[Duff]

Mozilla doesn't want to do something? Shocking!

This is the same organization that feels that producing a MSI installer for Windows or providing some other way to customize the installation/patching experience is a waste of time.

[sp332]

Not to repeat the same "then do it yourself" thing, but if it were really so important to so many corporations, wouldn't one of them have done it (or hired/sponsored someone to do it) by now? I'm just getting the impression that, for all the yelling, it's not that big a deal.

[Duff]

Yeah, sure. Expecting a third-party to maintain an installer is not a recipe for success. A few projects try to do that and provide some sort of group policy support -- but they're trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. It just doesn't work well.

Security updates are a bigger deal. Auto-update doesn't cut it with large networks with constrained bandwidth or where users don't have admin rights. When you use sane installers, that problem magically disappears.

My previous employer was willing to invest some $ to give back to Mozilla for just this purpose, but was unable to contact anyone at Moz who gave a crap.

My current employer gave up -- we automatically uninstall Firefox as it appears. Our primary browser is now Chrome -- 80% of intranet hits are Chrome today. Chrome addresses most of these issues, and my users are happy. (Except for the users of some Oracle app that uses IE6)

The Mozilla people are fat and happy because of the ad deal that they have with Google. When Google decides that they don't need Firefox anymore, the Moz folks will probably wish they hadn't given a virtual finger to all IT folks.

[sciurus]

http://www.frontmotion.com/Firefox/

They also provide a patched version of Firefox that supports management via Group Policy and a tool that lets you generate a MSI of firefox bundled with extensions.