Microsoft seizes on Firefox enterprise row
Mozilla released Firefox 5 this week, just a few months after Firefox 4 hit the Web. While consumers are generally fine about this Chrome-style rapid release development cycle, enterprise customers aren’t. Score one for Microsoft.
Mozilla has had a bit of a PR nightmare this week thanks to its nonchalance towards the concerns of enterprise customers over the new rapid release development cycle for Firefox. Which has given Microsoft an opportunity to steam in and claim a kind of moral victory over its biggest rival in the Web browser sector.
Enterprise customers aren’t happy with the new strategy, but Mozilla hasn’t done a great job of appeasing them by fairly addressing their complaints, as Ed Bott details. This led Ari Bixhorn, director of Internet Explorer, to post on his blog reaffirming Microsoft’s commitment to its enterprise customers, inadvertently putting the boot into Mozilla’s stance on the matter.
With my Microsoft cap firmly in place on top of my head I have to say I agree more with the Internet Explorer way of doing things, at least now that the company has switched to an annual update. This represents a significant ramping up in its development cycle, but is still long enough between major releases to give everyone ample opportunity to upgrade.
Mozilla, on the other hand, with its new six-weekly update schedule for Firefox, is useless for both enterprise customers and developers. The former is never going to be able to keep up, and the latter is having to continually issue their own updates to keep add-ons and extensions working correctly.
But the biggest issue is Mozilla’s attitude towards those who stick with older versions of the browser, with support removed for all older versions as soon as the latest is released. Microsoft remains committed to offering support for older browsers years after they’ve been succeeded. And while that presents its own problems, it has to be better than the alternative.
The question remains, however, how many enterprise customers will now return to the IE fold?
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June 27th, 2011
Kind of like the life of IE 8. Wasn’t IE 9 release 10 minutes afterwards?