Weekend Pundit has a nice post up about Firefox adoption in the enterprise called Some Companies Making The Move From IE.
I think we're going to see some serious bottom up pressure in the enterprise space because people want to use a Web browser and not be used by it. They want to get their work done without interruptions from adware and spyware. They want a cleaner and faster Web experience. They want a more capable tool; it's that simple.
When enough people demand it, I think a lot of small and mid-sized business will make that move away from IE. We'll even get some of the big boys in the Fortune 500, though their IT cycles are often a bit longer and managed with a heavier hand.
It's going to be a great year for Firefox, and it won't be limited to the home user.
Posted by asa at January 19, 2005 11:00 PMPerhaps one of the Firebird releases should be designated the 'enterprise ready' version for PR purposes. Try to get some key enterprise features into the release and make a big deal about them. "Mozilla team targets the enterprise ... blah blah blah".
The obvious feature is the Microsoft remote install thingy (the real name escapes me), but other lockdown features might be useful for big companies if they don't already exist. Does Firefox offer any way to lock down a set of preferences so they can't be changed by the user? If we already have that, then perhaps a tool to manage the preferences?
For me bug 74085 is critical to be fixed for enterprise adoption for any company that uses roaming profiles in Windows or stores the default Windows %APPDATA% directory on a remote drive.
For people who use roaming profiles it means their login and logout times are serously increased because the contents of the cache folder are being copies from/to the server.
For those where %APPDATA% is a remote drive will lose the benefit of the cache as it's writing to a disk over the network rather than locally which is normally quicker.
If bug 74085 is fixed then the cache folder on windows will always point to a local drive which will help the adoption in the enterprise.
Yes, there is a workaround which means you can specify a different cache folder but this is nowhere near ideal. In theory a network administrator should just have to install the program and have it working as expected.
Posted by: Dave on January 20, 2005 05:01 AM