Now this is the kind of Mozilla project I can get behind it focuses on the browser it gives a potential path for revenue and I practically jumped up and down when they announced their bringing in Thunderbird.
Right?!? There's a lot of negative sentiment on the comments here on HN but probably from people that don't understand locked down corps and other higher-security work environments where these features are needed. Plus not relying on Microsoft/Google is always a good thing. I can definitely see this being useful in hospitals, government orgs, etc.
Not only revenue but enterprise users are valuable market share. Think of things like Slack calling which last I checked don't work in Firefox unless you spoof the user-agent. More enterprise users will force better Firefox support in a huge variety of websites which will benefit all Firefox users.
Yes, this is good move. I am not getting why are people being up in arms, if they are getting fund from this, it will help improving Firefox, and resolve pain points the complainers have.
Are you using, or planning to use, the Enterprise version, and feel like this functionality is missing? Or is the complain about the regular release? I'm asking because I fail to see the link...
... That doesn't make any kind of sense whatsoever. Firefox puts customer privacy first, now that includes enterprise customers. Like how do you even possibly come to this conclusion. Mind boggling.
Features aren't a zero sum game. Enterprise can have a set of features, and the consumer version can have the same feature. Turn the example around. Enterprise Firefox will render HTML. That does not mean the consumer version will have the ability to render HTML removed.
So the answer isn't yes. The answer is we don't know if they will or will not remove the feature from non-enterprise, but it doesn't seem likely.
The answer is not yes, why are you spreading bs? It's just an extra feature item on the list, there is nothing that gets removed in the "normal" Firefox.
No. Are you thinking that was a feature intended to appeal to corporate use or something? I'm pretty sure it was all about AI backlash. It's still a popular setting to have available. (I have no idea how many people actually use it.)
You can already turn everything off under Settings -> AI Control. Personally I keep Translations on so I can translate locally instead of calling external services.
(Regardless of one's feelings about generative AI, I think some features like local translation are too nice to be labeled "LLM shit", but I admit I am biased)
There's already Island browser that competes in this space. Plenty of companies pay for browser control that goes beyond what the normal policies can provide.
You can't think of an enterprise that doesn't want all of its web browsing metadata collected by third parties? Some enterprises are much more security-conscious than that. I have seen protected paper trash bins in a research lab and office buildings with X-ray scanners (mainly for electronic devices, not weapons).
Does it block ads like Brave? Tracking is one of the worst plagues of modern browsing so blocking all kinds of tracking and fingerprinting should be the first concern in an enterprise. Nothing should leak to the outside world
I agree with the other person though that you should install uBlock Origin in Firefox (which works better there than in Chromium based browsers) and never look back.
Well, just install the fucking extension in Firefox. There is nothing else that is as good as uBlock Origin. E.g. Reddit prevents you from reading unless you log in? There's a filter for that in an "annoyances" block-list that you can activate.
I wanted to, but my dumbass global IT department directly blocks uBlock Origin, Origin Lite, and AdBlock by extension IDs. Chrome, Firefox, Edge, the works.
I cannot even begin to fathom that stupid fucking decision from someone above me.
...and this is/was the true Firefox way. You don't need to get some other browsers on the same engine made by shady companies. You have powerful plugins.
So much negativity in here. I mean, I get the antipathy toward Mozilla, but they're trying to find a way to make the actual browser a revenue stream. Yeah it could skew incentives or something, but unless you believe that you, and everyone you know is ready to start a paid subscription to Firefox Personal tomorrow, it's something like this, or more Google deals and pushing "service" integrations.
Seriously, this place is so damn negative these days, but not even constructively.
Mozilla as an organisation is rotten and genuinely needs to die, so that Firefox can live. The only thing from Mozilla that people care about is Firefox, but Mozilla doesn’t care about Firefox to a quite stunning degree. As an example: four or five years ago they announced laying off a quarter of their 1,000 employees, and declared what they were going to be focusing on: none of it was related to Firefox in any way (and most of it they’ve since shut down). And it should go without saying that you don’t need 750 employees to make a browser, and probably can’t effectively use even a hundred.
you don’t need 750 employees to make a browser, and probably can’t effectively use even a hundred
Browser engines are incredibly complicated, yet at the same time are very performance and security sensitive while needing insane backwards compatibility and full multi-platform support. That unfortunately requires large teams, which is why there's only Gecko and WebKit/Blink left.
"Making a browser" you can do with a team of 1 person. Just search & replace the branding in the Chromium source.
Well, you read one of their goals and visions here. That part is ok.
The question is: how is that goal turning out once it meets reality?
Tons of great ideas failed for various reasons. Alan Kay keeps on
pointing out how sad he is that Xerox PARC failed in many ways. Reality
is a strong selector - and the evil Google empire will make competition
really, really hard here.
The enterprise case can make a dent in distribution monopolies. I mean, even if Chrome is bundled all over the place for consumers, if an enterprise says "use Firefox" it can distribute it and enforce it.
At my unit of my Uni we have Windows desktops managed by central IT. As a software dev they gave me a bypass to get administrator access but they do enforce that we use Firefox ESR -- I recently got a brand new Firefox but after a while my Firefox does fall behind the times. I develop Firefox-first and let my tester find Chrome bugs, I think we find one less than once a year, over decades I've found that if you develop with the off-brand browser you have very little trouble with the dominant browser whereas if you develop with the dominant browser your product won't work with off-brand browsers. Developers like me have been keeping Firefox viable and probably cumulatively we create more enterprise value for Mozilla than Mozilla's own developers. I think Mozilla is the epitome of the badly run NGO and can criticize just about everything about it but... the cause of competition for browsers is one of the most important tech causes and it's one that isn't entirely lost. I try to only use Firefox except for YouTube which seems to be punishing Firefox users, for a long time I found Firefox compatibility was great but I have seen an increase in problems in the last year which is concentrated in banking and certain e-commerce sites, hotel booking and such. The only trouble we have with it is that we have an internal app that (for better or worse) loads 40,000 rows into a data table and performs really well on Chrome but feels pokey on Firefox.
I tried to be careful with a caveat, but you're not wrong. I think it's a good thing to chase and I hope Mozilla makes a stable long term commitment to it and doesn't expect instant results.
re: youtube, I really think it's a place where the fediverse is needed the most, and is unfortunately the weakest. I have seriously been considering something like an outreach campaign for niche categories just to build up the fediverse video universe (e.g. asking bands if they are okay with their live show videos being mirrored to fediverse, educational content, and maybe even something like a fediverse friday). Maybe a convo for another time but I think it's a huge issue where, unlike the browser wars, there's not even an obvious second best option.
So my take is that video hosting is pretty expensive and that it's hard to compete with Google because: (1) Google owns tons of fiber everywhere and has peering agreements with everybody so it has a better cost structure and (2) of course Google has a great advertising system to turn views into $ so (3) they can kick some money back to creators and still profit in a big way.
I have looked at the question of building something YouTube-like based on AWS where people could upload videos, they get re-encoded, hosted in S3, and sent out through CloudFront. It wouldn't be that hard and the system would be bulletproof and not require a lot of operational attention but it would be expensive... You could build something cheaper in terms of hosting costs but you'll pay it back in development and ops expenses until you get big.
And then there's the moderation issue: if you run an image hosting site people will try to upload CSAM and it's not hard to to enforce a no-ero policy but between that and hate speech and other problems who wants to deal with it?
20 years later they are finally taking Enterprise seriously. I still remember how hard it was to push Mozilla just to support Windows Group Policy along with other enterprise requirements and they were simply not interested in enterprise. Even though later they did some bare minimum to support it.
This was needed. A lot of large businesses ban Firefox because they don't have these kind of controls. I can't test Firefox on my work computer because company policy prevents it being installed. And that kind of thing really hurts Firefox.
All windows and desktop support folks where I work (bank) still work with File explorer, only it drives me crazy.
I've showed them Total commander and some advanced features, panes and overall speed but no, they all went back to hunting little windows, browsing by clicking, drag and drop hunts and so on.
The obvious inefficiency and their sluggishness when doing anything on filesystem is driving me crazy but I gave up.
Yes but if your work day consisted of only writing text, then using notepad would be torture.
It seems only developers invest time and energy into their tooling and software required to do their job. It would be kind of unthinkable for a developer at a big company to not use some kind of IDE and instead use the OS built-in text editor.
I've met plenty of developers who seem to go too far in the other direction and spend all their time optimizing their tools, and not actually producing anything that anyone else cares about. Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1205/
Lol idk file explorer is pretty much fine? Finder is a joke but I've never really felt any need to replace File Explorer. Tree view, tabs, bookmarks/shortcuts...I've never really liked a two-pane UI vs just having two windows, or two tabs, and windows can snap two windows side by side with two key presses. What about TC is saving you serious amounts of time?
Tons of features packed into 1 small integrated, very fast completely bugless tool done by 1 guy - ie sftp client, best recursive search I've used in Windows (including nested archives), I can view and edit files directly in archives (even within archives) without the need to unpack/repack them, great files / folders comparator, viewer for many formats including hex, open plugin support with good ecosystem, 2-pane system with tabs makes everything much faster and you can keep a lot of parallel work around for later, it remembers them after closing/restart, copying / moving queue is fantastic. You can customize everything. I am barely scratching surface with above. In good ol' Winrar style you can use it perpetually for free as shareware (but damn if somebody deserves money for their tool its this guy).
Once proficient I am much much faster than proficient file explorer users, its not even comparable when one does a lot of things with files/folders, personally and profesionally. By far the best windows-only software I am aware of and the one of main reasons I didnt migrate to Linux. Otherwise I would need 10+ additional software installed and some features of it are best in class (on windows at least).
Its good ol' Norton Commander from DOS alive but has gigatons of modern improvements.
I'll tell you a secret: I'm actually using MS Edge only on my corporate machine. Although some months ago they began to roll-out Firefox as well (for whatever reason).
I don't care. On that machine, there is NOTHING going on that I own (all of that is the IP of someone else).
Such a machine, with Windows, MS Teams, MS Whatsoever, Symantec Whatsoever, Cloud Office, Cloud Ticket System, Cloud Wiki, ..., ..., ... doesn't get more trustworthy just by using Firefox. They run a continuous MitM attack against all https connections that I make (and a lot of your employers do the same)!!! You can polish turds, but you cannot make that environment a trustworthy one.
I would never touch that machine for anything remotely "personal". On the other hand, for work, I don't care. I'll use the default browser, and if the default browser is MS Edge, I'll not spend ANY effort into working around it. That wouldn't be "passionate", but just stupid imho. YMMV of course depending on the employer and other factors.
And if there is a page full of ads, and it overwhelms me too much, well, I'll make a walk to the coffee machine and come back when I'm ready for it. It's that easy.
I only use whatever they give me at work, too. The trick is to do private browsing in a private browser. From a work machine, I only ever go to work related sites.
I'd rather not have Firefox installed, than Firefox preloaded with MitM certificates, disabled uBlock Origin, Proxy Switcher, added Adobe, Copilot, and a few more "useful" extensions and security add-ons that can't be disabled, and so on.
If company IT gets hold of Firefox, it's not better than just using Edge or Chrome that comes by default.
hopefully the IT department pushes out uBlock Origin with whatever browsers they require people use. I used to push it out to several customers with the Chrome GPOs... although I know it doesn't work in Chrome anymore
uBlock Origin requires permission to read and alter anything on any website. Although I trust it, and I don't see an alternative for something like an ad-blocker, I can see how that would be a deal-killer for corporate IT.
ZScaler comes from a vendor and a purchase agreement, uBlock Origin comes from "some guy" for free and that makes corporate folks uneasy. If Firefox would offer uBlock Origin in their enterprise version for $100/seat/month and market it as an "endpoint malware blocker for the cloud" instead of an ad blocker they'd probably get a lot of uptake.
Your web browser also has the ability to read and alter anything on any website, do you trust the makers of your web browser? (And everyone else in the supply chain...)
I wouldn't call Raymond Hill a "random" Canadian guy. I am also fairly certain that these same organizations rely on code written by even more obscure, random individuals every day.
AFAIK Firefox add-ons go through review before being uploaded, so this would actually only be an issue if you don't trust both the Canadian guy and Mozilla.
It's insane how much access companies give MS. The insights they must have on so many companies by snooping on what they do in outlook and excel alone...
Exactly. My company mandates Chrome or Edge with no extensions for work, and the SSO only works with these. I use Firefox in the side for browsing because IT doesn’t control it and I can block ads.
Note that Firefox Enterprise and Firefox can live side by side, so your workflow would still work, unless your corporate admin specifically moves to block it.
If my company would tell me what browser should I use for work, I would look away from it. Fortunately all the companies I worked for didn't care what browser I use (even most people used Firefox anyway).
That's exactly what they want, because there's tons of other people dying to take your place that barely know what a browser even is, who won't complain, and who will work for less money.
Obviously experiences will vary, but I have now had three organizations express concern (though not to the point of telling me I must stop) that I use third-party Firefox derivatives. This started with Pale Moon and then continued with LibreWolf.
The concern is that they "aren't authorized apps". As I've read it, this is a proxy for "we aren't certain these apps can be trusted, but nobody ever got fired for pointing the finger at Mozilla or Google when something goes wrong, but would be fired if they pointed it at this one random guy in the Netherlands".
This happened to me a couple of times (out of thousands of meetings) and it was because the audio was for some reason being piped to a different audio device.
Nobody needs 2 browsers to support on locked down computers. There's no increase in functionality apart from making between 0 and 1 extremely niche users slightly more happy (but not more capable).
That's weird. I used to work in a very secure facility (think actual air-gapped supercomputers where network access is building-LAN only) and Firefox was the only approved browser.
(you still need to get data in and out sometimes, Chips can be misused as radio antennas, loudspeakers can be used as microphone and do ultra sonic data transmission to other devices etc, so still making sure the software is under control on the Air gapped computer sounds like a good idea)
That's the point, you'd think any browsers should be fine? But only Firefox was approved after OpSec department did their research. There were definitely something that made them very unhappy about Chromium to ban it wholesale.
There are already some controls in place available, but they are often platform-specific (GPOs on Windows, Configuration Profiles on macOS) than can be pushed through Active Directory, Intune, Ivanti, etc, but this does remove some friction and configuration gaps where you can centrally manage those policies in a single location.
Yes, Firefox was already configurable through enterprise policies that an admin could deploy.
Firefox Enterprise tries to remove as much friction there as possible, and adds a pile of features like deployment monitoring, policy changes while running, device posture checks, various security features like SIEM logging, etc.
The other part is that you get the option to run all supporting services entirely on premise, so the browser never has to "phone home" to us.
There is, but the configuration and deployment methods are platform-specific, so you'd need to maintain one set of GPOs, another set of .mobileconfig, etc
Then if you need to change something, you need to change those individally per platform.
With this you can set it up and centrally manage them from a single dashboard, the only thing you need to do is to do the platform-specific enrollment once.
I'm glad Mozilla is trying to find a way to monetize the platform in exchange of providing a tool to better manage the browser at the enterprise level.
Large companies' IT departments claim a lot of reasons for their policies. Often the underlying reason is unstated, and has more to do with convenience of governance or with sales relationships.
It looks like they do actually offer that as a feature: "Employees can access internal company sites and web apps from personal devices without a device-level VPN"
As a Firefox user, I hope this works. As someone who works in IT, people are going to try and install Chrome at all costs and your ticket queues will be clogged with people saying a computer is broken or has no internet access if it doesn't have Chrome on it.
For general-purpose use this may be true. For specialized Wrb-based tools, like access to medical or legal systems, not as much: the users are conditioned to work with a specific browser (many remember MSIE-only apps), and are used to the idea that their workstation has all kinds of Internet access limitations, along with a corporate policy that expressly forbids arbitrary browsing.
I wish this was true. At my org we had to add Chrome to the base image because otherwise we get so many tickets/calls about it even though we provide it via an internal software distribution service that any user has access to. People like what they like and are very resistant to change.
Have done small to medium institutional rollouts of Firefox in different orgs, some of which were on top of a Linux base and others a Windows base. Windows deployments include Firefox in the base image and configuration is managed with AD and Ansible. Linux deployments manage configuration with Ansible. The preinstalled browsers were removed or disabled.
All users received an orientation and were informed that Firefox is the only approved browser.
Firefox was pinned to the desktop and taskbar, usually with the name "INTERNET" as the web browser is commonly known here.
The number of support tickets was very small. Usually if a user reported a problem with the web browser, it was a page that was also broken in Chrome or some other network issue.
Users reacted positively when they saw that there are no ads in Firefox. uBlock Origin was preinstalled.
Without ads the web browser is massively faster, which also was perceived by users.
If there is any initial resistance to Firefox, it usually melts quickly.
The only bother has been the frequent UI updates to Firefox, which occasionally cause frustration until we apply a new configuration to revert whatever fresh horrors Firefox designers have birthed. With ESR, these problems are less frequent.
I hope this Firefox Enterprise freezes the UI to the classic "tabs look like tabs" aesthetic, maintaining the option of vertical tabs.
I briefly read institutional as 'intentional', with both in mind, the standardization of experience is something that's really wroth thinking about.
One feeling I am starting to get is server side web apps might make more of a re-emergence, because putting so much application and business logic in the front end serves as a bigger footprint for possible security issues.
With respect to resistance to browsers (or preference for something else), I agree that users seek familiarity and those who got to start with Firefox do still remember it.
Mozilla is just one org, but it's relative independence will hopefully provide other perspectives to using a web browser as a universal interface, not just for humans, but our new sentence-dna containing friends.
It's absolutely insane to me that more orgs aren't rolling out things like uBlock Origin. In fact, at my bigbrain sillycunt valley job I am forbidden by policy from installing it (though no technical control in place). It's the simplest, highest ROI protection you can use on the web imo.
An earlier company I worked at had this same issue with Internet Explorer. It was after IE had been deprecated by microsoft as a browser but our IT department still had it as a downloadable application. Most of my team's on-call issues were from internal users using IE to access our site, even after we added an IE compatible popup that would tell them NOT to use IE.
Chrome, or Firefox are third party browsers to the operating system.
The internet explorer/edge issues were due to a web browser that was built into the operating system, and owned by the operating system company (Microsoft in this case).
There was a popular trend for a while that IE was the windows feature that let you download a different browser.
Apple had a similar run with Safari and from what I recall had to change.
By both worlds I guess I assumed that the only reason people use Firefox is that it isn’t tied to an advertising company that wants to enshittify the internet at the expense of my user experience because I saw nothing else about Firefox that I liked better than Chrome.
I've found this to be one of those issues that just seems completely normal when you first hear it but when you dig into the actual users, the "why" starts to get lost.
My anec-data on the subject seems to imply it affects a very specific segment of people: The "I only use a (usually Windows) computer at work" folks. The odd part of that is that almost all of them seem to own iPhones or iPads (specifically not Android devices) and since they use these devices, exclusively, outside of work and one can assume they're probably opening Safari for browsing, why do they have such a strong association that Chrome must be "the browser." This segment, though, seems to make up a large majority of "knowledge workers" outside of IT.
Now, like probably a lot of us here, I'm the tech support for everyone who knows I "play with computers professionally." One of the first things I do is remove the Chrome and Edge icon from the task bar[0] and add Firefox with a small set of extensions that generally keep me from having to revisit them due to malware. I usually just tell them "The button you use to get on the Internet changed but it's the same." ... and Bob's your uncle. I return a year later, the same Firefox icon is in the same place, updated several versions and all is well. They all vaguely knew they were using something different before, some knew it was called Chrome or Edge, but "the icon changed" is all I've had to say for probably a decade since the two browsers' core functionality is close enough that they generally cover every site the older generation would be expected to visit.
It feels like a variation of "they've got enough knowledge to be dangerous."
[0] I don't think I've ever seen my parents, aunts/uncles, extended older family every try to find a program through that menu that pops up when you click the button that used to be called the "Start" button. :)
Assuming this is not NYC: how many of the people in the group you're describing drive reliable, used cars that they own outright, and how many lease new? I think I know which, and if so, it would go a long way towards characterizing their mindset.
I think it's a status play, for people who have been convinced that status is tantamount to utility. If you lower yourself to options that aren't well-known to be high status, or at least known - particularly ones that require tinkering of any sort - you are wasting time, and worse, you are signalling to other people that you're a time-waster, that your time isn't valuable, and that your choice to waste time rather than use the default or high-status option shows that you have a defect in judgment.
Many years ago I installed Firefox 0.6 on my mother-in-law’s laptop and gave it the IE logo - she never noticed, it never got updated, but she never had any malware problems.
Also, half the sites on the Internet don’t work properly on anything but chrome. At home, I’m an ardent and committed Firefox user, at work, I use Chrome like everyone else (and keep anything personal as far away from it as I can).
In my workplace a lot of people used to like firefox because it was the only browser on which the pac proxy setting was not enforced by group policy so it allowed them to have their corporate apps to actually work regardless of the network they were connected to.
They lost fierefox a few months ago due to new compamy policy and with it lost access to some apps when working from home. We know it is related to the proxy config but company is so big and processes are such a mess nobody knows who should be contacted and by which email alias or service now ticket.
Do I work in the twilight zone or something? The company I work for is trying to phase out Firefox, and I'm getting multiple complaints a week from non-technical users that they can't open Firefox anymore and they don't want to use any other browser.
people who decide on policy tend not be the same people on the ground doing real work. Therefore management makes a policy, they think they are doing the correct thing, when in actual fact, they're not, but just don't hear or get the right type of feedback (including feedback they trust to be real and isn't just the workers complaining/whinging unnecessarily).
This type of dysfunction occurs quite frequently i find.
I think if you really want to build something like that,
you need real momentum. Perhaps the ladybird folks can
succeed here, the future will tell. I don't think Mozilla
has enough momentum left.
The number of people using web browsers has gone up massively though over the past 15 years. 2%-3% right now isn't as bad as it would have been in the past
This landing page smells like AI slop. I hate it not because it's AI generated, but the fact that reading more doesn't give me any further understanding.
>Firefox Enterprise. Different at the core. Stronger because of it.
311 comments
[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 27.7 ms ] threadSolid props to Mozilla for this one. Good job.
All in all good thing, why are they so mad.
So what before came as main advantage of Firefox is now dropped and put behind the paywall?
Thanks for the open admission that regular Firefox does not.
> AI controls — allow, restrict or disable AI tools
So the answer is yes, no need for making up a cynical answer.
So the answer isn't yes. The answer is we don't know if they will or will not remove the feature from non-enterprise, but it doesn't seem likely.
> they will remove "AI controls" from normal Firefox
which is the question the original poster asked?
(Regardless of one's feelings about generative AI, I think some features like local translation are too nice to be labeled "LLM shit", but I admit I am biased)
Like a rich kid living on daddy's money, they're somewhat disconnected from the reality that most people exist in.
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/phasing-out-the-o...
I agree with the other person though that you should install uBlock Origin in Firefox (which works better there than in Chromium based browsers) and never look back.
It allows forcing specific extensions on, and allowing user installs is a flag.
I use the policy engine on nixos to install some plugins and disable some of firefox's dumber features.
I cannot even begin to fathom that stupid fucking decision from someone above me.
...and this is/was the true Firefox way. You don't need to get some other browsers on the same engine made by shady companies. You have powerful plugins.
It takes literally two seconds to install uBlock Origin.
You can even preload it by baking in the xpi file.
https://librewolf.net/
It is a Firefox fork with sane, user-respecting defaults. Of course it breaks sites that do not respect their users' privacy / agency.
https://mozilla.github.io/policy-templates/#extensions
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Deploying-uBlock-Orig...
Seriously, this place is so damn negative these days, but not even constructively.
Browser engines are incredibly complicated, yet at the same time are very performance and security sensitive while needing insane backwards compatibility and full multi-platform support. That unfortunately requires large teams, which is why there's only Gecko and WebKit/Blink left.
"Making a browser" you can do with a team of 1 person. Just search & replace the branding in the Chromium source.
The question is: how is that goal turning out once it meets reality?
Tons of great ideas failed for various reasons. Alan Kay keeps on pointing out how sad he is that Xerox PARC failed in many ways. Reality is a strong selector - and the evil Google empire will make competition really, really hard here.
At my unit of my Uni we have Windows desktops managed by central IT. As a software dev they gave me a bypass to get administrator access but they do enforce that we use Firefox ESR -- I recently got a brand new Firefox but after a while my Firefox does fall behind the times. I develop Firefox-first and let my tester find Chrome bugs, I think we find one less than once a year, over decades I've found that if you develop with the off-brand browser you have very little trouble with the dominant browser whereas if you develop with the dominant browser your product won't work with off-brand browsers. Developers like me have been keeping Firefox viable and probably cumulatively we create more enterprise value for Mozilla than Mozilla's own developers. I think Mozilla is the epitome of the badly run NGO and can criticize just about everything about it but... the cause of competition for browsers is one of the most important tech causes and it's one that isn't entirely lost. I try to only use Firefox except for YouTube which seems to be punishing Firefox users, for a long time I found Firefox compatibility was great but I have seen an increase in problems in the last year which is concentrated in banking and certain e-commerce sites, hotel booking and such. The only trouble we have with it is that we have an internal app that (for better or worse) loads 40,000 rows into a data table and performs really well on Chrome but feels pokey on Firefox.
re: youtube, I really think it's a place where the fediverse is needed the most, and is unfortunately the weakest. I have seriously been considering something like an outreach campaign for niche categories just to build up the fediverse video universe (e.g. asking bands if they are okay with their live show videos being mirrored to fediverse, educational content, and maybe even something like a fediverse friday). Maybe a convo for another time but I think it's a huge issue where, unlike the browser wars, there's not even an obvious second best option.
I have looked at the question of building something YouTube-like based on AWS where people could upload videos, they get re-encoded, hosted in S3, and sent out through CloudFront. It wouldn't be that hard and the system would be bulletproof and not require a lot of operational attention but it would be expensive... You could build something cheaper in terms of hosting costs but you'll pay it back in development and ops expenses until you get big.
And then there's the moderation issue: if you run an image hosting site people will try to upload CSAM and it's not hard to to enforce a no-ero policy but between that and hate speech and other problems who wants to deal with it?
90% of my colleagues use Microsoft Edge without extensions.
Other browsers are seen as exotic.
I've showed them Total commander and some advanced features, panes and overall speed but no, they all went back to hunting little windows, browsing by clicking, drag and drop hunts and so on.
The obvious inefficiency and their sluggishness when doing anything on filesystem is driving me crazy but I gave up.
People don’t care about optimizing every little thing.
It seems only developers invest time and energy into their tooling and software required to do their job. It would be kind of unthinkable for a developer at a big company to not use some kind of IDE and instead use the OS built-in text editor.
Can you please briefly describe the features you think make it worth it?
Once proficient I am much much faster than proficient file explorer users, its not even comparable when one does a lot of things with files/folders, personally and profesionally. By far the best windows-only software I am aware of and the one of main reasons I didnt migrate to Linux. Otherwise I would need 10+ additional software installed and some features of it are best in class (on windows at least).
Its good ol' Norton Commander from DOS alive but has gigatons of modern improvements.
If we are talking specifically about windows explorer, I think not freezing randomly for no reason once in a while would be considered a nice feature.
IP Messenger is also great for what it is
I don't care. On that machine, there is NOTHING going on that I own (all of that is the IP of someone else).
Such a machine, with Windows, MS Teams, MS Whatsoever, Symantec Whatsoever, Cloud Office, Cloud Ticket System, Cloud Wiki, ..., ..., ... doesn't get more trustworthy just by using Firefox. They run a continuous MitM attack against all https connections that I make (and a lot of your employers do the same)!!! You can polish turds, but you cannot make that environment a trustworthy one.
I would never touch that machine for anything remotely "personal". On the other hand, for work, I don't care. I'll use the default browser, and if the default browser is MS Edge, I'll not spend ANY effort into working around it. That wouldn't be "passionate", but just stupid imho. YMMV of course depending on the employer and other factors.
And if there is a page full of ads, and it overwhelms me too much, well, I'll make a walk to the coffee machine and come back when I'm ready for it. It's that easy.
[0]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customizing-firefox-usi...
If company IT gets hold of Firefox, it's not better than just using Edge or Chrome that comes by default.
Like seriously, Mozilla could probably make some serious revenue with this. I only wonder if it would open them up to getting sued, somehow.
The concern is that they "aren't authorized apps". As I've read it, this is a proxy for "we aren't certain these apps can be trusted, but nobody ever got fired for pointing the finger at Mozilla or Google when something goes wrong, but would be fired if they pointed it at this one random guy in the Netherlands".
I could not get audio on Firefox
It was the only site I ever found where I could not get audio and I suspect some Google malfeasance
When I initiated a meeting I used Jitsi, no such troubles
(you still need to get data in and out sometimes, Chips can be misused as radio antennas, loudspeakers can be used as microphone and do ultra sonic data transmission to other devices etc, so still making sure the software is under control on the Air gapped computer sounds like a good idea)
Along with that, push extensions to add DLP bits, etc
Firefox Enterprise tries to remove as much friction there as possible, and adds a pile of features like deployment monitoring, policy changes while running, device posture checks, various security features like SIEM logging, etc.
The other part is that you get the option to run all supporting services entirely on premise, so the browser never has to "phone home" to us.
Then if you need to change something, you need to change those individally per platform.
With this you can set it up and centrally manage them from a single dashboard, the only thing you need to do is to do the platform-specific enrollment once.
I'm glad Mozilla is trying to find a way to monetize the platform in exchange of providing a tool to better manage the browser at the enterprise level.
I think it's policies.json and mozilla.cfg
Mozilla would have made tons of money.
It looks like they do actually offer that as a feature: "Employees can access internal company sites and web apps from personal devices without a device-level VPN"
I manage these types of decisions and won’t use it.
The installation of any software and management of it is norhing tnew in the corporate world.
Chrome may be chrome. Chrome is not the default on windows computers in corporations. Edge usually is.
After it's installed, professionals much more now know today how to remember which icon to select and run.
I remember one place simply changed the icon and watched the issues drop.
People really can be creatures of habit.
Some enterprises i've seen put in their own icon for a web browser (imagine starting with an intranet) and that helps separate it a bit more.
This might not be for everyone, nor ideal in all cases but people seemed to be OK with the idea of having a dashboard to launch their work from.
All users received an orientation and were informed that Firefox is the only approved browser.
Firefox was pinned to the desktop and taskbar, usually with the name "INTERNET" as the web browser is commonly known here.
The number of support tickets was very small. Usually if a user reported a problem with the web browser, it was a page that was also broken in Chrome or some other network issue.
Users reacted positively when they saw that there are no ads in Firefox. uBlock Origin was preinstalled.
Without ads the web browser is massively faster, which also was perceived by users.
If there is any initial resistance to Firefox, it usually melts quickly.
The only bother has been the frequent UI updates to Firefox, which occasionally cause frustration until we apply a new configuration to revert whatever fresh horrors Firefox designers have birthed. With ESR, these problems are less frequent.
I hope this Firefox Enterprise freezes the UI to the classic "tabs look like tabs" aesthetic, maintaining the option of vertical tabs.
One feeling I am starting to get is server side web apps might make more of a re-emergence, because putting so much application and business logic in the front end serves as a bigger footprint for possible security issues.
With respect to resistance to browsers (or preference for something else), I agree that users seek familiarity and those who got to start with Firefox do still remember it.
Mozilla is just one org, but it's relative independence will hopefully provide other perspectives to using a web browser as a universal interface, not just for humans, but our new sentence-dna containing friends.
Never underestimate the stupidity of your average computer user.
Surrounding ourselves with tech-literate people conditions us to believe that the general population is more literate than they are
The internet explorer/edge issues were due to a web browser that was built into the operating system, and owned by the operating system company (Microsoft in this case).
There was a popular trend for a while that IE was the windows feature that let you download a different browser.
Apple had a similar run with Safari and from what I recall had to change.
My anec-data on the subject seems to imply it affects a very specific segment of people: The "I only use a (usually Windows) computer at work" folks. The odd part of that is that almost all of them seem to own iPhones or iPads (specifically not Android devices) and since they use these devices, exclusively, outside of work and one can assume they're probably opening Safari for browsing, why do they have such a strong association that Chrome must be "the browser." This segment, though, seems to make up a large majority of "knowledge workers" outside of IT.
Now, like probably a lot of us here, I'm the tech support for everyone who knows I "play with computers professionally." One of the first things I do is remove the Chrome and Edge icon from the task bar[0] and add Firefox with a small set of extensions that generally keep me from having to revisit them due to malware. I usually just tell them "The button you use to get on the Internet changed but it's the same." ... and Bob's your uncle. I return a year later, the same Firefox icon is in the same place, updated several versions and all is well. They all vaguely knew they were using something different before, some knew it was called Chrome or Edge, but "the icon changed" is all I've had to say for probably a decade since the two browsers' core functionality is close enough that they generally cover every site the older generation would be expected to visit.
It feels like a variation of "they've got enough knowledge to be dangerous."
[0] I don't think I've ever seen my parents, aunts/uncles, extended older family every try to find a program through that menu that pops up when you click the button that used to be called the "Start" button. :)
I think it's a status play, for people who have been convinced that status is tantamount to utility. If you lower yourself to options that aren't well-known to be high status, or at least known - particularly ones that require tinkering of any sort - you are wasting time, and worse, you are signalling to other people that you're a time-waster, that your time isn't valuable, and that your choice to waste time rather than use the default or high-status option shows that you have a defect in judgment.
Mozilla might have anticipated this when they wrote "Diversify your browser engine" as one of the selling points.
https://www.firefox.com/en-US/enterprise/firefox-enterprise/
Diversification is a good idea, personally I use both Chrome and Firefox every day (and sometimes Lynx).
They lost fierefox a few months ago due to new compamy policy and with it lost access to some apps when working from home. We know it is related to the proxy config but company is so big and processes are such a mess nobody knows who should be contacted and by which email alias or service now ticket.
This is what the Island browser does - you can't log into any company resource unless you do so from the authorized browser.
This type of dysfunction occurs quite frequently i find.
I wouldn't be surprised if those people had some techie in their life advising similar! and/or, they just really want decent adblock tech.
Why?
I think if you really want to build something like that, you need real momentum. Perhaps the ladybird folks can succeed here, the future will tell. I don't think Mozilla has enough momentum left.
https://www.digitalapplied.com/blog/browser-market-share-202...
Firefox is between 2% and 3% now.
>Firefox Enterprise. Different at the core. Stronger because of it.
What's this even means
Page says a lot of nothing. Or just restates things that already were in place.
This one sounds new to me.