I’ve been dealing with a lot of organisations for almost 2 and a half years regarding Firefox in the enterprise, because of my projects FirefoxADM (which recently got an upsurge of interest despite being slightly dormant because it featured in some US Windows IT Professional magazine) and the Firefox Group Policy Extension. So, I’d be really interested to put my input and any help I can into this group if I could and you wanted me to. Email me.

The main reasons I have found that people want to deploy Firefox is that their users want it because that is what they use at home and the organisation wishes to roll it out and control it. In the big organisations, it is the controlling part that is tantamount, they usually have MSI repackagers or some other formal automated method of getting that application onto user’s workstations. Having an MSI is important, as long as (a) it is regarded as official and can be downloaded from Mozilla.com and people can file bug reports in bugzilla where the feature is the MSI, and (b) the MSI comes out hopefully within hours of the main installer.

Its important when talking about benefits to understand that even when organisations deploy Firefox, IE is still on the machine. Therefore, any comparison-to-IE benefits are pointless. I have come across only a couple of times when someone has contacted me regarding FirefoxADM where they saw it as a replacement to IE. The only one who was serious had a 5-figure number of machines and I had to talk him out of randomly removing DLLs which he thought were solely IE DLLs (its not a good idea!). Very few wish to move to an environment where,as opposed to relying solely on IE, they are relying solely on Firefox. In a way, people see relying solely on Firefox as its weakness – as there is no financial connection between Mozilla and that company, there is no method for companies to stamp their feet and get things changed if a change to the latest version of Firefox hoses their web applications.

I disagree that Firefox is more secure than IE and disagree that Mozilla have a better security process than Microsoft. However, one major thing I have pushed and have felt that people respond to is that something like FirefoxADM and existing IE Administrative Templates allows people to stay connected to the internet even when there is a zero-day on one of the browsers. For example, if IE has an unfixable zero-dayer, set all the proxies to point to 127.0.0.1 and then you can announce people can still use Firefox to browse the web until the patch has been released. Also, it allows you to turn off the likes of javascript in Firefox if an issue occurs in it or, similarly, set Firefox’s proxies to localhost, if a zero-dayer happens to Firefox. This is the sort of solution that turns “roll out to anyone who requests it” into “roll out to the whole organisation”.

As I say, I have dealt with a large number of people over the past couple of years with Firefox in the enterprise and hopefully could add some insight if required.

I don’t know why the UI keeps changing from version to version. It’s kind of aggravating. There’s still room for improvement but many things should be left alone and most is, it’s not like a complete UI overhaul every version. But version to version UI updates aren’t nearly as drastic as what the IE team did with IE 7. That was way too much.

Agreed with people are faster at things they are used to. There’s also features within Firefox to remove steps in tasks and does speed things along.

Selling Firefox as a backup in case something goes wrong with IE is great, but that’s not a security statement. I would never go to an enterprise and claim that Firefox is more secure. that’s just asking for trouble.

The speed thing is relative. I think it’s faster, but I don’t use IE anymore, so I wouldn’t know. People are faster at things they are used to. and IE 7 has all the benefits you mentioned.

There are a ton of other product benefits. The biggest one that enterprises care about is security. It’s also a selling point for getting IT groups to at least get Firefox on user’s machines i.e. if IE gets compromised at least you’re not totally hosed. The second big product benefit is product speed — both as an application and as a platform. You’re just able to do things faster in Firefox doing day to day stuff (due to tabbed browsing, the search bar, find feature, good pop-up blocker), and applications should run snappier in Firefox.