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As a Firefox user, I hope this works. As someone who works in IT, people are going to try and install Chrome at all costs and your ticket queues will be clogged with people saying a computer is broken or has no internet access if it doesn't have Chrome on it.
This was needed. A lot of large businesses ban Firefox because they don't have these kind of controls. I can't test Firefox on my work computer because company policy prevents it being installed. And that kind of thing really hurts Firefox.
Probably the most practical idea Firefox has had to maintain and possibly build up its market share in a long time.
Do I work in the twilight zone or something? The company I work for is trying to phase out Firefox, and I'm getting multiple complaints a week from non-technical users that they can't open Firefox anymore and they don't want to use any other browser.
Does it block ads like Brave without installing extensions? Tracking is one of the worst plagues of modern browsing so blocking all kinds of tracking and fingerprinting should be the first concern in an enterprise. Nothing should leak to the outside world
I really hope this works - it could provide sustainable alternate revenue streams for Mozilla, entrench alternative browsers into large deployments, and isn't some hare-brained half-baked idea that damages trust in its existing user base. Godspeed.
Hell yah. This is exactly the type of thing they need to do to take their mouths off the teats of advertising companies like Google.
Make privacy at the enterprise level the first class feature.
Too bad people won’t pay for any of this.
I can't think of a single enterprise who I have worked with or know who'd pay for this when there's Chrome or Edge available.
Can someone expound on the DLP features? E.g.:
Can you do basic string pattern matching to prevent leaks of sensitive data?
In the case of a credit card, for instance, how would you distinguish between a user legitimately "buying something on a website" from "posting customer card to a forum" or "sending to a chatbot" (or even "inappropriately making purchase with customer card")?
Can you match the data itself against an allow/flag/deny list?
Can you run data through a local or corporately-situated LLM instructed to "Assess whether this looks potentially sensitive" via a given set of rules, and flag it to the user or a supervisor to proceed/abort?
How extensive are in-built features, and what kind of hooks and feedback/UI interaction is available for third party integrations?
Finally something that makes sense from these guys!
And Thunderbird Enterprise! A pity that Thunderbird is still full of unsolved bugs, and it went from being an amazing email client to one of the worst ones. What a pity.
Every single ounce of sweat put towards an AI feature or redesign or side project (anon email) should have been put towards this, and implemented, a long time ago. And this will ACTUALLY make them more money, and allow them to actually build a better browser.
Does this mean they will remove "AI controls" (i.e. a way to completely shut all LLM shit off) from normal Firefox?
I'm sure this is great for improving adoption on the admin side, but I'm also sure that I would hate using a locked-down Firefox.
My company has management software that nags me about the latest Firefox version, which is annoying, because I use the extended support release instead. Less frequent updates, and fewer sudden changes like the AI features people have been grumbling about.
Incidentally, 153.5.0esr was released today, with 140 reaching EoL.
this is move that should have been done a long time ago + with a bundled vpn or equivalent of a tailscale in the browser.
Mozilla would have made tons of money.
I feel like people don't take the Chromium monopoly seriously. Sure, Brave is great, but it's still chromium, making Google have outsized say over how the web behaves. Manifest V3 was the proof, every Chromium browser had to live with it. If this helps Firefox gain ground, I'm all for it.
20 years too late unfortunately. They turned their backs on enterprise when the Netscape org was killed off and lost a lot of momentum because of that.
How is this different from autoconfig.js, firefox.cfg, and other `defaults/pref` options? Orgs can already use that to manage and lock down Firefox preferences, ban/force extensions, and more
The typical enterprise "Request a demo" without clear pricing. I think a company like Firefox should lead and publish pricing. I know IT guys are used to this but where I can make decisions this is an immediate showstopper.
No public price information. I wonder how much they charge.
Now this is the kind of Mozilla project I can get behind it focuses on the browser it gives a potential path for revenue and I practically jumped up and down when they announced their bringing in Thunderbird.
Solid props to Mozilla for this one. Good job.
It looks good, but it's hard to break habits.
Anything that makes enterprise management of FF easier is a win for the browser environment.
That said, I'm seeing enterprise security companies selling soft forks of Chrome with all sorts of inspection and policy built in. Basically, instead of doing DLP/URL filtering/risk management on a MITM box, they're pushing it to the browser. This helps remove the need for TLS decryption, and the need to funnel their browser traffic to any particular tunnel endpoint.
I guess what I'm saying is... Firefox might want to take a look at what those companies are doing to Chrome and figure if there is a way to make it easy to plug that kind of security into their browser.
edit: just noticed this is a paid service. So I triple down on what I said. Companies that are "buying" browsers are buying browsers with deep inspection and security features baked in. I don't know if they'll buy support for FF when Edge is free.
So much negativity in here. I mean, I get the antipathy toward Mozilla, but they're trying to find a way to make the actual browser a revenue stream. Yeah it could skew incentives or something, but unless you believe that you, and everyone you know is ready to start a paid subscription to Firefox Personal tomorrow, it's something like this, or more Google deals and pushing "service" integrations.
Seriously, this place is so damn negative these days, but not even constructively.
I'm skeptical that Firefox can pull this off ... but this is a product that is needed by business right now. I wish them luck.
So where is it? It just says 'Request a Demo'. There's no download. Is this a commercial product/service?
Yesss this was needed so much.
This is an interesting and seemingly obvious idea. Having an independent take on these matters including AI is valuable.
They are trying. But it won't work.
I think if you really want to build something like that, you need real momentum. Perhaps the ladybird folks can succeed here, the future will tell. I don't think Mozilla has enough momentum left.
https://www.digitalapplied.com/blog/browser-market-share-202...
Firefox is between 2% and 3% now.
And yet, still no simple way to self host the their syncserver (syncstorage-rs) without the mozilla account abomination.
For all the garbage Mozilla puts out, this is actually a good idea.
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> Firefox Enterprise puts customer privacy, independence and control first.
So what before came as main advantage of Firefox is now dropped and put behind the paywall?
Just seems like GPO options for Firefox, which already existed.
Page says a lot of nothing. Or just restates things that already were in place.
Firefox Enterprise puts customer privacy, independence and control first.
Thanks for the open admission that regular Firefox does not.
This landing page smells like AI slop. I hate it not because it's AI generated, but the fact that reading more doesn't give me any further understanding.
>Firefox Enterprise. Different at the core. Stronger because of it.
What's this even means
Prediction: Nobody is going to use this. They won't get a single sale.
Mozilla sold out its values with ads, telemetry etc hence the existence of LibreWolf, which should have no reason to exist.
I manage these types of decisions and won’t use it.
Once again Mozilla invents stuff noone wants. Its just incredible how an "org" with so much income fails again and again
every announcement I see from Mozilla makes me happier that I switched to WaterFox last year and don't have to deal with their shit any more
Folks here don't understand how big of a market this is. Island just raised a $400 million Series F at $6.4 billion valuation: https://www.island.io/press/island-announces-400-million-ser...
Mozilla is also very, very far behind in this race. But the potential is real. Enterprises have both the budget and the motivation to care about DLP (including preventing employees from copy/pasting sensitive data into AI chat apps), VPN-less access to private intranet apps (including to contractors on BYOD), preventing access to sites that distract employees and have zero business value (pornography, gambling, etc.)...
If you care about an open web browser, you should care about it having a sustainable revenue model. Enterprise browsers are exactly that revenue model. The question is not whether this is a good idea; the question is whether Mozilla can catch up.