Via C|Net (full article here):

The Mozilla Foundation is expecting to see a surge in interest in the Firefox browser from enterprise users once Microsoft launches Internet Explorer 7 next year.  Asa Dotzler, the community coordinator at the Mozilla Foundation, said Tuesday that he hopes to attract many corporate Windows 2000 users to the Firefox browser, since they will be unable to take advantage of the improvements in IE 7.

What is this guy smoking?  He obviously has no clue what he’s talking about, and didn’t in any way think through the scenarios in which deploying Firefox simply wouldn’t be possible.  A couple of scenarios spring to mind:

• While ActiveX certainly doesn’t have a place on the internet, it’s prevalence on the intranet/LAN is very popular (and viable as well due to the fact that security can be reigned in).  Last I checked, Firefox doesn’t support ActiveX, and there are no plans for this…which is good for home users.  Even if they were to make a special “LAN Edition” of Firefox or whatnot, what would be the compelling reason for an upgrade?  Companies with existing ActiveX solutions in place would have to A) retest against Firefox ($$$), B) deploy Firefox to their users machines ($$$), C) retrain their users on Firefox ($$$).  This simply won’t happen.
• Even if the above could somehow happen, another compelling reason for companies to stick with IE is that any company with an IT department worth their salt has Group Policy restrictions on their IE users.  Firefox doesn’t support Group Policy.  Again, if they were to somehow bake this in, the above caveats still apply.  No IT manager would ever approve the expense simply to move to another browser.

The only viable situation I could somehow see Firefox making inroads into corporate America is with small companies who don’t reign in their users surfing habits/have no internal IT department, and no custom ActiveX infrastructure in place…so basically just the mom and pop shops out there, and many of them have probably never even heard of Firefox, or don’t even realize that the big blue E on their desktop is called Internet Explorer (or even what a web browser is).  I am a staunch Firefox supporter (even through the security mess of late), but come on guys, don’t make yourselves look like idiots by attempting to bite off more than you can chew.  Focus on the home market, fix all the security crap…tackle the market you were built to tackle; the end user.  IE isn't going anywhere in corporations.

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