Academic librarians -- Firefox and Zotero upgrades
I am very frustrated. At the request of faculty, most of whom use Zotero, I have started teaching Zotero rather than EndNote, which is licensed by my university. I was wondering if other university librarians are struggling with IT departments who are not concerned about immediately upgrading browsers. They installed 32 new computers in the last two weeks with Firefox 24.4ESR loaded, and when I tried teaching Zotero today we discovered it is no longer compatible with that version of Firefox. And of course, they have disabled the upgrade feature, so we cannot do it ourselves. Any university librarians out there dealing with this?
(And for others, there are more details in Robsbib's earlier thread.) Note that "immediately" here does mean "in the three months since Firefox 31 ESR was released".
Beyond that, I'd like to restate perhaps more strongly than Dan has that your IT department is not fulfilling its most basic job description and you should escalate that. If your campus security forgot to lock buildings and put people's physical property at risk, I assume you wouldn't just accept that as a fait accompli. Having people use (significantly!) outdated browser versions is the IT equivalent of that. It's dangerous and irresponsible. 24.4 isn't even an up to date ESR version of Firefox: 24.5, a security update, came out in April this year, so those browsers haven't seen a security patch for more than half a year.
Thanks for the info.
One last idea that could serve as a workaround in an emergency (like having a workshop and no working Zotero) is that old Zotero versions remain available to download and they all follow the same download URL pattern--so, since it sounds like campus computers do allow installing add-ons--you could provide that link to participants and have them downgrade.
So the current version is at
https://download.zotero.org/extension/zotero-4.0.23.1.xpi
the last version (which still worked with Firefox 24) is at
https://download.zotero.org/extension/zotero-4.0.22.xpi
etc.