Mozilla goes enterprise with Build a Browser program

Despite its 22.51 percent global market share, Mozilla's Firefox browser has yet to crack the enterprise IT barrier. While Firefox is undoubtedly used widely in the enterprise, Internet Explorer is still the default choice for enterprise IT, in part because Mozilla has never made any particular market, including enterprise IT, a focus.

No more. Perhaps responding to criticism that Firefox lacked the tools to help enterprise IT departments manage its deployment, Mozilla is now rolling out a Build Your Own Browser program. The program aims to provide "a good fit for enterprises that want to create a customized browser that can be easily installed across multiple corporate desktops," according to Mike Beltzner, director of Firefox at Mozilla Corp.

This is good news. While some breathlessly wait for Google Chrome to leverage Google's cachet into the enterprise, ultimately functionality and stability win with skittish IT professionals. Mozilla's Build Your Own Browser program is designed to deliver against these IT requirements.

The program works as follows: IT professionals can tailor their preferred browser configuration (perhaps with default bookmarks to corporate Web sites, for example) using a Mozilla Web application, including corporate branding using Mozilla's Personas technology. The application will then send the user a custom installation program for deploying the browser across the company.

It's an interesting new foray into enterprise computing by Mozilla, but it's doubtful that the program will foster an exodus from Internet Explorer. That is happening already, with or without such enterprise tools. Mozilla is already seeing its Firefox market share gain 5 percent each year even as IE falls by 5 percent per year. This is leading more application developers to write their software for both IE and Firefox.

This, it is assumed, will continue apace.

In fact, with things like Mozilla's new Add-on Collector service for Firefox, which makes it easier to subscribe to and maintain third-party add-ons (e.g., Fasterfox, Faviconize, etc.), Mozilla is setting new benchmarks for browser performance and ease-of-use. Internet Explorer is playing catch-up.

Enterprise IT is a lagging indicator of where the market is going. It's normal that Firefox's rising popularity should be felt everywhere else first. At some point, however, even the stodgiest of enterprise IT departments is going to need to recognize that with roughly a fourth of their constituents using Firefox, sticking exclusively to IE is a losing battle.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

[Fire Balls]

Good luck. We will see this as adopted as Linux is in for corp inv. for a desktop interface.

[yacahuma]

WOW, I must be living in another planet, every company I've worked uses Explorer, just because IT is too lazy to install anything else. If Explorer was not included in windows, IT dept. will be more incline to use a better browser.

[SIGHUP]

Lazy, no, we just have more important things to worry about then the users web browsing experience. IE can easily be made more secure using gpedit which honestly is the only thing I care about when it comes to the users web browser.

[fgsdfgdsfgdsfg]

IT admins like myself don't use firefox because they lack the corporate enterprise tools IE has. There is no way to centrally manage the browser. no way to centrally update the browser with patches. They provide no support via windows group policy to control browser client settings. Users can customize their browsers to do things like, oh bypass a proxy server. I have all of those features in IE.
I find it interesting that people here with no IT network admin experience can claim to know why admins won't make the change and presume we are all "lazy"

[pentest]

"This is leading more application developers to write their software for both IE and Firefox."

A developer who writes software to a specific browser(plug ins are an obvious exception) is not a developer, and should be allowed within 100 yards of any development house.

[pjk0]

I agree, but unfortunately the history of the web is not pretty in that regard. It is a sad reality that writing standards-compliant markup is very low on the priority list of most people who code websites.

While the recent popularity of Firefox could have resulted in a big improvement in that regard, unfortunately the myopic corporate-driven twirps who code most of the sites are merely switching their mindset from "code to IE idiosyncracies and proprietary functionality" to "code to IE and FF idiosyncracies and proprietary functionality".

As an IT admin, one of the key reasons why I am none-too-thrilled about Firefox is because it's too easy for users to make changes to their personal browser environment which open the organization they work for to security risks, unapproved activities on the web, computer reliability problems, etc. Chrome is even worse in that regard. By pandering to "user freedom", they are in effect thumbing their nose at I.T. departments who know from decades of experience that most users will immediately shoot themselves (and the organization they work for) in the foot when given that "freedom".

[t8]

Thanks Firefox from delivering us from MIcrosoft's IE. Please continue your great work.

[kelmon]

The deployment functionality is nice but it won't make an impact, at least within my own company. Since IE has been the standard for many years (prior to that it was Netscape Communicator 4), all our intranet sites are designed for IE and a number of core web applications use ActiveX. To be honest, there isn't an incentive to use Firefox rather than IE within the enterprise - Windows comes with IE, can be patched as part of the usual Windows patching process, and offers basically the same functionality. Firefox may be faster but that's not really a key concern for our IT organisation.