Firefox Premium for Enterprises is now available
Organizations that run the Firefox web browser in Enterprise environments may subscribe to a newly established Premium plan to extend support.
Firefox Premium Support is a new offer for Enterprises that provides organizations with improved support options. The plan provides access to an Enterprise customer portal, improved bug submission options and bug fixes, SLA management tools and more.
Firefox remains free of charge for Home users and Enterprise users alike. The Firefox Extended Support Release edition remains free and can be used by anyone without charge. Support remains community driven for the most part; users may use the Mozilla Wiki, file bugs on Mozilla@Bugzilla, or use the community forums for support.
Premium Support is a new support plan for Enterprises. The plan starts at $10 per supported installation and includes the following benefits:
- Private bug submission
- Critical security bug fixes with SLA
- Concierge bug entry with guaranteed response time
- Enterprise customer portal
- Contribute to Firefox and the roadmap
- Proactive notifications on critical Firefox events
- SLA management tool
The benefits that premium support customers get are quite extensive and assist Enterprises in customizing, deploying, and managing Firefox installations. The ability to file private bugs and guaranteed response times may be especially welcome to Enterprise customers.
Mozilla provides deeper insight into the future of Firefox development next to that; Enterprise customers are informed about critical events. While Mozilla does not reveal what is meant by that, it is likely that the notifications include advanced notifications about major changes to Firefox, e.g. the introduction of new features such as DNS over HTTPS.
Closing Words
Firefox Premium Support is a new option for Enterprise customers that improves support significantly in several ways for organizations; this makes Firefox more attractive to organizations and may help Mozilla diversify its revenue streams at the same time.
It remains to be seen if the ability to file private bugs affects the openness of Firefox development. Some bugs, most notable security bugs, are restricted as well.
Mozilla's revenue comes from search deals to a large degree and the bulk of the money comes from browser competitor Google currently. Mozilla launched Firefox Private Network recently, a browser proxy to improve privacy of users.
Now You: What is your take on Firefox Premium for Enterprises? (via Sören)
Hi Martin. Has Mozilla taken down the “Premium” offer since you wrote this article? I ask because following your link at the beginning of your article to their site, takes me to a page where any mention of “plan”, or “plans”, or “sales” is not found.
I see the usual Pale Moon trolls are out and about. I guess the naysayers have nothing better to do than troll forums for software that they don’t use.
I see nothing wrong with an optional Enterprise subscription for those who want added support. Mozilla has to pay the bills, ya know. Nobody’s charging you at home for anything.
Odd, I always thought Google is already paying their bills.
To think this was once a browser with the USP of being customizable and personal – which was why it didn’t play with corporate environments where standardized configurations are the norm in the first place!
Was forced to stick to it on Linux since Amazon Prime won’t work with anything else and I’m damned if I’m installing Chrome, and it’s shocking to see how far it has fallen in the 9 years since I stopped using it. Pushing services in one’s face that no one asked for – Pocket and Account (no, I shouldn’t have to disable them, these features belong as extensions and not part of the core browser), spamming my email by default after creating a Firefox Account..ugh.
Lol there are worse things in life than being spam in an email. Firefox need money to exist, sorry to let you down but Mozilla is a non profit competing with for profit companies. Also you can eliminate Pocket and not log in to firefox Account. Its time for the users to grow up.
umatrix and not giving even more monopoly to chrome are the 2 main reasons why i keep using firefox.
Mozilla is Google’s sock puppet anyway. Using Firefox instead of Chrome doesn’t help the web one bit. Mozilla never stood up against Google when unpopular web standards like DRM were introduced, because they are fully dependent on them. Firefox fans don’t like to hear it, but that’s the way it is.
Firefox is notorious for hard to setup among system admins. Firefox also does not use Windows certificates and cannot be configured by the Windows policy editor. There are reasons why no one use Firefox in enterprise environment.
Nailed it. Enterprise = I want to control my workers. Google beats them handily for free.
lol paying for a browser
LOL every user of chrome, android is paying sharing his privacy and anomized (or not) profile…
LOL you are product if not doing that.
LOL paying for internet connection.
LOL paying for phone you read this on.
LOL it even does DNT by default today.
A lot more “LOL”s but lets try to keep this civilized
“What is your take on Firefox Premium for Enterprises?”
Mozilla desperately needs a source of income aside from what they get from Google, so I wish them the best of luck with this!
Selling support services is one of the user-respecting ways to make money for free software developers, as opposed to the current Mozilla income sources that are all “the user is the product” based (Google Search partnership, Pocket…). But is there any chance that this reaches a comparable level to what Google pays them ? And Mozilla being Mozilla, they’ll manage to turn something innocuous looking into something evil, just by looking at that “Contribute to Firefox and the roadmap” item. Becoming less dependent on that filthy ad company Google is necessary, but their current attempts to replace it with ads directly shown by the browser, for example, was jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. I don’t think that at this point they would finally start to behave ethically even if they succeeded in becoming fully independent from Google, they just share too many values with them.
@Anonymous:
True, but Mozilla is between a rock and a hard place. Literally everything that they’ve proposed or tried, including paid support, has been utterly condemned by Firefox users. It’s as if Firefox users simply don’t want Mozilla to have an income stream at all.
I have no insider knowledge about Mozilla’s thinking on this, but if I were them, I’d be focusing on the business community as well, in an attempt to avoid angering my regular users.
@John Fenderson
Saying condemned you mean 2% of power users? Because others don’t give a crap. I don’t have much to support it, just a feeling though, that the main reason for market share drop was the aggressive expanse strategy by Chrome – inclusion with lots of apps, preinstalled in android. Users adapt to a new browser, at least most of them.
“Rock and a hard place” – well said.
I can imagine that this premium users’ issues, problems may do good for Firefox. More funds, promises that need to be kept (issue->fix it quick).
I can see being helpful for businesses that kicked out their local IT staff in place of SaaS and cloud based services for their support. The pencil pushers that replaced IT don’t know basic troubleshooting and the MSP is too busy to care. Put in a ticket with FF and have the good people that make the software fix it for you!
I assume enterprise customers were queried before this offer; just announcing it blindly to everyone seems a bit silly.
Firefox remains free of charge, now with “Contribute to Firefox and the roadmap” for enterprises to influence further demise of FF.
Exactly my thought. Enterprises paying to contribute to Firefox and the roadmap ? Like Mozilla isn’t already “business before people” enough.
+ 1
– if so called enterprises like Alphabet (Google) get in the major share of these “contributions”, who knows how “good” the Firefox browser will become.
Is there a crack for that already?
“Contribute to Firefox and the roadmap”
I’m not against anyone contributing if the contributions are good, but is this supposed to mean that enterprise customers get more of a say in where Firefox goes than the rest of the community? Because we’ve seen how well that’s turned out elsewhere on the internet.
Looks like this may be the only way to get some important fixes, like a usable about:addons or the conflict between addons modifying headers, like EFF’s HTTPS Everywhere, uBlock and others.
Sounds like a act of desperation from Mozilla. I don’t think Firefox is thought of as a enterprise browser? For one Firefox doesn’t have the market share power to market support to enterprise for any amount.
if I can make them shift priorities to important aspects of the browsing experience I’d be more than happy to pay, even for personal use
but not before they bring Firefox back to usable level, as long as it’s merely gecko based chrome I can’t be bothered to throw money at them
Of course I will pay $10 for startrek enterprise customer portal and now I can’t wait for proactive notifications on critical Firefox champagne popping events ://
That’s one dollar for each percent of the market share they own. 😅
Development of Firefox in the last 2-3 years totally changed to the good again.. before they had some shitty months but they are aiming for the right direction again.. still the best browser out there.
in last 2 years they turned the best browser out there useless, how is that good?
@zakius:
Yes, Mozilla has pretty much ruined Firefox for me as well. But perhaps you and I are in the same boat with this: we are no longer Mozilla’s target demographic. The new Firefox may in fact be much better for the mass market, just worse for us.
Firefox may not be the best browser in terms of broad site compatibility or speed, but it’s up at the top for versatility. Regardless, if for some reason it fails, it’s not a cardinal sin to use Chrome. Same, if the opposite happens. In other words, browsers are not like Antivirus/Antimalware solutions where you cannot use several at the same.
@Rafty, closely tagging behind Chrome, but far from the best.