Mozilla says enterprise is not a big focus

published 27 June 2011

A Firefox manager has enraged business users by suggesting they're not as important as consumers when it comes to the popular browser.

The acceleration of Mozilla Firefox's development and release cycle has sparked controversy and amongst the complaints are those from business users lamenting the lack of stability, compatibility and compliance.

One such platform for these views is consultant Mike Kaply's blog, where he described the setbacks of such rapid advancement.

After Firefox 4, which took over a year to release, the browser platform was quickly usurped by Firefox 5 only a few months later and Mozilla officially declared Firefox 4 was at end of life' (EOL), a turn which Kaply described as "a kick in the stomach."

"While the rapid release process sounds great, it's an absolute fail for large deployments of Firefox," he said.

Asa Doztler, community coordinator for Firefox marketing and founder of Mozilla's quality assurance scheme, responded to the comments on the blog saying enterprise had "never been (and I'll argue, shouldn't be) a focus of ours."

"We get about 2 million Firefox downloads per day from regular user types," he said.

"Today, I argue, we shouldn't care even if we do have the resources because of the cost benefit trade," he claimed, "A minute spent making a corporate user happy can better be spent making many regular users happy."

"I'd much rather Mozilla spending its limited resources looking out for the billions of users that don't have enterprise support systems already taking care of them," he said.

Some users responded with concerns about the inconvenience of rapid EOL, even for non-enterprise customers, when Doztler revealed the development cycle would be fast-tracked to six weeks. One commenter asked if there were any assurances Firefox 5 wouldn't reach immediate EOL on the release of Firefox 6, possibly only six weeks later.

"My promise that it will happen," Doztler responded, "Firefox 6 will be the EOL of Firefox 5. And Firefox 7 will be the EOL for Firefox 6."