14 DAY TRIAL // A controversy has been brewing over the weekend, a foreseeable one, but a controversy nonetheless. When it became clear that Firefox 4 will not be getting any security patches beyond 4.0.1 and that it will be replaced by Firefox 5 and then by Firefox 6 and so on, enterprise users cried foul.
While the rapid release cycle is great for regular users, that's not how things happen on the enterprise front where all applications and updates get thoroughly tested before being rolled out to thousands or tens of thousands of computers.
For the enterprises and government agencies that have adopted Firefox, each major version means a lot of testing. When a new version comes once a year or so, this is not much of a big deal. But this won't work if it's going to happen every six weeks, like Mozilla intends to.
Naturally, enterprise users are upset and feel betrayed by Mozilla, which didn't exactly advertise this, though it wasn't much of a secret either. And Mozilla's answer to this, which boils down to "tough luck," said with varying bluntness by its representatives, is not helping.
But, while Mozilla's response to the situation could have been more diplomatic, it is probably right to make this move and not continue to support Firefox 4. Mozilla is a small organization, very dependent on its community, even in the core coding area.
Quite simply, Mozilla does not have the resources to support an enterprise version of Firefox, one used by a very small fraction of its user base. While there are several million enterprise users of Firefox at this point, it pales in comparison to the several hundred million users Firefox has.
Mozilla has said that even compromise solutions, like a long-term support version coming once a year or so, would not work. This is debatable, after all, for a long time Mozilla has supported several old version of Firefox at a time with security patches.
But there is an even bigger argument, one that's being overlooked. The whole discussion is over major versions. Traditionally, enterprise environments do large scale testing for any major updates, for obvious reasons, the changes are often substantial enough to require this.
But the differences between 'major' Firefox versions are going to be insubstantial most of the time, just like the differences between Chrome versions. The move from Firefox 4 to Firefox 5 was not a major version update in the old meaning of the phrase.
It is very likely that an update from Firefox 5 to Firefox 6 will not break any compatibility with enterprise applications. It is also likely that any change that would break compatibility be small enough that it would only require a small amount of work to get the proprietary app up to date. Still, this would mean changing the way enterprise deploys updates and develops its own apps, something very unlikely to happen easily.