Mozilla To Ditch Firefox Extensions? 415
An anonymous reader writes "Although some have raised concerns about how sane switching to Jetpack is, it seems that Mozilla's new gadget is bound to replace the powerful extension mechanism we know. Maybe Mozilla wants to replace all the great add-ons we use daily with gadgets that add an entry to the Tools menu, or maybe they just want to draw thousands of inexperienced developers into putting together a bunch of HTML and CSS that won't integrate in the UI. It seems to me that in light of recent decisions we've discussed before, Mozilla isn't going in the right direction. What do you think ?"
TOO MANY LINKS man! (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously. Provide a link to the main stori(es) and that's about it. All this extra stuff is simply extraneous. How can we RTFA if we don't know which is the real frikken article?
Car Analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
Removing extensions from Firefox is like removing the guns from a tank.
Toughts About Direction (Score:5, Insightful)
I never did think Mozilla was headed in the right direction. I've long shunned their browsers because, to me, they were bloatware, overly complex and bug-prone and not even offering the features I'd come to love in the competition.
But that didn't prevent Mozilla from making a very successful browser.
So, if now I say that I don't think they are headed in the right direction, what does that really tell anyone? Obviously, their success depends on other things than what I think about it. I wish them all the best, I hope they'll enjoy working on their products, and we'll see how they pan out in practice.
this isn't news... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's rabblerousing. Slashdot, news for the hard of thinking.
Editors, please try to give these stories at least a pretense of fairness. Unless you need this for your application to work at Fox News.
Re:TOO MANY LINKS man! (Score:5, Insightful)
Mozilla is implementing Opera's User JavaScript.
Re:TOO MANY LINKS man! (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe all Chrome extensions are pure HTML and JS. Many people have criticized that learning how to use XUL is a pain, and that most memory leaks and instability issues come from poorly coded extensions. Everytime Firefox has a major release, they break all old extensions. People either update/re-write their extensions or they don't work anymore. If Mozilla says the latest Firefox requires your extension to operate as pure HTML and JS, it wouldn't be the end of the world.
Re:Same as microsoft, gnome, etc dumb it down (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't doubt that there will be good add-ins via this. There's just going to be so much more trash.
Re:this isn't news... (Score:3, Insightful)
Slashdot has *always* been very biased. Slashdot is pro Linux and Apple, and very anti Microsoft for example.
It really gets me that people only identify bias that they don't agree with, and then assume that bias that matches your views isn't considered bias.
MSNBC and Fox News are equally biased for instance, but it seems Fox News gets called out for it considerably more.
Re:Same as microsoft, gnome, etc dumb it down (Score:3, Insightful)
That was actually one of the things I was thinking of. Do we really need to lower the barriers to entry? Are good ideas really going missing because "extensions are too hard?"
As a consumer of extensions, I have installed about 20 out of the 8,000 available. If I have a catalog of 80,000 jetpacks, does that mean I have to look through 10 times as much crap just to find the 10 useful ones?
Bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Extensions and the customization they provide is THE reason I use Firefox. If they are so foolish as to eliminate this capability, they're going to lose a lot of users. If this happens, I won't upgrade for as long as I can, and when I'm eventually forced to switch, I'll find a browser that supports allowing me to customize it. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the OSS community forks the project over this.
Can be done right... (Score:5, Insightful)
Chrome extensions are entirely HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and so are many Chrome pages (the New Tab Page, the Downloads Tab, etc). I'd tag this badsummary, because it's not the idea of Jetpack that's the problem here, it's the implementation. From the first article, which is the only one that seems to be seriously concerned:
I like its power, I dislike its syntax. I _really_ dislike its syntax.... images are inline as data URLs because Jetpacks misses offline support and packaging; the HTML element inserted into the statusbar has to be precisely positioned and that will suck depending on the preferred user's font size;
Contrast to Chrome's extension API, which is fairly clean where it isn't strictly what's already available to any webpage. In particular, those two issues are addressed: Chrome extensions are packaged (more or less) as a cryptographically signed zipfile, so you can have separate images, scripts, etc; there are currently very well-defined ways to add a button either to the URL bar or to the browser itself, and when toolstrips were available (I don't think they are anymore), they were exposed as HTML pages with most of the work done for you in predefined CSS, so no absolute positioning (at least not that you have to do yourself).
integration with native or native-alike (hear xul) UI and cross-platform issues, a major concern
Basically, the article seems to be assuming there are (and will always be) advantages to XUL. To me, the answer to this is not to expose XUL, but to fix/extend the HTML used. In a way, I think Chrome proves that users really don't care that much about the UI looking and feeling "native", but care much more about it being themable.
UI Integration? (Score:2, Insightful)
"Integrating with the UI"? So whatever happen to XUL [wikipedia.org]
Re:Toughts About Direction (Score:4, Insightful)
I initially chose Firefox for all the "wrong" reasons. It was open source, where IE was not. It was more secure by virtue of its smaller adoption footprint, where IE was the fat target. And it was not by Microsoft. I did not choose it because it was feature rich, or less buggy.
Since then I have grown to appreciate it more and more, mostly through the added value I get from extensions. Surfing is definitely faster. I have many more convenience options. I have control over the typical crap that blocks the content off most web sites.
The big questions I have are: why make developers of perfectly good extensions rewrite their code? For that matter, will some of them give up because they don't want to reimplement their code in Jetpacks? Or maybe they've already stopped supporting their old extensions, and now they'll just die.
Given all that, I wonder if his comments were more to stir up community reactions than an actual product roadmap?
Re:No more AdBlock with JetPack (Score:4, Insightful)
Since you gave your conclusion first, I made the silly mistake of assuming you actually supported it somewhere in your post instead of undercutting it by demonstrating it isn't clear one way or the other.
You did make a populist plea, though. I'll give you points for excellent rabble rousing technique.
Re:Same as microsoft, gnome, etc dumb it down (Score:3, Insightful)
Extensions were broken from day one. You only need to look at the fact that they are bound to specific versions for proof of that. Extensions see too much of the internals of the browser without any insulating abstraction. This means they are insecure, unstable and break when new versions are released.
This is in some cases a strength, because extensions can be very powerful, but it also a huge liability for both the programmers of the extensions, and for the programmers of Firefox itself.
This change would just be a long overdue fix for this fundamental problem.
Re:Toughts About Direction (Score:3, Insightful)
I get an impression that too much weight is given to synthetic benchmarks when determining "speed" of browser. Specifically, js-only benchmarks.
Where's overall speed of browsing, snappiness of UI, especially after a long session with many tabs open?
Re:this isn't news... (Score:5, Insightful)
TBH, Microsoft kind of earns it... unless called out publicly, they do have a habit of regularly doing things that seem designed from the start to squash innovation, destroy computing freedoms, and in general make tech a raging PITA for anyone who isn't them.
Also, Microsoft tends to get a pass far more often than other corps... take the whole Danger data loss affair. About a week of techie outrage, a couple days of MSM mentions, and that was it. If it was Oracle, IBM, or one of the other big boys who borked customer's data, you can bet hard money that the mainstream media would have called for some CEO's head on a platter. You could also bet hard money that the whole 'cloud' hype would have come to a crashing halt... instead of carrying on like nothing happened. Hell, if that happened to a smaller player, that small player would've been Chapter 11 within a month.
Mozilla has been floundering for a long time (Score:5, Insightful)
When Firefox was first released, it was a breath of fresh air -- a fast, effective browser that discarded the bloat which plagued Seamonkey.
Firefox laid the groundwork that has brought us to the current state of browsers... there's a competitive market, except in the business space, where the inability to manage browser settings has made the enterprise the last refuge for Internet Explorer. Unfortunately, the project doesn't have the desire to expand its impact further -- they refuse to accept bug reports or feature requests regarding issues that are critical to business users, and shout you down when you try to complain.
So you have this great browser, but you can't script the install, can't manage update distribution (ie. autoupdate is not appropriate in many use cases), and manage config in a sane way.
Now instead of fixing those issues, they are "fixing" something that isn't broken -- the extension system that makes Firefox so cool for so many people!
Re:Toughts About Direction (Score:5, Insightful)
The extension model needs revision, and only elitist bastards would be upset that they're making it simpler and more accessible.
And possibly more limited. Are jetpacks really going to have the same full access to Firefox internals? Not every useful extension repaints the UI.
I'm also concerned that the bar is already low enough that most of the extensions out there are total crap. By setting the bar on the floor, every idiot will be able to produce terrible jetpacks. Do you really want to wade through 100,000 crappy jetpacks to find the dozen nuggets?
The Apple app store is already getting there. Search for some useful term, and there are two dozen apps that pop up, and you waste half an hour wading through them all to find one that's reasonably close to what you want. Will Firefox really be better if adddons.mozilla.org starts featuring jetpacks that are no better than a "Lady Gaga-fier" or a "DUDE!!1! I MAD A J3FF PHILT3R!!11!!"
Elitist bastards live better than the standard rabble because they set the bar higher. Not everybody wants to be surrounded by crapware.
Re:this isn't news... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Same as microsoft, gnome, etc dumb it down (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, we need to reduce features IF we want any moron to do it. But do we want any moron to do it? I don't.
Re:this isn't news... (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft has done plenty of evil things. Yet when they do something nice, such as opening tons of documentation to the Samba team, people spin it as part of some evil scheme. In reality, it is a nice move largely predicated by the EU judgement against them.
Thus you've answered your own question - they did something nice not out of altruism or community, but in an effort to avoid punishment for something. Would they have done it if the specter of EU punishment for other anti-competitive actions hadn't been looming? I'm thinking not. I won't even have to bring up the whole "embrace, extend, extinguish" ethic they provably have.
Re:No more AdBlock with JetPack (Score:3, Insightful)
Or exercise some good ol' open source muscle and fork it. Isn't that supposed to be one of the benefits of open source? You aren't enslaved to a particular developer if a feature you want/need is dropped or not developed.
Re:TOO MANY LINKS man! (Score:5, Insightful)
The only reason I'm currently still using Firefox is because of some unique extensions, you can fully control how your browser looks and how it operates. With this functionality removed I would have no reason left to stick with Firefox.
Re:TOO MANY LINKS man! (Score:5, Insightful)
You're half right IMO - the extra links provide some useful context, but it's incredibly irritating not knowing which is the main article.
I realise this goes against all tradition, but why not just have the main link prominently displayed above the summary?
Re:this isn't news... (Score:3, Insightful)
Internal documents prove that embrace, extend, extinguish was at the very least a tactic they used in the past.
Are they quite as evil today? That's hard to say. Microsoft does seem to be opening up and playing a little nicer.
Gates isn't CEO anymore. Ray Ozzie doesn't come across as quite so evil. Ballmer is still there. And I don't assume every division and team at Microsoft is staffed by evil people.
I'm not saying Microsoft is a great company. I'm simply saying that the /. bias is to assume every move is pure evil.
Perhaps a better example might be Google. They donate tons of code. They open up all kinds of things. They develop for Linux. They pay for Summer of Code. They pay staff members to do nothing by contribute upstream (like Andrew Morton, one of the most influence kernel hackers). Yet every few days I see a Slashdot story on how evil Google is, and how they aren't open enough.
Slashdot shows repeated bias that as a large corporation, they must be evil, regardless of all evidence to the contrary.
Compare that to Apple's repeated evil actions, and how Slashdot treats Apple as the greatest company on the planet.
Re:Toughts About Direction (Score:5, Insightful)
So you're arguing that we should make creating Firefox extensions difficult because good programmers make good software?
I wanted to be clear because there are about a thousand arguments against such a position - of which I'm enumerate a few:
1) good programmers != good application designers ...
2) good programmers may not have the next cool idea
3) even good programmers would like programming to be easier
4) making programming more difficult than it has to be is NEVER A GOOD IDEA
5) good programmers might not say "Lady Gaga-fier" but will say some stupid 3l33t non-sense.
That said, I do hope that they keep extensions around for a while, as it seems Jetpack doesn't do everything yet.
Re:TOO MANY LINKS man! (Score:5, Insightful)
Mark parent +1 insightful. Compare Chrome's adblocking vs Firefox's, for example. Firefox wins. And there are lots of cool, useful addons, like TabHunter, which is a cool way to navigate through lots of tabs. Or FireFTP -- an FTP client that works wherever Firefox does. Or DownThemAll, a download manager that works wherever Firefox does. And so on.
I think what Firefox _really_ needs is a Chrome-like Task Manager that shows you exactly how much memory/CPU/network your add-on is consuming. For example, on Chrome I know that the Gmail checker add-on takes 10MB memory, and ~0 CPU/network. I can always uninstall it if I think that's too much. Maybe when Firefox's Electrolysis project for per-process tabs goes mainstream, this feature will be implemented.
Re:this isn't news... (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdot is pro Linux and Apple, and very anti Microsoft for example.
It really gets me that people only identify bias that they don't agree with
You've never been to the games section, have you? It's *very* pro-microsoft. Or maybe you really get yourself for not identifying the biases that that you agree with?
Re:this isn't news... (Score:2, Insightful)
Have anything to back this up, or are you just talking out of your ass?
Will never happen. (Score:5, Insightful)
Because that is the only point over using any other browser out there.
Firefox is not exactly fast or lightweight, you know. And without extensions it can’t hold a candle to Opera.
If extensions are going to get replaced, it will be by something that is so equal in what it offers, that it most likely still will be called extensions.
If they really kill their reason of existence off, I’ll switch over to Opera in the blink of an eye. The Opera guys never disappointed me, and always were pioneers.
Re:Toughts About Direction (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm also concerned that the bar is already low enough that most of the extensions out there are total crap. By setting the bar on the floor, every idiot will be able to produce terrible jetpacks. Do you really want to wade through 100,000 crappy jetpacks to find the dozen nuggets?
Voting systems, bloggers, word of mouth, the list goes on. That argument doesn't work online if there are lots of likeminded people (and if you think that your needs are different from everyone else's then there's no point looking no matter what system is used, since nobody else would have scratched your unique itch)
for me firefox has been going bad a long time (Score:3, Insightful)
For me , personally, virtually every change since FF2.0 has been for the worse; the gui has gotten harder to use, simple things i need are hidden, extensions are constantly breaking....
What has surprised me is that a group of devs hasn't forked to keep FF2 and all that was great in it, and try to add things that are really neat: how about a powerful business contacts manager, a la windows BCM, that is native in side FF
How about video that actually works ? (vlc has never worked well for me)
how about serious privacy (its clear 'they" are getting new tricks faster then ff can stop them)
how about a decent calendar - the thunderbird type calendars suck .....
instead we get all sorts of useless tinkering with the gui..
Re:No more AdBlock with JetPack (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the actual strength of AdBlock, and the reason it currently cannot be implemented as a JetPack: AdBlock has the option of blocking the ads when the URL is found in the source, therefore not loading it. It works at a lower level than what the JetPack platform offers.
To me, ad-blocking is more than just not showing ads, it's about not being tracked by ad brokers that leave "web-bugs" all around the World Wide Web. Blocking requests to the ad servers themselves is what makes AdBlock far more useful than CSS and layout modifiers, and the primary reason I stay with Firefox in spite of its shortcomings. Adblock, together with the ability to black-list servers in the cookie manager with a simple "Remember this setting" checkbox, are actually the only reasons I continue to use Firefox.
-dZ.
Re:Toughts About Direction (Score:3, Insightful)
> Sadly, I don't think you even understand why its bloated.
To be honest, as a developer, I've been trying to understand it myself. Firefox feels snappy on low-end machines (even VMs) for light browsing (few tabs open) and only a couple of extensions loaded. It becomes sluggish with loads of tabs open, esp if kept open for a long time. My guess is that despite the improvements to the garbage collector, the one-process-for-all-tabs architecture is to blame.
Re:Bad idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Nowhere is it being proposed that you can no longer extend Firefox -- it's just that you will need to use a more user-friendly language than XUL to do it. It's called something else, and suddenly those that don't take the time to read the linked articles freak out and declare that the end of the world has come for Firefox. Does anyone not think that the Firefox team would have thought through the consequences and decided with sober mind that they're positive?
Another poster has already quoted the firebug response, but here goes again: "I don’t think these changes will have a big impact on Firebug. Firefox will continue to support extensions while the jetpack technology matures. We can adapt as we go along"
If the creators of an extension as complex and deeply embedded in Firefox as Firebug think it's going to be ok, then maybe that's a sign that we should all just take a big breath and chill out.
Re:TOO MANY LINKS man! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Let Your Fingers Do The Walking (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:TOO MANY LINKS man! (Score:5, Insightful)
I think what Firefox _really_ needs is a Chrome-like Task Manager that shows you exactly how much memory/CPU/network your add-on is consuming.
I have been rallying for this functionality for years. It would improve the Firefox situation so, so much, and would likely provide a very useful tool for plugin/extension writers to troubleshoot/debug their work more thoroughly. Quality would go up across the line.
The way things are going, browsers are becoming more OS like every couple months. Gazelle is supposed to be the furthest implementation of such things to date, but Chrome is already well within "useful and well designed" territory.
What we need is the ability granularly manage independent elements within our browsers, because they're running a huge variety of different code: extensions which perform separate tasks; javascript on many different pages, Flash, embedded video, Java, etc. Really, when it comes down to it, most peoples' browsers are running more independently developed instances of code than they are running actual applications. (For instance, I'm running Firefox with 14 extensions and 3 plugins right now; I'm only running 6 independent applications, in addition to firefox).
The way it stands, Firefox is on par with Windows 3.1, in terms of process management. The closest thing to managing processes we've got is "taking a long time" javascript detection. Flash crashes, and Firefox crashes (unless you're using a crap wrapper). Extensions lead to Firefox leaking, and there's no way to granularly manage any of the data.
I saw Chrome's "process manager" for the first time the other day and was quite impressed. The fact that Google collects information via Chrome, and its limited extension/plugin repository (which doesn't provide the functionality I want) has so far kept me from giving it much of a serious look, but now, I'm having second thoughts.
Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
the people are still getting the drugs they need
Many hundreds millions of people are getting necessary drugs. But many hundreds of millions are not. Transporting drugs at cartel prices from developed nations or even manufacturing them under licence has the effect, still, of restricting access to those drugs for poorer at literally orders of magnitude less cost, and also retarding the development of manufacturing and research industries within developing countries dedicated to producing their own drugs at fractional cost. Sometimes "aid" has the effect of eliminating development, a pattern we've seen again and again enacted in post-colonial economic systems.
grant money freely given to them
Grant money given along with conditions that it be spent within certain cartels with pricing set not by market forces but by manufacturers' lobbies is not "money freely given". Especially because the manufacturers get a double benefit: sales proceeds and tax credits because of their "charity" in selling their drugs "below cost" (that is, below the high cost they claimed they could seel these drugs for, whereas in reality their sales at these prices in developing countries would have been close to zero).
As for "mass murderer", well, that wa snot my choice of phrase. It's a matter of perspective. In a couple of hundred years, when people are writing the history of late capitalism, they will add up the death toll, the literally billions of people who were allowed to die over a century or so because of the need to maintain the IP cartel system. Whether they will call that "mass murder" or "acceptable outcomes" depends on what economic system occupies the greatest mindshare in the most historians, and how out contingent, transient stage of late capitalism is viewed by them.
In an analogous system, think of the hundreds of millions who perished because of slavery, that is, the labor-intensive practices of early capitalism designed to produce agricultural commodities within monocultures at low cost. At the time, even though many agitated against it, the slavery system was regarded for generations as a necessary evil. With time, as the utilisation of fossil fuels and the employment of non-slaved masses within the system industrialisation replaced slave labor, the slave system lost mindshare. It began to be seen not as something desirable and even ordained by God, but as an unnecessary evil. For the most part, its economic output was replaced by in-situ colonialism, a system whereby the laboring masses were forcibly employed within the borders of coutnries rather than being transported en masse to remote destinations. In time, that economic system also lost relevance and was supplanted by more efficient modes of production and consumption.
Regimes change. Until it had developed sufficiently and established its own R&D and scientific regimes, the USA was one of the world's largest "pirate" nations. Right up until the start of the 20th century it was notorious for ignoring and refusing to recognise the IP and copyright systems of the "established" economic empires, allowing its industries to "steal" what they needed to ramp up their manufacturing. The more expensive products from the empires rarely had much chance of succeeding in the USA, unless they either sold at radically low cost or sub-contracted out their manufacturer at very unfavourable terms to native USA companies. Now that the USA has a huge stake in the current economic system, it effectively erects barriers to entry that prevent other emerging economies from doing what it itself did to emerge from backwater underdevelopment and a permanent existence as a low-margin commodities producer.
Re:Toughts About Direction (Score:4, Insightful)
Because of the broken web paradigm. There's nothing wrong with Flash, innately; it's a useful tool. The problem is how all browsers interpret embedded applets and scripts, and autoexecute them. Because of that ridiculous design decision, made many years ago, flash (and javascript, dynamic html, etc.) have ended up being more irritation than useful. No executable code should load and run automatically... but because that's the way the internet evolved, we need an array of tools to add fine-toothed user control back in.
Re:TOO MANY LINKS man! (Score:4, Insightful)
Even if Chrome is in beta (and, to be fair, Google "beta" IS equivalent to normal people's "service pack 2"), you are still allowed to say "Firefox 3.5 is superior to the Chrome beta in way X", and that information is useful to people choosing between Firefox and Chrome who care about X.
Re:TOO MANY LINKS man! (Score:5, Insightful)
With this functionality removed I would have no reason left to stick with Firefox.
You are so right. If they really did do this then they would lose so many of their users. This is so perfectly Netscape of them and as such I'd like to link to a suitable story from Netscape's past [joelonsoftware.com] in the hope to god that the Mozilla people can learn from the past.
Dear Mozilla people:
It's so simple. The new should not be allowed to break the old. If the new has to do that, then it's design is bad.
Re:TOO MANY LINKS man! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:this isn't news... (Score:3, Insightful)
Slashdot has *always* been very biased. Slashdot is pro Linux and Apple, and very anti Microsoft for example.
Slashdot may have a bias, but that doesn't preclude posting comments that are (for some definition of the word, anyway) "pro-MS", and get them modded up to +5, Insightful/Informative.
Thing is, if you go "with the bias", you can say absolutely anything so long as it conforms to that bias, and be modded up - no references needed. If you go against it, you will need sources to back up your assertions. But, well, if what you say is factual, you shouldn't have a problem with finding sources, and it's a good idea to do so in a rational discussion, anyway, so what's the problem?
As well, you can often see how a "Slashdot-biased" post which is factually incorrect and unreferenced is briefly modded up to +5 on groupthink alone, but soon enough someone knowledgeable comes by, posts a well-referenced retort also modded to +5, and then the original post is promptly modded down.
All in all, it's nowhere nearly as unbalanced as one would expect it to be. You just have to give moderation time to settle (early mods are usually emotion-driven "agree/disagree" - and this goes both ways - so you often see posts swaying wildly from 1 to 5 and back shortly after they're posted, but then it stabilizes), and try to stay on rational side rather than emotional one - if you stick to purely emotional arguments ("X sucks and all who like it are idiots, LOL"), that's where bias is the strongest.
I say all of the above from personal experience; and check out the disclosure/disclaimer in my /. profile for background.
You dump the Extensions, I dump Firefox (Score:3, Insightful)
The reason I'm using Firefox is the because the extensions are so much better than on any other browser. AdBlock, FlashBlock, DownloadStatusbar, RefControl, NoScript. You can half-ass these on other browsers like Chrome or Opera, and I've done it, but in the end the ease and simplicity of it wins out, especially when I have to explain to other people how to do it and the first thing you do on a new machine is install a decent browser and extensions. I do not want to have to locate the profile directory and hand edit or copy things on every machine, much less have to explain to my parents how to do this.
If you cripple this to the level of Opera UserJS, which is fairly powerful but also a pain in the butt, then I have no reason not to move to Opera or Chrome.
Now if they can somehow make this transition while preserving the addon manager functionality and allowing actual browser extensions like DownloadStatusbar or TabMixPlus to work, then I'm fine with that. It's the results that count, not how it's implemented.
Re:Mozilla has been floundering for a long time (Score:4, Insightful)
I said "in a sane way".
Let's say you have a bunch of WebDevs who love using some popular extensions, and you'd like to provide them with a fully prepped workstation every time a box is built. (I have an SLA that calls for our users to have a fully functional new PC ready to go within 40 minutes of unboxing, and we unbox about 500 PCs/week.) Too bad -- unless you have a crew of smart masochist admins who spend a few hours/days packaging up a solution. (We can do this in minutes for 95% of Windows, Linux and even Mac apps via an API or consistent install mechanism) One exception: if you get lucky, Ubuntu has 20 people who package a few select extensions.
Or lets say you have a global distributed network linked by MPLS or Frame Relay with limited bandwidth. You have a population of Firefox users who run with admin rights (really bad practice on any platform btw), and would like to setup mirror servers for the Firefox update mechanism. Too bad -- you can't do that either, unless you hack each update and each client as well.
Or lets say you want to migrate Firefox user settings from workstation to workstation, or between VDI sessions or between linux terminal servers. Too bad -- Mozilla creates a directory with random characters for user profile data.
Or lets say you want to provision proxy settings? Again, random profile directory, sorry.
Or maybe you want to disable auto-update, because a critical 3rd party application won't work with Firefox 3.5 for another month. Again, you're fucked, unless you jump through hoops.
I get the message. I'm responsible for over 100,000 people's computing environment, and Mozilla could give two shits about me. That's fine.
The punchline is, Google will be finished porting Chrome to Mac and Linux soon. Then they'll provide enterprise manageability, as they did for other tools. Then, people like me who manage lots and lots of workstations will look at switching to have one, common, managed browser on 3 platforms. That's 100k people who'll go home and install Chrome and tell their friends how great it is. (Just like those home users who brought FF to work, except much faster, since there's no restrictive IT @ home)