles. It's simply an inefficient use of resources cause by enterprise empire builders don't want to see a shrinking of their power.

Am I the only one that is skeptical of the quote in Mike's post [1]? "Managing 500,000 corporate users" seems a bit outlandish to me considering that only one corporation in the world seems to have more than half a million employees period. I am not so sure that Wal-Mart has 500,000 corporate users who are affected by browser upgrades.

[1] Linked in the article but http://mike.kaply.com/2011/06/23/understanding-the-corporate...

I don't know which John Walicki the quote is from, but the top result on LinkedIn works for IBM, so it's a possibility that they as a service provider support users of many different corporations on a single product.

How is this even a problem to corporate users? If they write standards compliant internal web-apps, they should certainly work even better in newer versions of Firefox.

should doesn't mean does, and breaking things for thousands of corporate users is not a good way to discover a regression.

Those web startups I keep hearing about that somehow manage to target a large swath of browsers/versions must have tons of people working on the problem!

Snark aside, I think the problem is most large corporations view internal development and network/systems administration as cost centers, and treat it accordingly. Then grouse and complain when things dont work, are fragile, or require additional expenditures to keep apace with more current technologies. Go figure.

My issues supporting Firefox in a "corporate" environment (okay, it's Windows SBS with 12 clients -- small electrical contracting office) have nothing to do with internal Web apps. It has to do with the whacked out way Firefox works. In particular, their use of profiles is a nightmare for anyone that has multiple machines. For backup purposes and to make things easier for the employees, I have their application settings sync'd back to the server -- this way when they log on they have everything they need. This results in a file lock and Firefox creates a new profile. They lose their Firefox settings constantly.

I really wish they'd bundle up an MSI installer as well, since that'd make upgrades & deployments much easier. Yes, this could be done outside the project, but it seems short-sighted to me.

I would rather see Mozilla focus on the individual end user experience than cater to what some IT dept wants.

Every BigCo I've worked at, IE was the official supported browser. Firefox was the defacto used browser by employees who probably didn't need a corporate IT managed desktop to get their work done.

Just curious, but how does Mozilla know that corporate users make up such a small minority?

Corporate users are many in number and only few is sticking with Firefox. Majority of the people is with IE, especially with IE6 (sigh). May be Asa would have said that

It's not that all corporate users lumped together are small minority. I'ts about the 500.000 number quoted by one of admins as their corporate user count.

Comparing single corporation with all the other users is a valid argument, since every corporation defines its needs differently. The non-corporate users are quite homogenous and can be lumped together.

The core problem is the corporate users demand extra support to spare them some costs. They want browser vendors to ensure bug-for-bug compatibility with all their internal systems -- rather than invest in updating the systems. Moreover, corporate users expect browsers to adapt to their particular set of systems, while still going forward on othre fields. I'd call it a minefield, and one without any grattitude to be won. It's pretty damn hard to innovate and develop a browser for such market.

Contrast that with consumer market, where content providers, ISPs etc. consider it natural part of business to update their customer-facing WWW once in a while. The browser is free to go forward, and chances are the new, cool features will soon be put to good use. Way more breathing space for innovation.

Previous submission on same topic: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2692205

Yeah, they don't care about corporate users to extend they disabled websockets because of some broken corporate proxies.

Such a quick jump in major version usually indicates a deep code quality problem. Are we asking the right questions here?

The quick jump in major version is because Mozilla is moving to a rapid release cycle, a la Google Chrome. Firefox 6 and Firefox 7 are expected by the end of the year. Here is one of the relevant blog posts:

http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/04/13/new-channels-for-fir...

That blog post is almost entirely devoid of content.

And ticking though version numbers that quickly is a bad idea. There are better ways for Mozilla to go about this...

The major benchmark for browsers has been Internet Explorer, which has had 9 versions in 16 years. Compare that to Google Chrome, which is already on 14.0.803.0 (dev) / 13.0.782.32 (beta) / 12.0.742.100 (stable) after existing for less than three years. Mozilla is moving away from Microsoft's release model and towards Google's release model. While the current timeline for Firefox is a major release every three months, the target timeline is for a major release every six weeks.

Technology gets faster. Version numbers are arbitrary. Mozilla will be fine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com