Dear John,
I just had a chance to read the thread on Mike’s Musings about the challenges you’re facing with Firefox 4′s End-Of-Life only 3 months after its release. For those of you who haven’t seen the thread, John has been preparing to upgrade half a million corporate users from Firefox 3.6 to Firefox 4 in Q3 of this year. He found out yesterday that, with Mozilla’s release of Firefox 5, support for Firefox 4 has ended. Asa Dotzler also took the opportunity to clarify Mozilla’s commitment to, and support for, enterprise customers as part of this thread:
Enterprise has never been (and I’ll argue, shouldn’t be) a focus of ours. -Asa Dotzler
As for John’s concern, “By the time I validate Firefox 5, what guarantee would I have that Firefox 5 won’t go EOL when Firefox 6 is released?” He has the opposite of guarantees that won’t happen. He has my promise that it will happen. Firefox 6 will be the EOL of Firefox 5. And Firefox 7 will be the EOL for Firefox 6.” -Asa Dotzler
Given your company’s substantial investment in Firefox, this is certainly a perplexing position for Mozilla to take. And John as you point out, Mozilla’s recent decision to accelerate the pace of their releases further accentuates the problem of only supporting the latest version of Firefox.
Although I’m in no position to question a competitor’s approach to customer engagement and support, I did want to take the opportunity to clarify the Internet Explorer team’s commitment to, and support for, our corporate customers. Specifically:
- Enterprises have always been, and will always be, an important focus of ours.
- For corporate customers, we’ll support each version of Internet Explorer as long as the latest version of Windows that it runs on is supported. For example, Windows 7 Enterprise is supported through January 2020. Internet Explorer 9 will therefore also be supported through January 2020.
John – I think I speak for everyone on the IE team when I say we’d like the opportunity to win back your business. We’ve got a great solution for corporate customers with both IE8 and IE9 (more info on our IE9 solution can be found here), and believe we could help you address the challenges you’re currently facing.
Let me know if you’d like to discuss this further. I can be reached at bix@microsoft.com.
Best Regards,
Bix
For those of you facing problems similar to John’s, I recommend you read our blog post from March “The Nine Reasons Why IE9 is the Best Browser for Business Customers.” We also have some great technical resources, free tools, and guidance on deploying and managing Internet Explorer on Technet: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/default
