Mozilla Forcing Businesses Into Using Internet Explorer

Just recently, one of Mozilla’s core employees went on record to say that the company was not concerned with enterprise customers and will likely never be. This comes after businesses are complaining that Mozilla is pushing out new versions of its Firefox browser too quickly. Microsoft on the other hand, jumped out of the bushes and declared that the company still loves enterprise customers.

In a blog post, Microsoft announced that the company will continue supporting Internet Explorer 8 and 9 until January 2020. This is taking aim at Mozilla who said that previous versions of their browser, Firefox, will not be supported after a new edition is released.

“[The] enterprise has been, and will always be, an important focus of ours,” stated Internet Explorer Director Ari Bixhorn. Microsoft has a polcy of supporting each version of Internet Explorer as long as the latest version of Windows it runs on is supported.

John Walicki, a corporate IT analyst, criticized Mozilla’s decision to kill support for Firefox 4 due to the release of Firefox 5, considering that Firefox 4 was released only 4 months ago. Mozilla is following in Google’s footsteps by releasing a new browser every three months.

Walicki even stated that he was about to migrate 500,000 corporate users to the new Firefox 4 browser until he learned that Firefox 5 had just been released and Firefox 4 would no longer be supported. “The Firefox 4 EOL is a kick in the stomach,” he stated. Walicki also said that he had spent months carefully testing the browser to ensure that thousands of web applications and add-ons ran on it.

Asa Dotzler, who was a part of the original Firefox team, argued that Firefox has never and will never be for enterprise customers. “you do realize that we get about 2 million Firefox downloads per day from regular user types, right? Your ‘big numbers’ here are really just a drop in the bucket, fractions of fractions of a percent of our user base. Enterprise has never been (and I’ll argue, shouldn’t be) a focus of ours. Until we run out of people who don’t have sysadmins and enterprise deployment teams looking out for them, I can’t imagine why we’d focus at all on the kinds of environments you care so much about.”

Microsoft earned a way into the hearts of enterprise customers after this fiasco. “I think I speak for everyone on the IE team when I say we’d like the opportunity to win back your business. We’ve got a great solution for corporate customers with both IE8 and IE9,” stated Microsoft.