Firefox struggling vs. IE in enterprises: the (blog) sequel

If writing technology journalism these days in the increasingly rancorous blogosphere is a bit like posting your profile+pic on an Internet dating site, then submitting an article to Slashdot.org, especially one that takes a critical look at a beloved piece of open-source software, is like putting a picture of your flabbiest, shirtless self on Hot Or Not? - that is, opening yourself up to attacks of the most petty and personal variety.

So it was with a little nervousness that I started skimming the reaction on Slashdot to my story about how Mozilla's unwillingness to cater to the needs of enterprises - group policy and deployment tools, paid technical support - is hurting Firefox's uptake by big companies. After all, some of the comments at our own site were pretty vociferous, bordering on the incomprehensible.

"Who wanted MSI as an installer? Give me the names to (sic) that I can choke their necks. MSI is the worst crap ever coded," ranted one spelling-challenged poster.

But I was surprised and gratified by the (as of Monday night) 360+ responses. Many were thoughtful, well-written accounts written by corporate IT admins, many of whom seemed to be ardent fans of Firefox in their personal life (as I am - 4+ years, going back to the pre-1.0 days) who were genuinely pained that for the reasons outlined above, rolling out and managing Firefox at work was just not feasible for them.

"I can't put FF on the list of products approved for general distribution out of fear that some dolt will blithely install a malevolent extension," wrote gruntled. "Which is really a shame because FF + NoScript is awesome. As it is, I approve use of FF on a case by case basis, limiting it to people who have a history of following instructions...I'm told that that there *is* a way to block installation of extensions and plug-ins, but it's labor intensive, and I frankly don't have the authority to obtain the labor required. So if that could be made easier, well, I think this could take off in a big way."

"One of the things holding back some of my sister offices is the very fact that, with 100+ users, it's inefficient or dangerous to have (certain) users as full desktop administrators, especially when they can't figure out which mouse button is the 'right' button," wrote another poster, Sef915. "So finding a way to easily deploy FF would make a lot of techs happy, in my corner here, if not necessarily the intraweb coders. :)"

"From my experience in the public sector, the brass always gets a little nervous when you start using the F-word (free)," wrote another, ExE122. "They would rather dish out a couple grand to have a support and maintenance contract, if not only for the accountability aspect."

I felt I had really touched a nerve among many IT admins. Meanwhile, the criticism from Firefox loyalists was, for the most part, fair and informed. Hardly any knee-jerk anti-Microsoft/IE comments, which must've been some sort of record for Slashdot.