FirefoxADM and Firefox 3

I think it is best I am completely open while I investigate this further, and to forewarn users of FirefoxADM that they may need to investigate another method of preference locking when they are considering deploying Firefox 3.

A couple of days ago, I tried Firefox 3 Beta 3 with a normal install of FirefoxADM and, to date, I have not been able to get it to work at all – either setting default preferences or locking preferences.  This is obviously a bit of a blow.

I feel that this could be connected to a bug in the Firefox code, as I have been unable to get locking working in any form (such as using the traditional method).

Its very early in the process of investigating this but if anyone has tried Firefox 3 and FirefoxADM and has any other experiences, please let me know.

I’ll post any updates to this here as well as in a new blog entry.

UPDATE (29/5/08):  Oh THANK GOODNESS…  https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=427927 was the bug and it is fixed.  FirefoxADM and Firefox 3 like each other again!  Thanks to wzzrd for his comment

The Firefox Enterprise Issue Hits the Media

In the last week, I did an email interview with Computerworld magazine, regarding Firefox and FirefoxADM.

You can read the resulting article here.

So, what do I think of the final article?  Well, its pretty much spot on for the situation as it is.  I have to say, I gave them a lot more information than they used from me, which is kinda annoying.  But expected, really, in that they wanted to make a readable article.

The article’s writer, Eric Lai, did a good job of including the opinions of most of the people who should have been asked:  Mike Kaply, Eric from Frontmotion, Rafael Ebron (who did a great job of spreading word of our third party tools) and, dare I be arrogant to say, myself.  I absolutely agree with what Mike, Eric and Rafael say in the article.

The article, though, unfortunately exposes the real problem with Firefox in the enterprise:  Mozilla.  Chris Hofmann from Mozilla gave some comments and they are ridiculous and FUD.  From the article:

He dismissed Active Directory as a “proprietary technology” that would hurt rather than help Firefox administrators.

“Multiple levels of permissions applied across different groups add a lot of complexity,” he said. “If you look at the track record for that feature, it’s resulted in less security for IE.”

This is rubbish.  Complete and absolute rubbish.  In fact, when he says “multiple levels of permissions”, I’m not actually sure he even knows what the hell he’s even talking about.  And this is the guy Mozilla put in charge of Enterprise strategy.  Heaven help us!

All of this has made me come to a decision.  I am going to start to look at sourceforge, the emails I’ve had over the past 3 years, looking at Firefox to see anything I’ve missed and am going to draw up a list of features I want to implement for new versions of FirefoxADM.  If you have feature requests, let me know.

Enterprise and Firefox: Where Are We?

A wee while back, I mentioned that I had gotten involved in an effort called the Firefox Enterprise Working Group.  So, any news to report?

To be honest, despite the valiant efforts of Mike Kaply, things have somewhat stuttered.  The first conference call was very well attended (although I haven’t seen actual numbers) and the debate lively.  Unfortunately, the numbers seemed to dwindle severely over the next 2 or 3 calls before I managed to attend one where I was the only person on the call!  In retrospect, I am unsure whether the conference call idea is so useful – its great for having a lively debate and for sorting out misunderstandings immediately, but a conference call in office hours on the West Coast of the USA is always going to lead to very unsociable times for the conference call from everywhere from mainland Europe to Australasia.  Even though the call was at 10am PDT, that was 6pm for me in the UK and 7/8pm for mainland Europe.  Obviously, for people in Asia, its seriously into the night time for the call.  I can understand why Michael chose the conference call as the “venue” for the Group but maybe some other communications method might be better for the interchange of ideas from here on in (such as the Firefox Enterprise Wiki or a mailing list).

It was interesting listening to how others have created solutions for Firefox.  Everyone seems to have taken slightly different angles on how to go.  However, I remain convinced that the #1 and #2 priorities should be Group Policy support and an MSI installer.  An example of a different view was TeamA, a pseudonym for what I believe to be a major US Bank, who were major proponents of a tool called Mission Control for controlling settings which harks back to Netscape days.  I previously blogged about this.  Whilst it had advantages over Group Policy such as, significantly, it works cross platform, and can control settings over the web, for me it had disadvantages such as the fact that Group Policy is a technology people know and is the technology used in probably 98% of scenarios, Group Policy is used for other related tools such as reporting and audit tools, and thirdly, it would involve the systems administrator putting in place new infrastructure just to control one application.

That latter issue is something that concerns me about the current approach of some and seemingly the one Mozilla Corp prefers.  Want to control settings?  Set up a Mission Control server.  Want to control extensions?  Deploy your own Firefox Extensions server.  Want to control updates?  Deploy your own Firefox Updates server.  Etc etc etc.  If there is one thing that my experience of FirefoxADM has told me, it is that there are two types of Systems Administrator who really needs a very high level of control over systems:  those at the very high end of resources in the likes of Banks and huge corporations, and those at the very low end of resources such as an IT guy for a bunch of schools.  Setting up a load of servers to control one application is just not a possibility for the latter – the mountain is not going to move to Mohammed.

Anyway, in the New Year, I really want to have another look at all the projects I have done, including the much-untouched FirefoxADM, mainly because, despite being not updated and generally unloved for the past 2 and a bit years, it is still working for people and being downloaded and deployed out there more than ever!

Hopefully 2008 will be the year of Firefox in the Enterprise.  Well, can hope.