Comments on: Enterprise Firefox Requirements

By: Dean Brundage

Dean Brundage — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 17:28:58 +0000

I work in a Solaris shop and use Firefox (and Thunderbird) in the enterprise for their ease of central management. Deployments and patches scale very easily. MCD/autoconfig makes it trivial to enforce corporate policy. LDAP support puts user account control in a single place.

By: Me

Me — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 14:42:22 +0000

Better proxy support. Say you have an a proxy that requires you to type in a username and password. Now if you have a lot of tabs stored from a previous session and you start the browser again, firefox opens an authentication dialog for each tab. Plus one for the extension update check. Lot’s of fun.

By: Guy Fraser

Guy Fraser — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 21:41:06 +0000

A bundled version of IE Tab that you can provide a list of intranet URLs requiring MSIE and firefox will automatically use IE Tab when someone browses to one of those URLs. Now Firefox will work with all the intranets, old and new

By: Stuart Ellis

Stuart Ellis — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:54:42 +0000

Group Policy support is probably the big one. On a well-run Windows network Group Policy automatically manages the browser settings so from the users PoV it just works. Having to run vendor-specific config. management for one application would be cumbersome and annoying. Windows admins on bigger networks are used to having to build their own MSI packages since many vendors don’t bother to package their own stuff, so that’s actually less of an issue than Group Policy, IMO. Having said that, it’s always a pleasant surprise to see a vendor offering an MSI, so it would be a relatively cheap way to win points.

By: mkaply

mkaply — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 12:27:10 +0000

@Mark S:
Active Directory can be used for user/policy management and deploying software.

LDAP also can be used for user management.

So you open the browser and it hits the corporate server to download policies, etc.

By: Mark S

Mark S — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 08:34:46 +0000

Perhaps this is a result of not running IE in a corporate environment, but what are LDAP and Active Directory integration used for in the browser?
Aren’t these primarily used in global address book situations?
I’m not they’re not desired, but I’m not seeing their value in the browser.

By: James

James — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 06:40:01 +0000

Machine-wide CA database. Currently impossible since the list of CAs is a) compiled into a binary, meaning a recompile of Firefox to add one b) not shared between apps. Maybe the new NSS will fix this, but possibly only to share the user certdb, the NSS roadmap isn’t clear if there will be a system-wide certdb.

By: Daniel O'Connor

Daniel O'Connor — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 04:38:20 +0000

Live bookmarks should prompt when they need your authentication.

See: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=254534

Why:
It provides an easy, secure way to integrate (secure) applications with the browser. For instance, we have a honking great big web application which can provide rss/atom feeds, which would be handy to have as livebookmarks (new jobs/notes/etc).

By: Kevin

Kevin — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 23:02:35 +0000

Better support for WebDAV would be nice. What is missing currently from all browsers is a way to launch the native webdav browser. For example, I’d like to provide a webdav:// url on my page that would open Windows Explorer so the user could browse the WebDAV share and do their file operations.

By: ctalbert

ctalbert — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 22:42:17 +0000

Unattended install and centralized management are a must for a lot of the IT people I’ve met that want to deploy firefox but don’t want the headache.

Some stuff I’ve heard (very unscientific):
* Ability to install with a default profile containing specified bookmarks and some first run add-ons
* Ability to run the silent install over the network
* Roaming profile – essentially what we’re doing with Weave, but enterprises will want their own control over that, I imagine.