alt Hacker NewsFolks 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.
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Agreed. This is a great move by Mozilla - great timing, great vision, great potential for revenue.
Managing browsers - portals to almost every use and risk - is a PITA and I don't trust Chrome for confidentiality of data or users. Access to actual Mozilla personnel (engineers?) would be a big differentiator. But I wonder about a couple of things:
1) What are Edge and Safari management like? Are they competition here? If IT wants to move off Chrome to a management-friendly browser, the first thought would be the platform's native browsers which might integrate easily with native management.
2) How well does Firefox's management solution work? One-off management solutions for single applications have a bad history: They are often buggy, poorly designed (how much is Mozilla investing in UI design for this small number of users), complicated to learn, deploy (is this some sort of client-server? require another app client-side?), operate (what about WAN users? intermittent connections?), have poor features (multiple profiles? per-user or per-device? multiple users per device and multiple devices per user? group management? integration with other directory services - or do they reinvent the wheel and I need to input every update in multiple applications? multiple platforms? mobile apps?), manage (the management app needs management), etc. Does it reliably autodeploy or do I need to manually do something for each of my 10,000 users? Again, how much will Mozilla invest in this small group of users, the IT admins? I already have Microsoft's / Apple's native platform management solutions and those are enough of a headache.
I'd advise Mozilla to make it a delight for IT admins - immediately remove their fears of an additional headache in their busy days - and they will jump right in. As long as it works, I don't think users would care. Everyone, users and admins, is too busy.
Yep, we know how much work we need to here (I work at Mozilla leading new products and this is in my portfolio). We're being very deliberate about how we go after the opportunity and are focusing right on enterprises (in Europe to start) that can take advantage of what we can offer now, while we move quickly to add new features and capabilities to address a broader audience. I think we can get there!