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Which Organizations Have Standardized on Mozilla?
andy brunetto asks: " We are investigating email clients to deploy as our "standard" at the college where I work. I'm trying to find out who is using Mozilla for their email. When I say "who" I mean organizationally, as I realize 99% of us geeks already use it. What organizations out there are rolling out Mozilla as their standard web and/or email client, and why? Yes, we are considering using Thunderbird, once it is final. Thanks!" Hopefully this will make companies realize that the Internet isn't comprised of just IE users.
Ideally yes, but 99% is a bit generous. I know quite a few it gurus that just use IE. I mean mozilla is the politically correct thing to do, but you know, IE is pretty familiar to most people. If we could see the logs at Slashdot, I'm sure that IE would have a commanding lead.
I use Mozilla on three platforms (OS X, SuSE 8.2+Ximian and W2K). Does thaat equal an "organization"?
UC Davis uses Mozilla as its standard web browser, and they use Eudora as their standard mail client.
If you ask me, it is really stupid to require people who have Windows, and hence already have IE, to install Mozilla on their computers just so that they can get technical support from the help line. Ditto Eudora vs. Outlook Express. Why bother people and clutter up their computers?
Purdue used Netscape 7 as the standard browser and mail client on over 3000 lab machines.
I think IBM's license for Netscape has just run out so alot of people are switching to Mozilla, not sure if this is worldwide or just UK.
"Pushing little children, with their fully automatics, they like to push the weak around"
"Why does the font change half way down the page??"
Ugh.
Between that and Mozilla not being able to lie about what it is to IE-only sites, that company is Internet Explorer and Outlook Express.
Then there's the Mac OS 9 based print/pre-press company. Mozilla dropped support for OS 9, yet we can't make the switch to OS X because of Quark.
That company is also IE/Outlook Express.
I'd switch if I could, but I can't so I won't.
This geek uses Gnome Evolution. I would think Evolution would make a lot more sense for an organiation than Mozilla's mail client. Most organizations are going to be predominantly addicted to Outlook.
"A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense not to himself."
The main reasons we're sticking with Mozilla and not going IE?
Platform availability. It's available on Windows, Linux & Irix.
Not MS
Spam filtering
Doesn't propogate virii
Low/No cost
Why are we going with Mozilla instead of Netscape?
Available on all above platforms.
Doesn't have the AOL marketing embedded in it.
Windows installations will be WinInstalled, so all plugins & customizations can be centralized.
Hope it helps.
Really? Everyone I know uses pine, Eudora, or Mail.app - you should be careful about making assumptions
I agree, Moz has a nice browser but the mail client is ponderous and unpleasant. I use Mulberry on Linux, OS X, Windows, and I used to run it on Solaris. It's just awesome!
I love Mozilla as a browser but wouldn't touch its email app with a 10-foot pole. Besides, is their a huge advantage to centralizing on only one email app? Other than having tech support only dealing with a single program, email is a bit different than the web - I'm unaware of any major problems with using any random IMAP client to read from any random IMAP server. If someone likes a particular program, and they know it well enough not to cause a load on your help desk, is there a real reason not to let them use it?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
You forgot to point out that Sun's current browser standard is Netscape 4.7 (at least internally, which I assume is what you're talking about.) It has been for years, though Netscape 6 and 7 are also available if you know where to look.
There are many, many internal applications at Sun that are written for Netscape 4.7 and don't work in NS6/NS7 (don't ask me how, but it's true. It boggles my mind, too.) So yes, Sun has 40,000 employees still using the broken, non-standards-compliant Netscape 4.7 as their primary browser, and they've been trying to "transition" away from it for over 2 years now.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
I remember when a standard was a well-documented protocol (e.g. POP or IMAP) and not a particular implementation of that protocol (e.g. Mozilla or Outlook).
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
C'mon, I understand using it for web browsing, but email?
Most of the posts that I see in mailing-lists are written with Pine, gnus (emacs' mail thingy), Mutt, KMail or MS Outlook. Maybe there's some Mozilla too, but it's not near "99%", not by a extremely long shot.
Ob-"I use": I'm very happy with Mutt myself, and my friends use also Mutt or Pine. Maybe we're all oldschool guys :-)
Ob-"Kids these days": Kids these days! When I was your age, we didn't have email. We had to shout to each other from miles and miles of distance! Sore throats were quite usual, trust me :-)
My weblog in spanish
Actually, the current story is Mozilla, not Netscape 7. (They forced us to make all our apps compliant with Mozilla recently.) But then again, this was supposed to be rolled out in Feb.
Here at Wake Forest, we have a program where all students receive IBM laptops through the university (it's included in tuition). These come preloaded with a lot of expensive commercial software that most students couldn't afford to purchase legally if they weren't going through the university. The interesting thing is that this gives the university a great deal of control over the initial setup of students' machines (including those who are non-CS majors). We can customize them all we want or delete Windows and put Linux on there but the vast majority of students are just using what comes on there.
Until now, the Windows machines were actually all set up to use Netscape 4.79 and its mail client and to hide IE and especially Outlook. This was done (I assume) for security reasons, especially considering that virtually all the virus email I've received from on-campus mailing lists, etc is from people who ignored the preconfigured setup and installed Outlook Express anyway.
This fall, they are moving to Mozilla 1.4 (I'm guessing that the reason is the similary to the old Netscape interface). They decided that Mozilla 1.4 was superior to the newer Netscapes and are deploying it over a year on about 5,500 installations.
Combined with another new pilot program to preinstall Linux dual-boot setups for CS students here (and give us bigger hard disks than other students), open source seems to be on the rise here.
Because Mozilla's customization layer is built on open standards (XUL/XML),
it would be very simple to implement a simple IEAK type tool on top of it. I
just don't think there has been enough demand yet.
(Score:-1, Wrong)
Use pine/Eudora. And I think the new Linux computer lab (one and only on entire Uni) is using pine/Evolution. Sorry, but I'm not going to trust my mail to Thunderbird any time soon either. Firebird *cough*Phoenix*cough* is fine for displaying content - but my e-mail client is there to permanently *organize* content, and I want it stable, reasonably bugfree and upgradable.
At least the Mozilla project has figured out that might some of us are interested in some parts like Firebird, couldn't care less about Chatzilla and Moz Mail and whatever else they put in there. They're going from one big monolith to smaller apps that do their thing - sounds almost like the old Unix design profile, and I think that's a good thing...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
We are investigating email clients to deploy as our "standard" at the college where I work. I'm trying to find out who is using Mozilla for their email.
Do you know why IExploder and Outlurk have %95+ market share? It's not because Microsoft is a monopoly, or because they are better products, or because Bill Gates is a member of the Trilateral Commission or the Bilderbergers. It's because of the herd instinct. People want to use the same software that other people in their group use. Corporations use IE/Ol because other corporations do. Geeks use Linux because other geeks do. There are rare exceptions, but by and large human beings rival cattle in their ability to be molded by the opinion of their peers.
I get the impression from your question that you're seeking to follow the herd. If you were one of the rare exceptions then you wouldn't care what other companies are using, and just deploy Mozilla. But since you're asking, it seems to me that either you or someone above you needs the assurance that using Mozilla in an organization isn't new, innovative or radical.
You're not asking about problems others have uncovered while deploying Mozilla in an organization. That's not your concern at all. Instead you merely want to know who is using it. If you want to be a individual unswayed by the unthinking opinion of your peers, then just go deploy Mozilla. But if you just want to make sure your head isn't sticking above the level of the herd too far, then stick with the Microsoft products that all the other organizations are using.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I was wondering how that worked. iexplore.exe is just a front-end to mshtml.dll (and others) right?
Couldn't you just rename the iexplore.exe file after installing the latest SP and 'hiding' IE? Programs that use the MSIE libraries will still work, but Internet Explorer itself will not. Am I totally wrong here?
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
If you think the answer is zero, or that commercial software is any better you would be mistaken. The only difference between Mozilla and other software is you can read the bugs and therefore gauge the risk and even produce workarounds if necessary. With commercial software bug reports disappear into a black hole - they might be fixed or they might not but you'll never know until an update appears and you can try to replicate the problem.
I wanted to install Moz 1.4 this summer on all the staff workstations in my school district (I'm the tech director). Unfortunately, Mozilla doesn't lend itself well to .MSI packaging for automated distribution. I might try again later in the fall, but visiting 300 workstations manually to install it isn't viable right now. A workaround for this would be really nice.
I've recently standardized our company on Mozilla mail using IMAP access. I went through deploying Mozilla 1.3.1 and now 1.4 to about 50 users on various Windows machines. We previously were using Eudora and POP3 access.
Here are some of our motivating factors to switch to a Mozilla/IMAP solution include:
Overall, Mozilla's been accepted as "much better than Eudora", however I still get the occasional user which feels that the change only made things worse. And of course, there are those who long for the usability of Outlook. We kindly remind them that Outlook is evil and using Mozilla helps keep us worm free. Yes - we virus scan and sanitize (Anomy Sanitizer) our mail before delivery, but nothing's perfect.
Now for the gripes:
Our ultimate goal, as some have mentioned, is to embrace Thunderbird, since some users still want to use IE as their browser (mostly for site compatability reasons), and to have their email links launch in their browser of choice. That, and it not nearly as "bloated" as the entire Mozilla suite, especially since most of my users are only using the email component.
$ man woman *
-bash:
It could be the sign of a larger, unnoticed bug. Also, all those steps may not be necessary, it may just be one of many paths to the same bug.
I use Windows 2000 and RedHat 9 equally. IE never crashes, but Galeon does all the time. I can't count the number of times I've had to click "Restore last session". Of course, some of those might be Galeon itself, but most of them are Mozilla (which I'm informed of after submitting a bug report).
I sat down in front of a computer in a public lab at my local college campus last semester and did the following:
Downloaded Pheonix (it was not yet FireBird) and unzompressed it.
Ran Phoenix and installed the IE skin.
Edited the Phoenix toolbar to be quite a lot like IEs.
Set Phoenix as the default browser.
Deleted the IE links from the desktop and start menu.
Added links to Phoenix using the IE icon with the text "Internet Explorer" to the desktop and start menu.
Quietly left.
I'm not sure what impact this really had, but I did it on 3 computers at differing times. I do hope I caused some havoc, but not as much as I hope nobody noticed.
I want my Cowboyneal
Principially you're asking the right question. Anyone who's believing that 99% of all geeks use the mozilla MUA, hasn't thought more than half a second about that subject. Maybe even hasn't thought at all.
But IMHO even pine is no more a geek's favorite MUA. Most geeks I know use mutt. Maybe with pine key bindings because of being used from pine in former times. ;-)
But I think we should make a big difference between several groups of geeks:
My favourite MUA? I use mutt nearly exclusively. Works fine with screen, ssh and slow connections. Does not need to run locally, does not need a GUI. Works on colored and b/w monitors. What else do you need? ;-)
-- There is no place like $HOME.
Why do people assume that if they use a web browser for email, so does everyone else?
I don't want HTML in email. I don't want to use monolithic programs. I want a mail client that works even if the browser should crash (or not exist, for that matter). I want to be able to access my mail even when I have no GUI available.
mbox format and any mbox-compliant mail client will do that for me. In a pinch, I can even use cat/tail to read mail and telnet or pipe to a mail server to send mail.
I'm sure there's someone out there that uses cat as the editor and send it with uucp too.
Anyhow, we were discussing geeks here, and I say it's a sorry excuse for a geek who doesn't understand the difference between web and email, and allows the potential security risks of parsing incoming email.
AOL users and corporate drones, sure, but are *geeks* like that now? Or has the bar been lowered for being a geek?
Regards,
--
*Art
Whats the deal with good softeware like mozilla (and all the bad software too) avoiding one of the greatest unused tools on the internet... DNS SRV records!
DNS has such great potential. It's been supported since BIND 4.x. Yes NO (yes, not one, not even the small guys) have given SRV records a try. Is there something bad about SRV that I don't see? Its incredible as far as I can tell!
-t
Several of my clients companies, medium sized by NZ standards (tiny by world standards) are now standardising on Mozilla. The main reasons:
Plus, I think they all really enjoy the idea of thumbing their noses at the Microsoft bulldozer - nearly all of my clients now recognise their dependence on Microsoft, so this is an opportunity to demonstrate their disdain for the company and its practices.
Dragging an email from the inbox to the calendar opens up a new appointment with the message as the text and KEEPS the email in the inbox. This is great. But dragging a message from the inbox to my *saved messages* folder is not so great, it moves the message (or if I right click, it copies the message) to this new location. If bill sends me the message and I want to put it in *saved messages* and *bill* folders, I have to copy the message. I don't want 2 copies of the message though (what if I change the priorety of the message? Now I have to change it in two places). I just want to have the same message in two places.
My inbox has about 1050 emails messages, but I can't move them into individual project folders or who sent them folders, because in Outlook, I lose the ability to search in different folders with the same search.
IMO, microsoft needs to revamp the entire way that emails are organized. If they could throw in a relational database that was transparent to the end-user, then email organization would be a lot better. Typically, Apple comes up with this kind of thing and MS steals it, but either way I would like to see it soon.
</rant>
Hmmm... I personally cant think of a single person I know who uses Mozilla, Opera, etc. We are all IT geeks, and we all are gladly using plain ol' IE.
Maybe its because we all just like stuff that works, and dont feel the need to complain about useless things like alternate web browsers.
Actaully, I tried out Opera when I first heard about it, and stopped using it for the same reason I switched from Nutscrape to IE 3.02- the damn thing crashed about every 10 minutes. IE is and has been, by far, the stability leader, at least in my experience.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
At Rutgers University (in New Jersey), the standard is Netscape 7 for www browser and mail. In fact, the only reason that IE is on the computer in the labs is because you can remove the damn thing. Oh yeah, outlook is nowhere to be seen.
Since August 2002, Drew has been using Mozilla as its supported IMAP mail client. It is distributed with all student laptops, lab computers, and fac/staff desktops. Previous to that, we used Netscape 4.7.
When I starting doing webdevelopment about 3.5 years ago, my and my colleagues were writing pages for Arizona State's College of Business. They're all about Microsoft so we were designing web applications for them on IE. I worked there for 2 years and by the end of it, I knew the IE DOM like the ingredients on cheetos... So I can make pretty nifty pages in IE, but the really sad thing is (of course) they never show up on mozilla or netscape. I've been trying to read up on the mozilla dom when I get time. I hope mozilla can incorporate some of IE's filters and such... could something like this be standardized? Whenever I try to stick to CSS standards, the pages never come out right on IE. So I will have to use some work arounds... IE has some pretty neat stuff but unfortunately, none of it is STANDARD!
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
Or let's extend this to a large company, say 60,000 employees. You build new Windows computers from a standard build hosted on the network... just like Linux. You get some access to the source code for Windows and IE so you can make your own changes... just like Linux and Mozilla. You can blast the new updates out to all the computers in the company... just like Linux (there are ways, I've seen it :)).
:) Guess who wins on the bottem line in the end?
Now that we know you can do they same with Linux and Windows, let's look at the specific problem of a Mozilla bug and an IE bug.
You get an IE bug that causes all the IEs in the company to not reach your Payroll system, making it unable to submit timecards. So you open up the IE code and start to work at tracking down the problem. Since it's your own build, you don't have much support except some from MS, but they handed you the code because you paid $$$$$$$$$$ and were told you are on your own. After many many days (or weeks), the bug is solved, the patch is pushed out, and everything is rosy.
Same thing with Mozilla now. First thing you do is check bugzilla and see if the bug is already known. If it is, and their is a work about, and even code!, roll the change up and push out the update. If the bug is not solved, or is not known, add a new entry or add to the existing one with what you know. Then site down to solve the problem much like you did for IE. Expect that you have the IT staff + the mozilla community working on it, not just he IT staff. If someone else figures out the solution, roll it up and patch. If you figure it out, post the solution so no one else has to go through what you just did, roll in up and patch.
The worst case for both IE and Mozilla is that you have to spend a significant amount of time diving through code solving the problem. The best case for IE is that it doesn't take long to find the bug. The best case for Mozilla is that the solution was already on the web, and the entire thing just takes a day to get EVERYONE working again. Now factor into the picture cost. For the MS path, you have to pay MS for the code which is very expensive. For the Linux/Mozilla path, the code is free
Space for rent, inquire within
Plain ol' IE is right. It's plain and old. You have no idea how funny it is for me to catch myself trying to use mouse gestures or tabbed browsing when I use someone elses computer. At one time I was just like you. I didn't care about some alternate browser, especially when IE 5 was so much more stable than any version of Netscape or Opera that I had tried. You seriously need to give Mozilla a try. I recommend the Lo-Fi or IE skin, with mouse gestures installed and tabbed browsing turned on. It will seem a lot like IE, but better. Believe me.
ps - IT people are not always geeks...
Can't say I've noticed the same. I've been using XP since a month after it came out and while IE does crash every once in awhile, I can't remember it bringing down the entire system. It simply brings up a dailog asking me if I'd like to report the crash to Microsoft, I say no, and start up IE and I'm on my way. As a matter of fact I can't think of more than 1 or 2 times I've had to reboot XP due to a crash - it's just a not a common occurance.
XP and IE are very stable. I can only guess the majority of people complaining about Windows either mean Windows 9x or perhaps they don't use Windows at all and have simply read, "Windowz Suxors, It's always crashing!" so many times on Slashdot they assume it's true.
Done properly, probably not. I pulled this on my cousin. I used the IE skin and switched the icons, and loaded the plugins, and it was 2 months before she noticed. And she only noticed because the games at MSN wouldn't work (big surprise there!).
I've got a couple clients that have formally switched, using OE only for sending out because the Access guy can't figure out how to link Access to the Mozilla mail client. They haven't had a virus problem since.
At another site, IE is still the official browser, but a couple of users have discovered Mozilla's features and have switched. Still haven't convinced the boss yet. Maybe the bill from the last "I'll open this strange attachement which is really a network aware virus" incident will help change his mind. If not, well, more future billing for me.
I can't decide whether you are trying to be funny, or are just posting an ignorant comment. It's true that the above telnet session does not use ssl, and sends passwords clear text over a network but it provides a true reflection of the commands email clients send to a pop server (unless you are using pgp)
I hope you don't think email is secure because it isn't.
Has anyone even come up with a theoretical exploit that could do this. Maybe they have, but I've never heard of it.
"I have a good idea why it's hard to verify programs. They're usually wrong." --Manuel Blum, FOCS 94
My recommendation was weak not due to dislike, but simply because I didn't have a lot of experience with Mozilla mail so I didn't know where it falls on the sucks-to-rules scale. But I figured it would probably work "good enough" so I gave it to them and yes, it worked.
If I didn't know Mozilla was good, why did I give it to them? Pretty much just to avoid having to spend time on research. I know there are very likely some good mail clients for Windows, but I don't know what they are, and didn't want to spend a lot of time evaluating software. So I was looking for an easy way out.
Another easy way out would have been MS Outlook since I think the machines in question probably had it preloaded. But most of our email comes from The Internet, so obviously that would be a stupid choice. If a worm/virus/trojan comes in here, it won't matter what "dumb user"'s fault it is, it'll be my mess to clean up. Just because I didn't want to spend a lot of time on research, doesn't mean I could just be completely irresponsible.
Yet another easy way out would be to use a Windows port of Sylpheed, since I know Sylpheed pretty well (and I actually like Sylpheed except for it's seemingly single-threaded nature). But the day (hour?) I was working on this, all I found was one port of Sylpheed-Claws (the bleeding edge version of Sylpheed) and it was very crashy. So I gave up on that right away (remember: I was looking for easy way out).
By picking Mozilla, I didn't have to spend time researching it, and I was able to go on to the next project. If it turns out to be inadequate for some reason, then I guess I'll have to spend more time looking. Perhaps saying we're "standardized" on Mozilla would be an overstatement. We're "standardized" on IMAP and SMTP, which is how things should be. [pedant mode on] Those are standards, Mozilla is just an implementation.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Funny you should mention speed. I was doing a demo of pop-up blocking for someone. I loaded a site I knew used them in IE, then in Mozilla (with blocking turned on) The Mozilla page load was noticibly faster. Mozilla was started later yet was finished while IE was still loading the page. Now this is hardly a scientific experiment or benchmark, but it impressed the user. The fact it loaded faster and no pop-ups to deal with made an excellent demo. The blocked pop-up may be why it loaded faster though, but hey, a good demo is a good demo.
My email provider (Fastmail) has a neat way of dealing with html email. I have my default view set to "text only". When if comes across an email that has only an html part, it runs the message through lynx and I see the output. I get an easy view of the message without any possible security risks. Very nice.
I have not found a mail system as stable as Outlook with an Exchange server.
Outlook is a good program. Hell, all of office is pretty top-notch if you ask me. I'd buy it if they had a Linux version (Crossover Office is good but it's still not nearly as good as a native app..)
Outlook has a lot of nice features, the in-box rules are very easy to create and manage, and has more then a handful of other features that, in my opinion, set it apart from many other e-mail clients.
When coupled with an Exchange server, you get excellent seamless server-side storage of messages. IMAP can come close, but you still need local copies of your messages if you expect to do anything useful with them. Searches and such are all done on the server, eliminating network load. Many in-box rules will also run on the server-end, so even when Outlook isn't running, the rules still trigger and messages can be moved around your mailbox.
POP3 and IMAP definately have their place for internet-based e-mail services, but when it comes down to internal office e-mail, Outlook and Exchange just work better.
I'm not an advocate of Microsoft by any means, but I also don't ignore good software because of who makes it. MS Office is good, it's easy, and you can do a lot of stuff with it. OpenOffice is very good as well, no doubt about that, but MS Office is good too. And it comes with Outlook.
I'm waiting for the day when there's a Linux-Based e-mail system that's as good as the Outlook and Exchange combination. The other day there was a good discussion about Open Source alternatives to Exchange, and even with the ones that weren't free, nothing for Linux really impressed me. I think that if you need to use Linux on the backend, Lotus Domino is still the best choice.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
ever since, say, ages ago, Mozilla had the option of using quoted-printable with News and mail. not News or mail, but News and Mail. so to those of us who need Latin 1, Mozilla could be used for News or Mail, but not both.
And that's why we European geeks eschew Mozilla.
-- Rolf Lindgren, cand.psychol
...so I'm not the only one who notices that IE's Stop button sometimes... doesn't? That bugged me a lot back when I used it, but nobody else I knew had that problem (or noticed it... a lot of my friends are computer-dumb).
Even with Mozilla v1.4, I still have problems printing under Windows:
p ?p roduct_code=301859&pfp=BROWSE (only one page?)
b le t_PC/4505-3122_7-20711028.html?tag=dir (first page is a waste -- big gap)
URLs for examples:
http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.as
http://reviews.cnet.com/Toshiba_Port_g__3505_Ta
Thank you in advance.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).