Editor's comment

Posted Jun 26, 2011 19:57 UTC (Sun) by mingo (guest, #31122)
In reply to: Editor's comment by rgmoore
Parent article: Mozilla to Businesses: We're Not Interested (PC Mag)

Now yours is probably a fair argument to make - and if enough developers share your sentiment it's a powerful force the Mozilla Project should better not ignore.

(Sidenote: the fact that IceWeasel has not taken over the browser market by storm seems to suggest that at least for the time being most developers are behind Firefox, right?)

In any case, businesses should not "expect" the Mozilla guys to care about them just for the sake of being business-friendly.

Editor's comment

Posted Jun 27, 2011 17:02 UTC (Mon) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (1 responses)

Sidenote: the fact that IceWeasel has not taken over the browser market by storm seems to suggest that at least for the time being most developers are behind Firefox, right?

It shows that Debian was far sighted enough to go to the trouble of rebranding when most other distributions weren't. I suspect that Firefox's mandatory upgrade policy is going to make every other distributor that wants to maintain its own browser upgrade schedule instead of being dragged along by Firefox will be strongly considering following suit.

Consider Fedora, for example. They released Fedora 15 about a month ago, and the version of Firefox they shipped with is no officially obsolete and unsupported upstream. Since they are trying not to upgrade important packages during a product's lifecycle, they're faced with the unpleasant choice of making an exception for Firefox; living with the need to get Mozilla's approval for any update, including critical security updates, in FF4 for the next year; or trying to replace FF4 with a rebranded version partway through Fedora 15's life. Something tells me that there will be no Firefox- though there may be an Iceweasel or similarly rebranded version- in Fedora 16 unless FF changes its update policy.

Editor's comment

Posted Jun 27, 2011 17:09 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

There is no basis for such assumptions. Firefox 5 is now available as an update for Fedora 15 and it is will within the policy for updates with no explicit exceptions required since Firefox 5 despite the major version change really is just a incremental update that doesn't change the end user UI drastically or anything like that.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Updates_Policy

I would be very much be willing to bet that Firefox is going to stay with no renames or forks by default.