LWN: Comments on "Mozilla to Businesses: We're Not Interested (PC Mag)"

Code for whom?

wtanksleyjr — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 20:37:18 +0000

Actually, the "silly version dependent policies" involved here are Firefox's own extension checking policies, together with the breakneck and undocumented change in release policies.

I can't tell you which enormous org I work for, or why they blessed Firefox. I can only hope that your question was intended to ask whether there were any such orgs, and my answer can somehow reassure you that there are such orgs, and they blessed Firefox, and then the Microsoft reps who consult for us pointed out Asa's comments, and now the future of Firefox in our org is now in doubt. Since our org has a large (but violently disputed) voice in the control of as much as 3/4 of the surface area of the globe, that's a pretty big loss for Firefox adoption.

I don't blame Asa for his decision; I think it's worked well for others and hope it works wonderfully for him and his team. I do blame him for failing to communicate his decision. Such communication, if delivered to the right people, might have arranged to have a backporting team already arranged, thus removing the need for the announcement of ZERO support for the immediately prior release.

The ideal outcome of this would be for some distributor to step up and form a team to build a stable "Firefox EE" build, with a roadmap based on the expected future of Firefox. This roadmap would fairly quickly become populated with features that are actually present in Firefox 6 or 7, but are considered too big or extension-breaking to use in the EE.

My main expectation for this kind of thing would be Debian and Redhat.

-Wm

Mozilla to Businesses: We're Not Interested (PC Mag)

JanC_ — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 11:36:29 +0000

Ubuntu includes an extension that helps to integrate Firefox into the desktop, so I guess that's one of the "commonly-bundled add-ons" too.

Mozilla to Businesses: We're Not Interested (PC Mag)

JanC_ — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 11:31:00 +0000

There is a huge difference between applications that are enterprise ready (without bragging about it) and applications that are marketed as "enterprise ready". :P

For example Apache seems to be quite enterprise ready to me (they innovate around a stable API and using a plugin-based system), and although there might be better web servers for certain workloads, it will do its job fairly well most of the time...

Mozilla to Businesses: We're Not Interested (PC Mag)

JanC_ — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 11:16:03 +0000

I did immediately notice because of breaking extensions, and judging from the support channels I'm not the only end-user experiencing that... And to be honest: all but one of them started working again within a week after the upgrade (unfortunately it's one I use fairly often but is not on the Mozilla addon-site).

Mozilla to Businesses: We're Not Interested (PC Mag)

dlang — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 22:45:58 +0000

but at one point it was, it's only over time, with the experience of making many releases that they have gotten as good as they are about not making disruptive changes.

Give the Mozilla folks some time and I expect them to start getting pretty good at this as well.

for all the fuss over this change, how many people even noticed when ubuntu moved from 4.x to 5? the only reason I noticed is that I went looking to see what version I had to figure out how hard it would be to manually move from there to 5. I was surprised to find I was already running 5.

I don't run a lot of extensions, so I wouldn't have expected trouble, but I think that most people actually have the same experience.

Mozilla to Businesses: We're Not Interested (PC Mag)

nix — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 21:09:16 +0000

The Linux kernel is not undergoing constant major *user-visible* disruptive change. Internal stuff the users cannot detect is not relevant here.

Mozilla to Businesses: We're Not Interested (PC Mag)

dlang — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 18:03:28 +0000

that would mean that the linux kernel is not usable by any end users, and as one of the end users, I can attest that it is very usable.

Mozilla to Businesses: We're Not Interested (PC Mag)

nix — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 12:51:08 +0000

less does the same thing. But xterm and less don't change much, so in effect all releases are minor releases. I'm not sure it works so well for projects undergoing constant major disruptive change (actually I'm not sure such a project can be considered usable by any end users at all).

Mozilla to Businesses: We're Not Interested (PC Mag)

markhb — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 15:22:00 +0000

No, it's more like "We changed the radiator mascot. Maybe we switched the brake and accelerator pedals as well, but you're going to have to take her out on the highway to find out."

My posts are my opinion only and do not represent my employer in any way.

Mozilla to Businesses: We're Not Interested (PC Mag)

tialaramex — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 11:20:07 +0000

So like xterm then. I appear to be running xterm version 261. I'm pretty sure I recall using one of the 100-ish releases in the past, and perhaps I'm old enough to have run double digit versions of xterm. Nothing terrible happened in that time, mostly bugs got fixed.

However for Firefox it does mean they can no longer distinguish "this release is a minor upgrade, it fixes sixteen bugs AND the JS implementation is up to 10% faster" from "many APIs are changed, we have replaced the core rendering engine, and removed support for SSLv3 due to a patent problem".

Now, that's never bothered me with xterm. Maybe it won't bother me with Firefox. Maybe web browsers will settle down and stop innovating and all future Firefox versions are largely bugfixes. But I doubt it.

Mozilla to Businesses: We're Not Interested (PC Mag)

nye — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 11:15:13 +0000

>Microsoft have responded

Yeesh.

Every time I think that LWN has become nothing but a trollfest I just have to look at <the rest of the web> for a breath of foul air.

Mozilla to Businesses: We're Not Interested (PC Mag)

dlang — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 07:37:16 +0000

clarification, they aren't bumping the major number every couple of releases, they are bumping the version number every release (there is no minor version number any longer)

Mozilla to Businesses: We're Not Interested (PC Mag)

ThinkRob — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 23:35:59 +0000

> Extensions checking a specific FF version string need to be fixed, simple as that.

Uh... that would be all of them. All extensions contain a max version field.

And no, much to Mozilla's amazement, not every extension is deployed via addons.mozilla.org

This is kinda missing the point though; the talk of what is/is not a sane corporate testing policy, etc. is all ignoring the bigger question:

Why are they doing this?

Why on earth is Mozilla bumping the major version with (nearly) every couple releases? I can understand doing it "just cause" if it were, say, a pet project with no significant users. Or if it were an internal app, hey, use whatever versioning policy you want. But Firefox is neither of those things. It's a well-funded browser used by millions including some *very* high profile businesses. At this point Mozilla has to know -- even if they didn't when they first considered doing it -- that bumping the major version is going to result in a fair bit of pain and irritation for a not-insignificant chunk of their userbase.

As long as I've been developing and using software, I've been under the impression that if you know that a given change is not "free" in terms of user frustration, you'd better have a decent reason for making it. Apparently, Mozilla thinks otherwise.

The lack of a good explanation for why they're doing this, combined with the outright hostile attitude of at least one of the developers comes together to make Mozilla look (at least to some folks such as myself) not unlike a group of hipster 20-somethings sneering "get with the times Grandpa" to their users.

And that's not a particularly pleasant way to think of what was once a poster child of open source.

Code for whom?

dlang — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 21:39:54 +0000

I'd like to know what companies that have these silly version dependant policies actually blessed Firefox in the first place?

I suspect that in most cases it's being demanded by users, if not just installed by the users in spite of the corporate policies (that's how firefox got into the businesses in the first place)

as for the need to be able to purchase support, where did they buy support for firefox version 3 or 4?

Ars Tech has it right that going with a date based versioning would have avoided this major number panic, and that there is really very little difference between the firefox 5 release and any of the 18 different firefox 3.6.x releases in terms of risk. they all have security fixes in them, and they all have non-security changes in them

Code for whom?

rodgerd — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 21:27:43 +0000

I work for a bank. Our stats show most of our customers do their banking in the morning, when they get to work. As Mozilla have issued their "fuck off, we don't want you" statement to corporate users, I expect to see the numbers of Firefox users plummet. As it does, the interest in properly testing our applications to work with Firefox will disappear.

Editor's comment

kripkenstein — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 19:12:51 +0000

> I don't think the analogy is especially apt. The kernel takes an indifferent attitude toward ABI compatibility largely because they want to force developers to push their modules upstream. Firefox is equally indifferent to ABI compatibility, but they are much less willing to accept extensions into the mainline tree. That combination is a much more hostile attitude toward out of tree code than the kernel takes.

The analogy is not exact, but I think it is closer than that. One factor is that addons.mozilla.org is in between being in the mozilla codebase, and being entirely separate. If your addon is in there, it will get automatically checked for version compatibility issues, and either get its allowed versions either bumped, or a warning shown.

That isn't the same as being in the mozilla codebase itself, of course. But it practice almost all addons can be automatically verified as compatible, so if your addon is on addons.mozilla.org, your life as an addon developer is much easier.

The bigger issue is for addons that aren't in addons.mozilla.org. Mozilla has no access to them, so it can't help ensure their compatibility. But Mozilla does encourage that everyone put their addons in addons.mozilla.org, just like the kernel encourages developers to push their code upstream. (Again, it isn't an exact analogy, but there is some general similarity.)

Mozilla to Businesses: We're Not Interested (PC Mag)

k8to — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 18:55:25 +0000

I work on "enterprise" software that I will not name because it would verge on advertisement, but I can honestly say it's "not that bad". I wouldn't claim much better, so I think your point has some merit.

Editor's comment

xtifr — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 18:03:50 +0000

Might have been nice if they'd finalized that and waited until it was widely deployed before pulling the support rug out from underneath their users.

I know, I know, ask for my money back if I don't like it. :) Actually, I'm already using Iceweasel instead.

Update: Kev Needham, Channel Manager at Mozilla has responsed to a request for comment:

Lennie — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 15:08:41 +0000

Totally agree, my parents use Linux on the desktop and I have a lot less work with the OS/apps; All the software is easy to keep up to date.

I do however have the same amount of work with just doing user-support. "How do I do X", they wouldn't know how to do certain things on any computer.

Linux is not more complicated for most users, maybe some are stuck in their ways on their existing Windows XP for example.

But they eventually need to move to something else anyway, Microsoft stopped supporting it, only extended support till 2014.

Mozilla to Businesses: We're Not Interested (PC Mag)

Karellen — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 11:41:56 +0000

Microsoft have responded

Update: Kev Needham, Channel Manager at Mozilla has responsed to a request for comment:

njwhite — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 10:24:47 +0000

Perhaps you should consider a Linux distribution.

Mozilla to Businesses: We're Not Interested (PC Mag)

tialaramex — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 09:36:02 +0000

Red Hat Enterprise Linux seems rather better than "not that bad" to me.

Update: Kev Needham, Channel Manager at Mozilla has responsed to a request for comment:

Wol — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 08:45:12 +0000

But XP will probably need to be supported for a while yet ...

Not this machine, but my old machine is still in regular use. With three slots taking a maximum of 256Mb each, my machine is upgraded to the max yet it's below the recommended minimum for any upgrade.

What do I do if IE8 support is dropped? I had difficulty finding the money for my (wife's) new machine! Old machines live on a long time in some hands - if they don't break poor people can't afford to replace them ...

Cheers,
Wol

Mozilla to Businesses: We're Not Interested (PC Mag)

elanthis — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 04:40:59 +0000

Uh, no, no I was not.

I have AdBlock installed myself.

Editor's comment

kripkenstein — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 21:49:40 +0000

> On the other hand, compare it to the majority of free software which does not have that requirement - modified versions of Linux are called 'Linux'; modified versions of Apache are called 'Apache'; modified versions of KDE are called 'KDE'.

I think there is a very big difference between Linux, Apache and KDE on the one hand, and Firefox on the other.

Linux, KDE and Apache are used by tech people like you and me. When we try some Linux distro, if we see it fail in some embarrassing way, we know it isn't *Linux*'s fault. It's almost certainly the distro.

Firefox however is a consumer product. Hundreds of millions of people use it, almost all of them *not* tech people like us. If they download something called 'Firefox' and it is horribly buggy, they will think that Firefox is to blame, and not place their trust in the Firefox name anymore.

Linux of course is used by many consumers. But they basically never hear that name. They hear Android, TiVo, Kindle, etc. My parents don't know what Linux is, but they know what Firefox is, even though they use both.

Historical trivia: Early in the Mozilla project, the plan was to not ship a consumer product at all. It was to just ship code, and let others make the final products. In other words, exactly like the Linux kernel works. But this didn't take off so a shift was made, and Mozilla started to ship Firefox as a consumer product.

Mozilla to Businesses: We're Not Interested (PC Mag)

viro — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 18:44:48 +0000

[searching archives] there you go: http://lwn.net/Articles/247869/
Bruce Perens is not alone in that kind of demagogy...

Editor's comment

rahulsundaram — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 17:09:47 +0000

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.

Editor's comment

rgmoore — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 17:02:25 +0000

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.

Mozilla to Businesses: We're Not Interested (PC Mag)

nye — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 17:00:31 +0000

>You really don't see a lot of non-nerds using extensions

Sure they do. Yahoo toolbar, Google toolbar, AVG toolbar, AOL toolbar, OMG toolbar, WTF toolbar, BBQ toolbar, the list goes on...

I know, I know, you covered that with 'adware crap' but I think the point needed to be more strongly stated. Browsing the web on non-technical relatives' browsers is like browsing it through a small letterbox.

Mozilla to Businesses: We're Not Interested (PC Mag)

njs — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 16:31:12 +0000

And Adblock Plus is already ported to Firefox 7... I think they'll be okay.

Editor's comment

nye — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 16:16:51 +0000

>And Internet Explorer is in no sense "free".

Er, there's no charge for it. How is that not the criterion for 'free-as-in-beer'?

If your argument is that you need Windows to run it then my reaction to that is twofold:
1) By the same token, no software at all is free since you need hardware to run it
2) To all but a near-zero minority of people, Windows is free. It comes with the machine, and you can't get an equivalent machine without it for less. Indeed, that often costs extra.

Editor's comment

nye — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 16:09:45 +0000

On the other hand, compare it to the majority of free software which does not have that requirement - modified versions of Linux are called 'Linux'; modified versions of Apache are called 'Apache'; modified versions of KDE are called 'KDE'. All of these are trademarked, and control over that trademark is occasionally exerted, but not in such a sweeping, blanket fashion - and the sky didn't fall.

(Okay, arguably the KDE project should have asked Kubuntu's first few KDE4 releases to be called something else; Kubuntu really did give a lot of people a falsely bad impression of KDE4, so maybe I've defeated my own point...)

Mozilla to Businesses: We're Not Interested (PC Mag)

nye — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 15:58:19 +0000

"Enterprise has never been (and I'll argue, shouldn't be) a focus of ours"

Good for them; somebody had to say it.

Enterprisey people seem to suffer under the delusion that not only do they matter, but that their needs should be put in front of the vast majority of people; as a result, can anyone name 3 pieces of 'enterprise-grade' software that could at least be described as 'not that bad'? How about *one*?

Forcing widely used software to be gimped because of some faceless companys' draconian policies doesn't sound like good idea. I'm sure MS wish they weren't in that bind.

Mozilla to Businesses: We're Not Interested (PC Mag)

branden — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 14:56:57 +0000

You mean Bruce Perens wasn't a crowd of one?

Editor's comment

kripkenstein — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 14:54:01 +0000

You make a fair point, if names were meaningless, they can't be important enough for someone to care about trademarking.

But this isn't symmetrical, as you imply. Mozilla has been releasing Firefox for a while, and people expect something from it. If someone else releases something they also call 'Firefox', but it is extremely buggy and unstable, Mozilla is hurt more than the other party. People will blame 'Firefox', not the other party.

Of course, it does matter to the other party as well. Calling it 'Firefox' helps people know that it is closely related to the Firefox they already know.

So I agree with you that names are not meaningless. However, they have different meanings to Mozilla and to people using the name.

Note that if another party calls their browser 'SnowBear, a browser based on Firefox', then there is no trademark issue, and the other party also gets most of what they want, since people will understand it is in fact closely related to Firefox. Compromise is possible here.

Enterprise Linux vendors may well cover this

Cato — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 13:16:21 +0000

They used to backport fixes, but not any longer. Oh well...

Editor's comment

geofft — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 11:38:48 +0000

If names are things important enough that Mozilla feels the need to protect theirs to such an extent, isn't it obvious that names are definitely things important enough that any serious downstream redistributor of Firefox would want to continue calling their redistribution by the same name?

It can't be "just a name" for one person, and so important to file for trademark protection and actively defend it for another.

Mozilla to Businesses: We're Not Interested (PC Mag)

HenrikH — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 11:06:44 +0000

3->4 was a major change. 4->5 is more like 4.01->4.05

Enterprise Linux vendors may well cover this

zwenna — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 10:48:48 +0000

> it's reasonable for them to continue to backport fixes to older Firefox versions, which is certainly what Ubuntu does.

Reasonable or not, Ubuntu does not backport fixes to older Firefox versions. Rather, they upgrade to a supported version:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopTeam/Specs/Lucid/FirefoxNe...

Enterprise Linux vendors may well cover this

Cato — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 10:36:33 +0000

Red Hat shows you can simply sell support without owning proprietary software. The problem for Firefox in the enterprise is that browsers are viewed as a free-as-in-beer commodity, despite the investment that goes into them. So it's not clear anyone would actually buy this support.

In any case, I would hope the enterprise Linux vendors will take this on within RHEL etc - since they sell some workstation Linux, it's reasonable for them to continue to backport fixes to older Firefox versions, which is certainly what Ubuntu does. The only difference is that there are more "major" versions, and over time (say Firefox 5 to 12) it may get harder to backport the fixes because the core browser is changing more frequently.

Anyone else who needs an enterprise supported Firefox with a stable version could start with an Enterprise Linux version.