Understanding the corporate impact (of upgrading Firefox)

Indeed, but wouldn't such a plan start with building on a firm foundation that isn't going to get EOL'd and no longer support security updates after three months?

The reality is that building on FF or Chrome now means trusting potentially critical business functionality to an outside group you can't control with a history of pushing breaking changes.

(If anyone is about to pipe up with how they only release useful changes and the community testing is sufficient to prevent regressions, please keep in mind that both Firefox and Chrome have each outright broken both cosmetic rendering details and basic functionality recently, in minor/point releases that you wouldn't normally expect to change user-observable behaviour at all, plus of course there are many widely and less widely reported compatibility issues.)

> And having reasonably-well written web apps does help as well

Don't tell that to anyone who uses Java applets and has spent significant time over the past few months working around the repeated screw-ups made by major browsers as they implemented new internal details.

(If anyone is about to pipe up with how Java applets are yesterday's technology and browser vendors don't need to care about them any more, congratulations, you are a walking example of my point.)

> Corporate IT can learn a lot from how application development works on the web,

Or web application developers could learn a lot from corporate IT, depending on your point of view. Personally, I can't remember the last time I saw a business critical corporate IT system completely fail or a major deployment of old-fashioned desktop software block a whole company, while I see the trendy style of rapid-development cause major errors with alarming frequency. That applies to everything from Reddit falling over every ten minutes to Google Docs' seeming inability to display even basic documents and spreadsheets properly on all major browsers at any given time.

> So many of the problems of building a robust global IT architecture have already been solved in the Internet itself.

Ironically, I think the Internet is a fine example of what I mean. Before the Internet, no-one could DDoS a whole business out of existence, because business models weren't vulnerable to that sort of instant mass attack. Before the Internet, you didn't get rapidly evolving viruses that could sneak into your corporate networks because one user clicked the wrong Facebook link during their lunch break and cause you weeks of grief to remove because they could propagate quickly throughout a whole section of your LAN. Before the Internet, one executive doing something dumb didn't result in every confidential report to which that executive had access being uploaded to someone who would extort money from you to keep it quiet. Before the Internet, your database front-ends were in-house, and one error in a front-end didn't leave you vulnerable to having all your customers' credit card details stolen.

Does this mean the Internet is a bad thing? Of course not, it's overwhelmingly positive on balance. But it presents many fine examples of what can happen if the damage causable by a single rogue element isn't effectively contained.

> If my previous thesis has any value, that a big problem with corporate IT is attitude, how do we fix it?

Exactly. You are assuming that the problem here is the attitude of corporate IT groups, and not their choice of tools. I am suggesting that Firefox and Chrome are making themselves into unsuitable tools and the responsible thing for corporate IT to do is to not use them, presumably going back to using a stable IE version and Microsoft's well-developed management tools instead.

When last I checked in with some former co-workers, JPMChase still used IE6. Its a relevant problem.

Web developers arent as utterly hopefully as you seem to think, my gmail supports drag and drop attachments, my irc client supports websockets when available, my task tracker works offline (and on a mobile), my maps support geolocation.

And I personally dont support have to support ie6, but a lot of people still have to. I havent heard of anyone that has to support Chrome v1.

> My point is that it's not black and white unless Mozilla chooses to make it that way. Right now, it's white. For Mozilla to say: "Infinite incremental release is the way forward" is to say, "We don't care about your ability to plan releases in any way shape or form." That's pretty black & white. Any commitment to a release schedule would, at least, give them the ability to plan.

Asking for a release timeline and asking for 3 years of support on a dead branch are entirely separate things. It's not unreasonable to ask the Mozilla keep users informed of the release schedule (don't they already do this?), but asking them to support an old version for 3 years seems silly. It takes a lot of manpower and there's no value in it for probably 95% of their customers.

> I agree that web browsers are not synonymous with word processing software, but the expectation that large corporations will simultaneously adopt web based technologies while throwing out decades of change-management process is just naivety at it's finest.

I would say it's practical, not naive. If you want a browser that allows you to stagnate while enjoying long-term support, then either start paying someone for support, or start using IE. You agree that web browsers and word processors are different, so why should Mozilla bend over backwards to allow corporations to try to treat them the same?

> Large organizations benefit from economies of scale. This means reduced costs. This means one IT manager per five hundred PCs. This means you can't roll out software willy-nilly and expect your organization to stand. Any in-roads Mozilla gained with corporations will be quickly squandered if they stick to this strategy.

Sure, so don't roll out willy-nilly. Test and then roll out, just as they do now. But instead of rolling out 4.1, roll out 5.0. I don't understand what the big issue is. I'm sure it's a bit more work if there's a breaking change, but frankly you're going to have to deal with those breaking changes eventually unless you're going to stick with the same browser for years (let's call this the IE6 model). You just deal with them incrementally rather than in one massive painful push. Frankly the incremental approach sounds less painful for everyone involved.

We're talking about corporations demanding that a free product meet their antiquated needs. There's no grounds for the demand. It reflects their broken rollout policies, not a deficiency on the part of Mozilla. Maybe if it takes you several months to approve a browser rollout, that's your real problem. And let's be honest, a lot of this is just baseless fear. We're talking about a change in the way version numbers are incremented. People are worrying because it's called 5.0 instead of 4.1. The number attached doesn't really matter.

> Again, I agree that the old pattern is not what we need, but this is upheaval, and that's not what works at corporations.

What else would work? For Mozilla to dedicate a lot of extra resources to maintaining dead branches for years? Not only does this not help move corporations forward, it doesn't help Mozilla, and it doesn't help the web.

If the current change management models are not working, then they need to be fixed. Test and rollout faster and more frequently. Roll out in stages, rather than with the "big bang" model. Have a roll-back plan and system in place. Really, the way people talk, it's as if every week the browser is going to break half the web. I hardly think that's the case, and I frankly think Mozilla's testing is probably more thorough than most any corporate IT department.

This is as opposed to testing the beta to see whether it's breaking anything and if so report a bug to the browser vendor so the final release _won't_ break anything.

Just making that one change to their rollout process would significantly reduce the breakage potential of updates....

It's not a strawman. Why do you think IE6 is still around? It's not for the grandmothers who don't know how to run Windows Update. It's for corporations who demand that Microsoft support an ancient product because they're too lazy/cheap/incompetent to upgrade their internal apps to work on modern browsers.

Corporations want indefinite support on every piece of software they use (and why not, I guess). The question becomes how long does it make sense for vendors to support a product. When you're talking about a product that needs to be upgraded frequently to continue to do its job and to maintain security, I'd say the answer is "not very long".

> Well, if you want browsers to be taken seriously as a platform for running software applications and not just viewing static sites with occasional interactive features, then browser had better become that long-lived.

You're the one creating a false dichotomy here, pretending that the only options are to build for a stagnant browser or to not build at all. The browser is not the platform, and that's what you don't get. The web is the platform. If you built a web app for Firefox 4, it's going to work in Firefox 5. The platform hasn't changed. It's gained some new features perhaps, but the original functionality is still there.

> Do you have any idea how much investment Microsoft makes in keeping each new version of Windows backward compatible with software and drivers from the last version (or, more likely, the last several versions)? There is no way they would be the dominant force on the desktop today if they had gone around releasing point updates to Windows every few months and arbitrarily breaking other people's software that was built on their platform.

An interesting point of comparison would be to note that Firefox 5 is backwards-compatible with Firefox 4. Unless you choose to use bleeding-edge beta functionality, your sites will still work just fine. Mozilla (and Google, and Apple, and Microsoft) work really hard to maintain backwards-compatibility in their browsers. You're pretending that upgrading to FF5 means that everything written for older browsers will stop working. We both know that's not true.

> Even your three year figure is telling. If Windows 7 hadn't been able to run existing applications written in the XP era, Microsoft would probably be toast today, having blown two big OS releases in a row and lost the confidence of the developer market. Three years is within the typical lifespan of a single PC in an office environment, particularly these days when IT departments are seriously questioning the value they get from spending time and money on the upgrade roundabout and paying for all these subscription plans. Everything else that came with the PC still runs three years later and still lets people get their jobs done. Why should browsers be anything special?

They aren't special. Firefox 5 will run all the same sites as Firefox 3.0, and it will run a lot more as well.

> Your final paragraph is just outright denial. Microsoft can and do patch security and compatibility bugs in Word all the time.

Of course they patch bugs. I never said they didn't. That doesn't mean the Word Processor model makes sense for browsers. I'm using Microsoft Office 2008. Should I also be using Firefox 3.0? I haven't upgraded Office because it costs money. I have upgraded Firefox because it's free and easy. Browsers are no longer shrink-wrap software, and treating them as if they are is ridiculous.

> They just manage to do it without changing the UI, introducing new file formats while obsoleting ones that were fine just six months ago, and breaking a couple of key features that they don't care about because only 5% of users need them.

Can you point out what FF5 has done that's so terrible and backwards-incompatible?

Edit: I guess there are some add-on incompatibilities, and that is something that they need to address moving forward. Frequent drops are fine, but should maintain compatibility.