4 ms·

One the one hand, you can't really blame FF. Chrome is killing them with their quick release cycles, so they felt they needed to respond. On the other hand, wh

by Maro 15y ago

One the one hand, you can't really blame FF. Chrome is killing them with their quick release cycles, so they felt they needed to respond. On the other hand, what options do enterprises have? Assuming they're currently using FF, they probably don't want to go back to IE. Chrome is out of the question for the same reason we're having this discussion, frequent releases. So, what's left? Safari on Windows? And too much is broken on Opera. So, I don't really think FF has much to fear in terms of losing existing enterprise customers. It may stall adoption on the enterprise market, but if it brings them back in the consumer market, and it's a net gain, then it was a good move. After all, Mozilla's customers like Google are buying eyeballs wholesale, irrespective of them being enterprise or consumer users.

bad_user 15y ago
what options do enterprises have? Change their policies? Just let Firefox freaking update itself, after all, Mozilla is more trustworthy than an IT department of debatable competency. And what on earth are they doing in those internal apps that makes them incompatible between Firefox 3 and Firefox 5 ? I do have an intranet app of reasonable complexity that was created using IExplorer 6 and the original Mozilla browser. It still works today, the same as it was working when I made it. That's what standards are for.
- pilif 15y ago
  what though, if by total accident, that one webapp worked on FF 3.6 due to a bug in that borwser version? That one webapp that some guy once created to make his life easier, that's not documented anywhere any more and that's now being used to do all accounting over even though nobody knows about it. Now imagine you as the IT guy update Firefox from 3.6 to 4 and now that app breaks and with it the accounting department stops working. Nobody will appreciate your "but... I didn't know that app was there" which is totally not the correct answer to "why the hell did you just break the accounting department?" I have seen this happen. Maybe not at this scale, but it definitely did happen. No wonder IT people are scared of updating: If you don't do anything, everything will keep working, but you might piss off some web developers who you don't know. If you DO update, you may risk breaking some home-grown solution you didn't know about and you will be held responsible for all the damage caused. Yes. That app shouldn't exist. Yes, it should be documented, yes it should not have bugs. But it might exist, it might not be documented and it might have bugs. You. Just. Don't. Know. Now don't get me wrong: I'm not one of these guys, mainly because I have not been burnt by this yet (and probably never will - 10 people company and I still know about everything that's going on), but I can certainly understand them.
  - cageface 15y ago
    Those are the tradeoffs of webapps. They're relatively portable and don't require manual deployment for every update but web tech moves fast. The good news is that today standards support is good enough across browsers that you should be able to write fairly durable apps if you don't push niche functionality too hard.
  - bluedanieru 15y ago
    What you've described is where a company allows technical debt to crawl up their leg and bite them in the ass. Probably in the name of cost-cutting. They are free to: * never upgrade * do things The Right Way I really don't understand this mentality where we have to bend over backwards for organizations that simply aren't interested in listening to the fucking professionals about how things should be done. Where after a decade of horsing around and allowing high turnover and changing direction every quarter suddenly Mozilla has to drop everything to accommodate some packet of assholes who don't like the direction their free tool is taking. We've made entirely too big a deal out of getting everybody off old browsers. Don't like Firefox? Chrome? IE6 still exists. Feel free to use it for the next 50 years.
  - bad_user 15y ago
    what though, if by total accident, that one webapp worked on FF 3.6 due to a bug in that borwser version? It's not the browser's fault, it's the fault of the people who made that app. Mozilla's responsibility is indeed to provide reasonable backwards compatibility, but as long as that behavior is specified in the standard or as long as it benefits lots and lots of people. But it is also Mozilla's responsibility to advance the state of the art, to implement new emerging standards and to fix their broken implementation, if needed of course. And let me tell you - Mozilla almost lost me to Chrome. I also think your argument doesn't hold water as I've never seen Firefox behave badly on upgrades, ever since version 2. Sure, there might have been an incompatibility here and there, but I never ran into one and if it was, it was easily detectable if you just executed your app in Opera, or Chrome, or Safari, or another non-Gecko browser. However, I suspect that this fear-mongering is from "consultants" and IT staff that are paid for support contracts and testing new versions of Firefox was part of their billable hours. And now they'll have to do more work supposedly testing Firefox.
blumentopf 15y ago
In a recent HN thread, someone correctly stated that Mozilla and Google are working the browser market like a tag team, not like competitors. In accordance with that view, I think it would have been more sensible for Mozilla to stay with their previous versioning scheme, and not call something 5.0 which really should have been 4.1, thus making a complementary offer to the user base, instead of doing it exactly like Chrome.

by Maro 15y ago

bad_user 15y ago

what options do enterprises have? Change their policies? Just let Firefox freaking update itself, after all, Mozilla is more trustworthy than an IT department of debatable competency. And what on earth are they doing in those internal apps that makes them incompatible between Firefox 3 and Firefox 5 ? I do have an intranet app of reasonable complexity that was created using IExplorer 6 and the original Mozilla browser. It still works today, the same as it was working when I made it. That's what standards are for.

pilif 15y ago
what though, if by total accident, that one webapp worked on FF 3.6 due to a bug in that borwser version? That one webapp that some guy once created to make his life easier, that's not documented anywhere any more and that's now being used to do all accounting over even though nobody knows about it. Now imagine you as the IT guy update Firefox from 3.6 to 4 and now that app breaks and with it the accounting department stops working. Nobody will appreciate your "but... I didn't know that app was there" which is totally not the correct answer to "why the hell did you just break the accounting department?" I have seen this happen. Maybe not at this scale, but it definitely did happen. No wonder IT people are scared of updating: If you don't do anything, everything will keep working, but you might piss off some web developers who you don't know. If you DO update, you may risk breaking some home-grown solution you didn't know about and you will be held responsible for all the damage caused. Yes. That app shouldn't exist. Yes, it should be documented, yes it should not have bugs. But it might exist, it might not be documented and it might have bugs. You. Just. Don't. Know. Now don't get me wrong: I'm not one of these guys, mainly because I have not been burnt by this yet (and probably never will - 10 people company and I still know about everything that's going on), but I can certainly understand them.
- cageface 15y ago
  Those are the tradeoffs of webapps. They're relatively portable and don't require manual deployment for every update but web tech moves fast. The good news is that today standards support is good enough across browsers that you should be able to write fairly durable apps if you don't push niche functionality too hard.
- bluedanieru 15y ago
  What you've described is where a company allows technical debt to crawl up their leg and bite them in the ass. Probably in the name of cost-cutting. They are free to: * never upgrade * do things The Right Way I really don't understand this mentality where we have to bend over backwards for organizations that simply aren't interested in listening to the fucking professionals about how things should be done. Where after a decade of horsing around and allowing high turnover and changing direction every quarter suddenly Mozilla has to drop everything to accommodate some packet of assholes who don't like the direction their free tool is taking. We've made entirely too big a deal out of getting everybody off old browsers. Don't like Firefox? Chrome? IE6 still exists. Feel free to use it for the next 50 years.
- bad_user 15y ago
  what though, if by total accident, that one webapp worked on FF 3.6 due to a bug in that borwser version? It's not the browser's fault, it's the fault of the people who made that app. Mozilla's responsibility is indeed to provide reasonable backwards compatibility, but as long as that behavior is specified in the standard or as long as it benefits lots and lots of people. But it is also Mozilla's responsibility to advance the state of the art, to implement new emerging standards and to fix their broken implementation, if needed of course. And let me tell you - Mozilla almost lost me to Chrome. I also think your argument doesn't hold water as I've never seen Firefox behave badly on upgrades, ever since version 2. Sure, there might have been an incompatibility here and there, but I never ran into one and if it was, it was easily detectable if you just executed your app in Opera, or Chrome, or Safari, or another non-Gecko browser. However, I suspect that this fear-mongering is from "consultants" and IT staff that are paid for support contracts and testing new versions of Firefox was part of their billable hours. And now they'll have to do more work supposedly testing Firefox.

blumentopf 15y ago

In a recent HN thread, someone correctly stated that Mozilla and Google are working the browser market like a tag team, not like competitors. In accordance with that view, I think it would have been more sensible for Mozilla to stay with their previous versioning scheme, and not call something 5.0 which really should have been 4.1, thus making a complementary offer to the user base, instead of doing it exactly like Chrome.