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.
is this some sort of client-server? require another app client-side?
It's client-server (Firefox <=> management console). There's no other app needed client side, it's all built into the browser.
what about WAN users? intermittent connections?
Supported (one of our core developers often works on a spotty 5G, so we got rather loud feedback when this broke...)
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?
Yes to pretty much all of these - minus reinventing the wheel - I think only "multiple profiles for the same user-id" are currently not supported. You'd essentially need to give an alternate login to the users that need this (because that's what triggers the profile selection). I don't think there's technically anything stopping this, just didn't seem like a common enough use case to get in the very first release.
mobile apps?
Not in this first release. (^_~)
Does it reliably autodeploy or do I need to manually do something for each of my 10,000 users?
We expect most will autodeploy over an existing MDM solution (Intune, Fleet, ...).
Again, how much will Mozilla invest in this small group of users, the IT admins?
I'd say Firefox Enterprise's customers are the IT admins, no? The users aren't generally the asking party to get a managed browser.