Mozilla Corporation chief executive officer Mitchell Baker readily admitted to ZDNet Australia sister site Silicon.com that the enterprise is "not our sweet spot" but said the organisation offers an enterprise customisation kit created by an IBM developer and said it's interested in working with partners to address the needs of corporate IT.
"The gold is the company that steps up and says, 'I'm willing to do something,'" Baker said.
While many IT directors do allow the open-source browser to be used on company time, those who don't are often held back by the proprietary technologies employed on their intranets.
"Enterprises have intranets that only work with (Microsoft's) IE," Baker said. "We can't fix their intranet."
Another hurdle Firefox must overcome is the "heartbreakingly slow" process many enterprises go through to certify the use of a tool as critical as a Web browser, according to Baker.
It's this need to comply with proprietary technology--as well as general quality issues--which, Baker claims, keeps IT departments from going with client-side open-source applications, not merely the fact they're open source.
On the server side, though, she said, "I hear open source is in the enterprise--sometimes it's open and acknowledged, sometimes it's not."
The next version of Mozilla's Web browser, Firefox 2.0, is due out in the third quarter of this year. New features will aim to make "using information quicker, easier and better," said Baker. The new Firefox will sport improved tabs and search boxes, better use of RSS, and antiphishing and other security enhancements.
Baker said Mozilla's 2005 revenue was in the "tens of millions of dollars" range--and that the organisation is now investigating ways to give some of that back to the volunteer development community.
"Some of that revenue should find its way into the community in some form," she said.
This compensation is more likely to take the form of hardware gifts or other resources, not fat paycheques, though.
"We could never pay enough people to make Firefox," especially at the level they'd make at rivals such as Microsoft, she said. "We won't be doing that."
Baker explained that Mozilla is in the process of hiring an individual to spend six months figuring out how to give some of its profits back to the community.
Sylvia Carr of Silicon.com reported from London.
It doesn't help that Mozilla's roaming profile support has historically been ... less than ideal. Even now, for example, there's just NO way to tell it to store browser and email cache on the local machine, but keep things like address books and bookmarks in the domain profile.
Additionally, while Firefox now has some basic customisation features, they're extremely recent and a bit raw around the edges. As far as I can find out, Thunderbird has none - which means there's no non-manual way to deploy it with pre-installed certificates etc. Additionally, neither application can use the Windows certificate store to obtain client certificates for users when authenticating with IMAP/TLS or SMTP/TLS servers.
I deploy both Thunderbird and Firefox at work. Currently they're better than the alternatives ... but not by very much. MS's management tools are extremely attractive, and the inability to control Firefox through tools like Group Policy is very frustrating.
Thunderbird is also buggier than I'd like, especially with IMAP, and has some annoying UI quirks (the worst: opening and downloading attachments off an IMAP server is slow, unreliable, and has an awful UI) that are actually tempting me to move users to Outlook Express or Outlook.