Firefox: it's just too darned expensive | Hacker News Reader

Firefox: it's just too darned expensive

gizmodo.com

25 pointsjgamman26 comments

Testing, deploying, and supporting new software costs money. There's no way around it and it's not directly related to the expense of the software licenses required.

+ IE can be managed via Group policy => tweak once, deploy to all.

This could be possible with Firefox too(I don't know), but I would require a specific tool to be developed, tested (by Mozilla for example) and LEARNED by the admins.

The tool itself needs to be deployed...

http://www.frontmotion.com/Firefox/fmfirefox.htm

First result for "Group policy Firefox"

Right, and that's the entire point of the "expense questions" the reps are talking about. They now not only have to vet Firefox, they also have to find a 3rd party tool to vet & buy.

Plus the cost of training IT people to install Firefox across thousands of computers (you didn't think they'd install it one-by-one did you?).

Etc, etc.

Awesome project; but the presentation of this as a solution to big organizations/companies is lacking, or to put it more bluntly, their website sucks. It would be great if the Mozilla Foundation would host this project and make it more presentable.

Agreed; Firefox needs to have this out of the box, for free, to compete with IE in corporate IT.

The university I attend uses frontmotion. It's great.

The guy doesn't even say it would be more expensive than IE. Just that adding IT support for a new browser is an expense question and hasn't been answered yet.

It's too bad that the people they pay to write web apps don't add "IE support" as a line-item. The project just goes over cost and becomes late instead, so they don't realize that "the expense question" actually comes out quite favorably for Firefox. (Your tax dollars at work.)

This doesn't make sense. If they are mandating IE for all their computers than their whole App is built solely for IE. For all it's faults, of which there are many, IE isn't harder to use or harder to develop for if you're just writing for IE.

(With the notable exception of lacking the Canvas element. Seriously IE team what is up with that?)

Look, I'm no fan of IE. But if Firefox advocates want to make headway in business and government arenas they need to stop making BS arguments and start looking at the facts. Saying there's no expense to switching to Firefox (on a mass level) or that IE development is a big money drain are both so easily discredited that they make the overall argument (that Firefox is better) look invalid. Because they make those making the argument look like they're just acting of irrational hatred of IE rather than actual facts.

Maybe there is no reason to use Firefox for the business?

IE actually saved me some time the other day. A client is using TinyMCE and wanted spell-check enabled. I thought this required a PHP script on the server (which is not going to happen, our infrastructure is not set up to run PHP), and that I was going to have to port that script to Perl. Turns out it can use IE's built-in spell-checker instead. Since the client only uses IE, the problem was solved.

This does not make up for the thousands of hours I've spent on things that work great in Firefox, Safari, and Opera, but immediately kill all scripts in IE. (The error messages are crap, and the debugging tools don't work. Nice!)

Last time I checked, Firefox and Safari have built-in spell checkers too (and both browsers probably had the feature before IE did). The only reason not to use Firefox is because it would cost too much to make all of the IE-only sites work in it.

Even if the apps already work on Firefox, it would cost additional time and money (creating/updating documentation, another set of security patches to track, etc) to support the new browser.

Even just testing all the apps on all the sites to find out if they are compatible with Firefox costs time and money.

The secretary in the video seems quite aware that the expense question may actually come out quite favorably for Firefox..

How did you conclude that?

Does Firefox officially provide MSI packages yet? I seem to remember people saying there were a number of issues which made it painful to administrate (for a large corporation) compared to IE.

Properly integrating with Windows management tools should be a priority for the organization.

Many organizations won't even consider a switch unless it works with their tools.

As many big organizations, the DoS is dependent on Windows. The harm (depending on a single vendor solution) has already been done and it will take some steps to undo.

BTW, I would fire a developer who does a web app that only runs on IE, even if IE is the only browser mandated by the organization. Stupid rules are no excuse for employing incompetent people on public money.

Would you also fire a developer for creating a Windows-only desktop app, even if Windows is the operating system mandated by the organization?

That's a different question. It's similar, but the situations aren't really the same. Developing a desktop app that runs on multiple OSes either involves using something like Gtk and probably having a noticeably non-native app on at least some systems or writing separate user interface code for every platform. I don't have much experience in web development(or desktop development for that matter), but given that all commonly-used browsers share at least a certain subset of HTML, CSS, and Javascript, is it really as hard as creating a desktop app that looks native on every major platform? Since there's no such thing as a native look for web apps, it's not really something you have to worry about, so you just have to deal with the differing HTML/CSS/Javascript implementations across browsers.

Besides, an organization is and far more likely to switch browsers than to switch OSes because changing browsers is a less dramatic change that is less disruptive to their old way of doing things.

I think it's a lot more similar than you realize. It's just that most web developers don't have the luxury of deploying to a homogenous environment, so they take it for granted that the site has to work in half a dozen browsers.

Or, turn it around: would you insist your intranet apps support IE 6, even if using IE 6 is forbidden by IT policy?

I would insist all applications to warn users IE6 is forbidden by IT policy, to record its usage and to fire upgrade requests for the IT services team.

I find it funny that the US is doing this, while here in Canada, the government still only officially supports Netscape, even though Netscape itself is no longer supported.

The initial expense of doing something is almost always greater than doing nothing.

The long term expense of doing many things is often less than doing nothing. Otherwise, no one would ever do anything.

A myopic bureaucrat? Naaa...

IE is also free and more secure. Why would they want to switch?

As an organization, the question wasn't about switching the question was about allowing both. Individuals have numerous reasons to prefer one over the other.

and if they allow both, they have to increase development costs for all web apps because we all know supporting multiple browsers costs more.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com