Speaking of working, in my experience, there is a considerable number of enterprise websites and web applications out there that don't work well or not at all(!) in Firefox. (Prime example: outlook.office365.com hasn't worked for me in years – I always end up in a redirect loop unless I clear all cookies, and I heard the same story from others.) Needless to say, such issues might cause new Firefox users to switch back to Chrome/Edge rather quickly. (A friend of mine recently stopped using Firefox for his work because of that.)
Any idea what to do about this? Of course with AI one could go as far as adding a "Report this site doesn't work in Firefox" button that magically sends a report (+ suggested fix) to the people operating the website/app. But I can think of dozens of reasons why this wouldn't work well at all (let alone be a good idea) in practice…
Not sure if you're aware, but this button does actually exist in the help menu, at least for getting a public report filed. I looked through our tracker and didn't find any report similar to yours though (..and Office365 has a ton of webcompat bugs on file...), so I'd recommend you and "others" to actually file those bugs.
Finding and fixing those bugs in websites (unless they're behind a login that you can't easily sign up for) typically isn't the issue, but getting ahold of the site owner sometimes is.
If we can't get ahold of the website operator, or they're slow or unwilling to fix it, we can ship compatibility shims in the browser.
Take a look at about:compat to get some idea.
Managing browsers - portals to almost every use and risk - is a PITA and I don't trust Chrome for confidentiality of data or users. Access to actual Mozilla personnel (engineers?) would be a big differentiator. But I wonder about a couple of things:
1) What are Edge and Safari management like? Are they competition here? If IT wants to move off Chrome to a management-friendly browser, the first thought would be the platform's native browsers which might integrate easily with native management.
2) How well does Firefox's management solution work? One-off management solutions for single applications have a bad history: They are often buggy, poorly designed (how much is Mozilla investing in UI design for this small number of users), complicated to learn, deploy (is this some sort of client-server? require another app client-side?), operate (what about WAN users? intermittent connections?), have poor features (multiple profiles? per-user or per-device? multiple users per device and multiple devices per user? group management? integration with other directory services - or do they reinvent the wheel and I need to input every update in multiple applications? multiple platforms? mobile apps?), manage (the management app needs management), etc. Does it reliably autodeploy or do I need to manually do something for each of my 10,000 users? Again, how much will Mozilla invest in this small group of users, the IT admins? I already have Microsoft's / Apple's native platform management solutions and those are enough of a headache.
I'd advise Mozilla to make it a delight for IT admins - immediately remove their fears of an additional headache in their busy days - and they will jump right in. As long as it works, I don't think users would care. Everyone, users and admins, is too busy.
It's client-server (Firefox <=> management console). There's no other app needed client side, it's all built into the browser.
what about WAN users? intermittent connections?
Supported (one of our core developers often works on a spotty 5G, so we got rather loud feedback when this broke...)
multiple profiles? per-user or per-device? multiple users per device and multiple devices per user? group management? integration with other directory services - or do they reinvent the wheel and I need to input every update in multiple applications? multiple platforms?
Yes to pretty much all of these - minus reinventing the wheel - I think only "multiple profiles for the same user-id" are currently not supported. You'd essentially need to give an alternate login to the users that need this (because that's what triggers the profile selection). I don't think there's technically anything stopping this, just didn't seem like a common enough use case to get in the very first release.
mobile apps?
Not in this first release. (^_~)
Does it reliably autodeploy or do I need to manually do something for each of my 10,000 users?
We expect most will autodeploy over an existing MDM solution (Intune, Fleet, ...).
Again, how much will Mozilla invest in this small group of users, the IT admins?
I'd say Firefox Enterprise's customers are the IT admins, no? The users aren't generally the asking party to get a managed browser.
All I would say is, put something on your website that persuades admins that it won't be a headache, that it will make their workday easier, not harder - regardless of benefits to overall IT goals. Maybe a 1-2-3 screen clips/animations (fantasizing a bit of the content for this example):
1 - Deploy: Add this pref to the FFE application deployment package and FFE management is deployed in every installation!
2 - Open the management console - there's the new installation, and it's automatically listed under the user/device synced from directory services!
3 - Manage: (shows user/device in a group, and a nice set of clearly defined - non-ambiguous - hierarchical checkboxes for that group's prefs).
And actually make it reliably that easy - which I know means more work on your end and isn't always practical, but it makes an enormous difference IME. Get people talking about how easy it is. Solve their busyness problem.