Firefox: Opting Out of the Enterprise Market?

Is it just me, or did Firefox not just update to a shiny new version 4? It was a few months ago, and as an IT pro I can say that a lot of companies are still doing internal testing to decide on when or if to upgrade to version 4. Other companies are probably rolling out Firefox 4 to users computers in phases and hope to be finished soon. now they have released 4.1 (oops, version 5) right on its heels. Not only that, but they announced the end of security support for Firefox 4 which is all of 2-3 months old. This could be then end of Firefox in the enterprise market, and that would be a sad thing as it was the only real competitor with Internet Explorer as Google Chrome updates to new versions much too often and tends to leave IT departments worried about the changes and the impact on existing standard software.

Oh wait, isn’t that what Mozilla’s Firefox just did? Maybe following Google’s example wasn’t the best strategy. And it looks like following is what Firefox is going to be doing more and more from now on as their stable market share shrinks to devoted users, people who don’t pay attention to their browser and non-corporate professionals who don’t worry about their add-ons or compatibility. Even for a lot of Firefox devotees it might be a bit of a stretch as it is likely at least some of their plug-ins won’t work. Only time will tell at this point, but I would not predict an upsurge in Firefox’s market share after this shift in policy.

Maybe it is time to switch back to Safari on my Mac.

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