Firefox missing what IT needs

Firefox 2.0 has finally slipped into release and while preliminary reviews are running hot and cold, it appears the browser won't have a big impact on corporate users.

The thought of a rekindling of the browser wars may be far-fetched even though Microsoft just two weeks ago released its major browser upgrade – Internet Explorer 7.0.

Mozilla posted Firefox 2.0 on Tuesday afternoon.

The browser contains new features such as enhancements to tabbed browsing, a spell checker, and search and Web feeds support.

While those may be slick features, the issue for many corporate users is that tools for such functions as installing, patching and managing Firefox, while often available as add-ons from third-parties, don’t have the support model IT requires. And corporate users still have many Web-based applications designed for Internet Explorer that would have to be re-written for the Firefox platform.

“For Firefox’s entire lifespan, it has not played nice with group policies in an Active Directory environment,” says David Kleen, network administrator for Associated Students, a non-profit that provides student programming, services and events at California State University, Long Beach. He also says the lack of an .msi install package capability as part of the browser instead of as a third-party add-on from developers such as FrontMotion is another show-stopper.

“Firefox is a pioneer of solid design, functionality and ingenuity that can only come from the open source community,” Kleen says. “It’s too bad they don’t officially support .msi packages and group policies or we would be seeing a lot more Firefox 2.0 users out there as corporations would adopt it heavily.”

He says he will roll out Firefox to a limited number of power users, but that testing of Internet Explorer 7.0 is already underway.

Firefox also can’t loosen another grip Internet Explorer has on corporations, which are Web-based and intranet applications specifically designed for Internet Explorer using Active X technology. And even though Microsoft is adopting support for the more open Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (AJAX), which lets users develop applications that behave like desktop software, adoption is still in its infancy on the corporate intranet.

“I prefer Firefox to IE on any given day,” says Houston Pagtakhan, an IT administrator with a large retailer he asked not be named. “But it is not my organization's standard browser. We have a number of applications that are coded to work only with IE. I don't agree with that, but I can't control it.”

Pagtakhan, however, has taken up the charge and has installed Firefox 2. “I only use IE when I have to,” he says.

While Firefox 2.0 has been a few years in the making, even the developers say the focus is decidedly consumer with a few nods given to corporate deployments.

“We are much more focused on the consumer, on the best online experience for that person,” says Chris Beard, vice president of products for Mozilla, the organization that coordinates development efforts for the free Firefox browser.