Introducing Firefox Enterprise
107 points by viccuad
107 points by viccuad
I really really hope this works for Mozilla. They need a non-Google revenue stream. It's also a very reasonable product, the browser is after all core to most office workflows nowadays.
They need a non-Google revenue stream
Sure. They also need to not pay $7M/year to their CEO, and stop spending resources on all sorts of irrelevant initiatives.
I think hope making a real product that people actually buy will bring some much needed sanity to the board.
It's been this way for years unfortunately, complete with Mozilla firing a bunch of people because "woe is me" and then proceeding to continue paying their CEO the jackpot. I wouldn't get my hopes up for this changing any time soon.
How do they find a new revenue stream without initiatives?
I think the key word there is "irrelevant". Firefox Enterprise would seem very relevant. I'm planning to suggest it to two organisations I work with in the coming days.
That was a deliberate omission, cause it's not really known if it'll be relevant until it is or isn't. If this doesn't produce a non-google revenue stream, will it still be "relevant"?
Yes. A relevant initiative can still fail; even a successful initiative can be irrelevant (to users).
Imagine Mozilla baked a crypto miner into Firefox, and it generated a significant revenue stream. I'd argue that would be an irrelevant initiative - profitable, but guaranteed to lose market share due to it being irrelevant to what users want (and indeed hostile to it).
Yeah, i'm still questioning the word "relevant" and how one could define it without knowledge of the future.
What would be an example of another "relevant" initiative they could undertake right now?
I'm no market researcher, but the way I'd approach it would be: relevant features are those that their user base have been asking for, and especially those that have been identified by their non users as deal-breakers.
What I most love about this is that we can continue working on a kick-ass, independent browser engine, and ideally our customers gain some increasing independence from big tech.
Personally, I hope that some of the requirements for enterprises align with what were previously lower priority tasks because they "only" serve a small user base of security nerds. It would make me particularly happy because I am a security nerd myself ;).
If you have questions, feel free to reach out (here or privately).
One thing I want more features around is app-like browser profiles that are defined by a set of hostnames. In the big enterprises where I've worked there were specific desktop shortcuts that would launch IE (this was 10+ years ago) with settings specific to certain corporate web apps. It worked mainly because those web apps didn't link to other apps. However when they did it was terrible because you'd be loading a modern site in a browser tuned for IE6 compatibility. It always seemed to me like the browser could be made to launch with a list of hostnames that were within its purview and to launch links to other hostnames in a fallback profile. This would be great for something like Discord where I want all of my Discord activity in one profile but I want to be able to follow links in a security-focused lower-risk profile with NoScript et al.
Yeah internal apps are often shitty and sadly require a laxer security profile than what you actually want so being able to have centrally controlled profiles for "allow http, but only these predetermined hosts" and "Strict HTTPS, full adblock, no internal services" would be nice.
Some of that already exists! https://firefox-admin-docs.mozilla.org/reference/policies/sitepolicies/ And more policies will come :). For the non-enterprise users: You probably want containers? Or profiles? Firefox has both :S
Both of those concepts rely on the basic premise "I am a web browser and the user clicked a link so I should load the link" but there are exceptions where I want to keep some activity out of a container or profile. Both profiles and containers would benefit from user-defined redirection between different profiles and containers.
It looks like there is partial support for that in the Mozilla-provided extension: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers#w_manage-site-assignments
Since Europe is leading the push for digital sovereignty, is Mozilla concerned about a European competitor? Has Mozilla ever considered moving to Europe become the European competitor if this attempted alignment with EU priorities turns out well?
The idea is that the Enterprise version doesn't need to talk to non-European servers. The non-client software (certificate revocation with CRLite, etc) can be on-premise.
And btw, most of the people working on this are European and sitting in European offices. Not all, but most of the code is open source, so there's also less of a risk there (imho)
My job recently outlawed Firefox and made Chrome our exclusive browser precisely because Firefox didn't have an Enterprise offering. I am excited at the prospect of being able to get my company onboard with Firefox Enterprise.
I'm more or less in a similar boat. At work, we can't access corporate gmail if not using Chrome. It seems there's a specific extension installed by IT in my Chrome profile. This was discussed previously.
Likewise, but I don't know if/when mine would reverse the Chrome mandate.
I've been dragging my feet. Enforcement measures are in place, but falling short of deleting Firefox administratively and sending a nastygram to a person's manager.
Would be cool if they told us what's missing. We hear a lot of these stories and it's hard to push back and fix things when it's so vague. I know it's not a simple ask but more info would really help us :)
I can’t say I’m completely optimistic about this (still inclined to think Mozilla needs to die so Firefox can live), but it’s nice to finally see Mozilla putting effort into something that’s actually related to the browser. Last time I paid close attention to what their CEO declared they were focusing on, in 2020, none of it was related to Firefox (and half of it has since been shut down).
Firefox is just about the only thing from Mozilla that people care about (well, maybe MDN, but that also has direct investment from other companies), but it has felt like Mozilla doesn’t care about Firefox for quite a few years.
Seems smart to me! This has been an ask of leadership at my last two companies. I think it makes sense as a compliment to Mozilla and hopefully it generates a lot of revenue for them while at the same time exposing their development team to more specialized user requests.
I mean, Mozilla is also a US company, the whole problem the EU has is not only that the companies are large, it's that some punk that the the country calls president is randomly restricting US companies from serving foreign agencies, see the latest news.
Mozilla would have to comply just the same as long as they're US based no? So they aren't actually a viable alternative to fix the issue
Well, if new browser releases just happen not to break compatibility for the old features, and the enterprise policy managing software runs on-prem, and the client company's country of residence treats their license for the management software as valid, this makes the situation less urgent than sudden Google account mass-blocking.
Even if there is a phone-home requirement for license control purposes, the client treating HTTP code 451 as «all good» could be a solution.
I like this. It lines up with chromes enterprise offering - and I know a fair few who are forced to use chrome at work. This presents an alternative which can possibly diversify the market, albeit very slightly, which is always a good thing in the chromium heavy world. As others have said it provides another revenue stream for them away from google, so fingers crossed it works out.
Hey look, now every tab has an AI slop border that is a gradient from AI slop orange to AI slop purple (the actual Pantone shades).
Even better there is no setting to turn this off. You gotta go into about:config to do it and set browser.nova.enabled to false.
When people say that using AI still requires taste? They mean this!!! If you're so empowered, why can't you use your empowerment to ship software that makes me feel empowered. But instead I just feel like my user experience is at the mercy of some mid level manager's AI agent. I don't see that as respecting me. Offer me be better stuff. Don't cram worse stuff down my throat and expect me to be thankful.
I mean talk about being respectful! I don't care that much to have to fiddle about in about:config, but a lot of the stuff in there is super dangerous! That's why there's a big warning on the front of it saying "only dismiss this warning if you definitely know what you are doing".
For people who are not engineers, that is an important warning! That layer of security now can be thrown away, rendered ineffective, bypassed, just because someone doesn't want to opt into the new UI styling right now. Should I advise my less technical friends and family to (permanently) bypass the layer of security if they don't like the new styling?
I just cannot say how much this reeks of someone trying to juice their perf evaluation. If you gave users a choice you'd have to admit that maybe 40-60% of them don't like or want this new styling. But if you use dark patterns, you can just trap people in experiences they like worse! Where before you had to confront an actual failure, now you can just declare success and move on. On your perf eval it will just say "everyone adopted my new styling" and omitted from mention will be the fact that to opt out you had to locate a filing cabinet in a disused basement and ignore the sign on it that says "beware of leopards". Et voila, consent manufactured. Perf review aced.
For people who are not engineers, I'd tell them to just pick the built-in "Ash" theme; it's based on the old colors. Or the old flat "Proton" color scheme is still kicking around on the Firefox themes site if they really hate gradients.