4 ms·

I wish Mozilla would explore the enterprise productivity space. There’s huge amount of money currently being made on dubious enterprise security products, and w

by Nextgrid 11mo ago

I wish Mozilla would explore the enterprise productivity space. There’s huge amount of money currently being made on dubious enterprise security products, and with the browser being at the forefront of threats (its literal purpose is to execute lots of untrusted code safely) I feel like an enterprise build with centralised management, in-browser DLP (removes the need for janky TLS interception middleboxes), built-in adblocking (since those also reduce productivity) would sell really well and give them independence from Google and the advertising industry. I don’t understand Mozilla’s current strategy; their attempt to pander to the advertising industry and produce a Chrome clone has been a massive failure as demonstrated by their ever-shrinking browser market share which is now effectively a rounding error. For people that are satisfied with being part of the advertising economy, why wouldn’t you just use Chrome and the Google ecosystem? If you don’t mind your data being used for advertising purposes, Chrome is an excellent browser and their broader ecosystem gives you functionality Mozilla will never match. Mozilla’s only way out is to go back to its roots and build a better user-agent, and provide an adversarial alternative to the current advertising-based ecosystems.

redrix 11mo ago
100% agree. I would happily run a dedicated enterprise browser that blocks downloads, has DLP, has watermarking (etc) if it meant I could use my own PC. Not Browser Isolation or VDI - An actual enterprise browser. My job is pretty much 100% in browser though, so I realise this isn’t viable for everyone.
unethical_ban 11mo ago
Palo Alto Networks is one of several companies pushing custom versions of Chrome as enterprise security browsers doing exactly what you're talking about: holistic DLP/anomaly detection, URL filtering and content inspection in-browser. Presumably because it's closer to the malicious behavior, and network MITM is harder to accomplish with newer TLS and with decentralized workforces. If Firefox had a more customizable, enterprise-feature-focused browser maybe we'd be seeing it used instead of Chrome? I don't know.
zobzu 11mo ago
They don't wanna be Redhat - but IMO it's their biggest mistake (I worked there 10 years).
makeitdouble 11mo ago
> demonstrated by their ever-shrinking browser market share At this point I think Firefox market share stopped being in Mozilla's hand. Just as it was during the browser war days, the critical issue went back to site compatibility: Firefox performs poorly on Google properties (Gmail is fine, YouTube, gsuite, admin consoles are pretty bad), and document based services like Notion or Figma. It kinda works, but Chrome based browser perform notably better. The main point of course is that those sites are at fault (sometimea intentionally when it comes to Google), but that doesn't change Mozilla's position. Stop using Google services is just not a great choice, and many of us use them rely heavily on them for work. Mozilla could make technical miracles and or bring some incredible feature from the left field, but that's a tall order for any company that size, so I'd expect most of their future effort to still end up with lower market share, whether or not they had good ideas.
- calvinmorrison 11mo ago
  At some point people should recognize the web browsers are an opinionated VM. Many many many languages only have one runtime. There's no true reason Mozilla NEEDs its own engine, and probably would be in better shape today if they shifted to a privacy defensive fork of chrome.
  - kibwen 11mo ago
    Mozilla might be in better shape, but the web wouldn't be.
    - calvinmorrison 11mo ago
      Do you think Chrome gives a shit about firefox's engine? No. don't forget the decade of -my-shitty-browser-extension: somethingdumb;
      - godelski 11mo ago
        > Do you think Chrome gives a shit about the Internet? No. FTFY
ivanmontillam 11mo ago
But they already do?[0] -- [0]: https://cyberwarzone.com/2025/11/07/mozilla-unveils-enterprise-support-program-for-firefox/ https://cyberwarzone.com/2025/11/07/mozilla-unveils-enterpri...
glenstein 11mo ago
The main driver of market share loss was the rise of mobile and Chrome being the bundled default on over a billion devices. I don't think Mozilla's run has been perfect, but I am flabbergasted at so many confidently wrong retellings of the history of market share change that treat it exclusively as a story of Mozilla's strategic missteps and make no space for the fact that a trillion dollar company with the #1 or #2 most visited site in the world for the past 20 years muscled a new browser into the picture, leveraging their monopoly in search and mobile, plus laptops produced and sold practically at cost. Firefox could have made every perfect decision you could have dreamed of and still suffered a market share collapse. In fact, I think there's a pretty clear-cut example of a natural experiment demonstrating what it looks like to execute in the browser space to nearly perfection and still lose. In my personal opinion, Opera at its peak with the Presto engine, represented the most impressive combination for it's time of elite level performance and stability, genuinely good innovation that benefited the user, and commitment to the core browser above all else. My favorite was whenever they rolled out Opera Unite (to this day a truly mind blowing idea), I think Opera 11 or 12. And, at a time when it truly mattered, was light on resources and bandwidth and even shipped a portable executable that could be run from any Windows PC from a USB stick. Not only that, but it was consistently ahead of the competition with embedded and device adapted versions. Is business partnerships were creative and cutting edge too. They were early to mobile, struck deals with oems, and even got on the Nintendo Wii. They offered paid and subscription options. IIRC they sold "speed dial" placement for ads and got into the search licensing game. So in everything from performance to speed to stability to innovation that actually benefited users, to intelligent business partnerships and experimenting to find revenue, Opera executed at perhaps the best level anyone could, the perfect moneyball browser. And I was never originally an Opera fanboy, I preferred Firefox 1 and 2 at the start, but pivoted to Opera because, as a college kid with no money, it delivered an impressively modern experience on lightweight hardware. Despite executing at the highest level both in software and business decision making, it didn't matter, because distribution power trumps product quality. Sustaining a fully independent rendering engine became financially unsustainable, and with the maturity of Android, carriers favored bundled stock browsers. With no options left Opera then made what I consider a difficult and very unfortunate decision, but perhaps having no other choice, sold to a new ownership team, pivoted to Chromium, and lost much of its team to Vivaldi which is also based on Chromium. But at no point in the story was their loss of financial visibility or market share due the loss of vision that people think explains Firefox's loss of market share. If the world actually worked that way we'd all be using Opera 25 right now. Edit: If someone more knowledgeable could chime in, I would be fascinated to know if choosing a browser on Android could be a potential monopoly remedy. There's already precedent for that on Windows, iOS and on Android in EU for search.
glenstein 11mo ago
>I wish Mozilla would explore the enterprise productivity space. They're rolling one out in January 2026
araes 11mo ago
They actually have an Enterprise Edition [1] [1] https://www.firefox.com/en-US/browsers/enterprise/ https://www.firefox.com/en-US/browsers/enterprise/ Features: [2] - Rapid Release or Extended Support Release channels - MSI deployment wrapper - ADM and AMDX group policy templates - MacOS plist file policy templates - Linux target JSON file “policies.json” policy templates - “Open in IE” extension for ActiveX Does not have the built-in DLP you're requesting (at as far as I could find) and Firefox already has pretty aggressive adblocking that sets off lots of sites for me. [2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-enterprise-vs-normal-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-enterprise-vs-n...
drewda 11mo ago
As others have mentioned but not yet shared links, enterprise support is coming in January: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-support-organizations https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-support-organiz...

redrix 11mo ago

100% agree. I would happily run a dedicated enterprise browser that blocks downloads, has DLP, has watermarking (etc) if it meant I could use my own PC. Not Browser Isolation or VDI - An actual enterprise browser. My job is pretty much 100% in browser though, so I realise this isn’t viable for everyone.

unethical_ban 11mo ago

Palo Alto Networks is one of several companies pushing custom versions of Chrome as enterprise security browsers doing exactly what you're talking about: holistic DLP/anomaly detection, URL filtering and content inspection in-browser. Presumably because it's closer to the malicious behavior, and network MITM is harder to accomplish with newer TLS and with decentralized workforces. If Firefox had a more customizable, enterprise-feature-focused browser maybe we'd be seeing it used instead of Chrome? I don't know.

zobzu 11mo ago

They don't wanna be Redhat - but IMO it's their biggest mistake (I worked there 10 years).

makeitdouble 11mo ago

> demonstrated by their ever-shrinking browser market share At this point I think Firefox market share stopped being in Mozilla's hand. Just as it was during the browser war days, the critical issue went back to site compatibility: Firefox performs poorly on Google properties (Gmail is fine, YouTube, gsuite, admin consoles are pretty bad), and document based services like Notion or Figma. It kinda works, but Chrome based browser perform notably better. The main point of course is that those sites are at fault (sometimea intentionally when it comes to Google), but that doesn't change Mozilla's position. Stop using Google services is just not a great choice, and many of us use them rely heavily on them for work. Mozilla could make technical miracles and or bring some incredible feature from the left field, but that's a tall order for any company that size, so I'd expect most of their future effort to still end up with lower market share, whether or not they had good ideas.

calvinmorrison 11mo ago
At some point people should recognize the web browsers are an opinionated VM. Many many many languages only have one runtime. There's no true reason Mozilla NEEDs its own engine, and probably would be in better shape today if they shifted to a privacy defensive fork of chrome.
- kibwen 11mo ago
  Mozilla might be in better shape, but the web wouldn't be.
  - calvinmorrison 11mo ago
    Do you think Chrome gives a shit about firefox's engine? No. don't forget the decade of -my-shitty-browser-extension: somethingdumb;
    - godelski 11mo ago
      > Do you think Chrome gives a shit about the Internet? No. FTFY

ivanmontillam 11mo ago

But they already do?[0] -- [0]: https://cyberwarzone.com/2025/11/07/mozilla-unveils-enterprise-support-program-for-firefox/ https://cyberwarzone.com/2025/11/07/mozilla-unveils-enterpri...

glenstein 11mo ago

The main driver of market share loss was the rise of mobile and Chrome being the bundled default on over a billion devices. I don't think Mozilla's run has been perfect, but I am flabbergasted at so many confidently wrong retellings of the history of market share change that treat it exclusively as a story of Mozilla's strategic missteps and make no space for the fact that a trillion dollar company with the #1 or #2 most visited site in the world for the past 20 years muscled a new browser into the picture, leveraging their monopoly in search and mobile, plus laptops produced and sold practically at cost. Firefox could have made every perfect decision you could have dreamed of and still suffered a market share collapse. In fact, I think there's a pretty clear-cut example of a natural experiment demonstrating what it looks like to execute in the browser space to nearly perfection and still lose. In my personal opinion, Opera at its peak with the Presto engine, represented the most impressive combination for it's time of elite level performance and stability, genuinely good innovation that benefited the user, and commitment to the core browser above all else. My favorite was whenever they rolled out Opera Unite (to this day a truly mind blowing idea), I think Opera 11 or 12. And, at a time when it truly mattered, was light on resources and bandwidth and even shipped a portable executable that could be run from any Windows PC from a USB stick. Not only that, but it was consistently ahead of the competition with embedded and device adapted versions. Is business partnerships were creative and cutting edge too. They were early to mobile, struck deals with oems, and even got on the Nintendo Wii. They offered paid and subscription options. IIRC they sold "speed dial" placement for ads and got into the search licensing game. So in everything from performance to speed to stability to innovation that actually benefited users, to intelligent business partnerships and experimenting to find revenue, Opera executed at perhaps the best level anyone could, the perfect moneyball browser. And I was never originally an Opera fanboy, I preferred Firefox 1 and 2 at the start, but pivoted to Opera because, as a college kid with no money, it delivered an impressively modern experience on lightweight hardware. Despite executing at the highest level both in software and business decision making, it didn't matter, because distribution power trumps product quality. Sustaining a fully independent rendering engine became financially unsustainable, and with the maturity of Android, carriers favored bundled stock browsers. With no options left Opera then made what I consider a difficult and very unfortunate decision, but perhaps having no other choice, sold to a new ownership team, pivoted to Chromium, and lost much of its team to Vivaldi which is also based on Chromium. But at no point in the story was their loss of financial visibility or market share due the loss of vision that people think explains Firefox's loss of market share. If the world actually worked that way we'd all be using Opera 25 right now. Edit: If someone more knowledgeable could chime in, I would be fascinated to know if choosing a browser on Android could be a potential monopoly remedy. There's already precedent for that on Windows, iOS and on Android in EU for search.

glenstein 11mo ago

>I wish Mozilla would explore the enterprise productivity space. They're rolling one out in January 2026

araes 11mo ago

They actually have an Enterprise Edition [1] [1] https://www.firefox.com/en-US/browsers/enterprise/ https://www.firefox.com/en-US/browsers/enterprise/ Features: [2] - Rapid Release or Extended Support Release channels - MSI deployment wrapper - ADM and AMDX group policy templates - MacOS plist file policy templates - Linux target JSON file “policies.json” policy templates - “Open in IE” extension for ActiveX Does not have the built-in DLP you're requesting (at as far as I could find) and Firefox already has pretty aggressive adblocking that sets off lots of sites for me. [2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-enterprise-vs-normal-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-enterprise-vs-n...

drewda 11mo ago

As others have mentioned but not yet shared links, enterprise support is coming in January: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-support-organizations https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-support-organiz...