infoTECH Feature

September 29, 2011

Mozilla Proposes Slower Firefox Update Schedule for Enterprises

Mozilla (News - Alert) recently got itself into hot water with the enterprise crowd following a string of rapid fire updates to its Firefox browser. Now, the company is proposing an alternative that could see the updates doled out more slowly, proving less stressful to IT pros who have to support the browser.

This year alone has seen Firefox jump from version 3 to 4 to 5 to 6 and now to 7, with each new version popping up every three months. Individual consumers may be able to keep pace with each new update. But businesses and IT departments face a tougher time as they need to support multiple users as well as deal with Web-based applications that need to be tested for compatibility with each new release.

To make the situation even more difficult, every time Mozilla pushes out a new version, it cuts off support for the current version, giving IT admins little or no time to test their internal and external Web apps let alone prepare to migrate all their users to the latest update.

Adding more fuel to the fire, this past summer a couple of Mozilla folks showed a certain lack of concern for businesses running their browser. In particular, Mozilla's director of the browser, Asa Dotzler, said in June that the enterprise has never been and shouldn’t be a focus of the company and that “a minute spent making a corporate user happy can better be spent making many regular users happy.”

Well, now Mozilla’s poor bedside manner with the business world may be turning around. The company recently established an Enterprise Working Group (EWG) devoted to helping corporate customers who need to support Firefox. Based on feedback received through the EWG, Mozilla has developed an initial proposal that would give enterprises more time to test and deploy new versions of Firefox.

Specifically, the proposal advances the idea of an Extended Support Release (ESR) based on official releases of Firefox. Instead of giving companies only three months to contend with a new version, the ESR would allow for a two cycle (12 week) overlap between the time of a new release and the end-of-life support of the previous release.

As explained in the proposal, “this will allow organizations to qualify and test against Aurora and Beta builds for twelve weeks leading up to the ESR, and an additional 12 weeks to certify and transition to a new ESR.”

Geared toward organizations that need to deploy Firefox in a managed environment, the proposed releases would give IT more time to test and roll out new versions of the browser while limiting the security risks of being stuck on older versions.

Mozilla has mapped out the full details of its plan on its ESR proposal page. Though the company acknowledges a number of caveats and risks involved, there are benefits as well. So far, the ESR is still in the proposal stage, so it’s certainly far from a done deal. But at least it shows that Mozilla is taking a step in the right direction by trying to better support the enterprise environment.



Lance Whitney is a journalist, IT consultant, and Web Developer with almost 20 years of experience in the IT world. To read more of Lance's articles, please visit his columnist page

Edited by Jennifer Russell
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