For general-purpose use this may be true. For specialized Web-based tools, like access to medical or legal systems, not as much: the users are conditioned to work with a specific browser (many remember MSIE-only apps), and are used to the idea that their workstation has all kinds of Internet access limitations, along with a corporate policy that expressly forbids arbitrary browsing.

[Edited: typo]

An earlier company I worked at had this same issue with Internet Explorer. It was after IE had been deprecated by microsoft as a browser but our IT department still had it as a downloadable application. Most of my team's on-call issues were from internal users using IE to access our site, even after we added an IE compatible popup that would tell them NOT to use IE.

Change the icon to look like Chrome?

The large business I work for cited low usage when they blocked it from being installed a couple of years back.

Is there a notable difference between Firefox Enterprise and standard Firefox with group policy management[0]?

[0]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customizing-firefox-usi...

I'd rather not have Firefox installed, than Firefox preloaded with MitM certificates, disabled uBlock Origin, Proxy Switcher, added Adobe, Copilot, and a few more "useful" extensions and security add-ons that can't be disabled, and so on.

If company IT gets hold of Firefox, it's not better than just using Edge or Chrome that comes by default.

Well, you read one of their goals and visions here. That part is ok.

The question is: how is that goal turning out once it meets reality?

Tons of great ideas failed for various reasons. Alan Kay keeps on pointing out how sad he is that Xerox PARC failed in many ways. Reality is a strong selector - and the evil Google empire will make competition really, really hard here.

Non-Technical users are complaining to you about how they want to use Firefox? What?

people who decide on policy tend not be the same people on the ground doing real work. Therefore management makes a policy, they think they are doing the correct thing, when in actual fact, they're not, but just don't hear or get the right type of feedback (including feedback they trust to be real and isn't just the workers complaining/whinging unnecessarily).

This type of dysfunction occurs quite frequently i find.

Well, just install the fucking extension in Firefox. There is nothing else that is as good as uBlock Origin. E.g. Reddit prevents you from reading unless you log in? There's a filter for that in an "annoyances" block-list that you can activate.

If you are unable / unwilling to install an extension, Librewolf includes and enables uBlock Origin by default.

https://librewolf.net/

It is a Firefox fork with sane, user-respecting defaults. Of course it breaks sites that do not respect their users' privacy / agency.

This feature ships in Firefox for a few years IIRC? https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-prote...

I agree with the other person though that you should install uBlock Origin in Firefox (which works better there than in Chromium based browsers) and never look back.

It doesn't ship with a blessed adblocker, but firefox + ubo is still the gold standard.

Is this a real question?

It takes literally two seconds to install uBlock Origin.

You can even preload it by baking in the xpi file.

If its first concern why would you use a browser that has ben caught injecting affiliate codes?

You can't think of an enterprise that doesn't want all of its web browsing metadata collected by third parties? Some enterprises are much more security-conscious than that. I have seen protected paper trash bins in a research lab and office buildings with X-ray scanners (mainly for electronic devices, not weapons).

There's already Island browser that competes in this space. Plenty of companies pay for browser control that goes beyond what the normal policies can provide.

They list this as a feature in the submission page.

No, why would you think that?

Someone dropped the following link, which seems to have way more detail than the press releases: https://www.firefox.com/en-US/firefox/enterprise/158.0/relea...

It looks like they do actually offer that as a feature: "Employees can access internal company sites and web apps from personal devices without a device-level VPN"

Edit: To give proper credit, the link is from Heise.de

Hopefully they still can. Healthy Firefox == healthy browser market.

Right?!? There's a lot of negative sentiment on the comments here on HN but probably from people that don't understand locked down corps and other higher-security work environments where these features are needed. Plus not relying on Microsoft/Google is always a good thing. I can definitely see this being useful in hospitals, government orgs, etc.

Not only revenue but enterprise users are valuable market share. Think of things like Slack calling which last I checked don't work in Firefox unless you spoof the user-agent. More enterprise users will force better Firefox support in a huge variety of websites which will benefit all Firefox users.

Yes, this is good move. I am not getting why are people being up in arms, if they are getting fund from this, it will help improving Firefox, and resolve pain points the complainers have.

All in all good thing, why are they so mad.

It's enterprise, so the cost is 500k unless you don't want to pay so much, then it's 50k.

That's how you know it's enterprise!

If you have to ask the question, you're probably not going to like the answer.

The number of people using web browsers has gone up massively though over the past 15 years. 2%-3% right now isn't as bad as it would have been in the past

What do ad/tracker extensions do to that stat tracker?

Mozilla as an organisation is rotten and genuinely needs to die, so that Firefox can live. The only thing from Mozilla that people care about is Firefox, but Mozilla doesn’t care about Firefox to a quite stunning degree. As an example: four or five years ago they announced laying off a quarter of their 1,000 employees, and declared what they were going to be focusing on: none of it was related to Firefox in any way (and most of it they’ve since shut down). And it should go without saying that you don’t need 750 employees to make a browser, and probably can’t effectively use even a hundred.

Are you using, or planning to use, the Enterprise version, and feel like this functionality is missing? Or is the complain about the regular release? I'm asking because I fail to see the link...

No, they do not infact hate pancakes.

Pretty sure that's Firefox in contrast to the other alternatives in the Enterprise space.

"control first" to the IT department instead of the user.

> Once again Mozilla invents stuff noone wants.

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/phasing-out-the-o...

They need to try. I also feeling like there’s likley growing demand globally; like they mentioned. A need for greater digital sovereignty.

It's income they don't really earn.

Like a rich kid living on daddy's money, they're somewhat disconnected from the reality that most people exist in.

What do you dislike about this announcement?