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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.
My organization is entirely devoted to using mozilla and mozilla based products.
And yes, I AM looking to expand our current one man workforce.
I am a filthy pirate.
Sun Microsystems is transitioning to use Netscape 7, which is close enough to Mozilla...
of our large R&D development community is using Netscape, mostly because these people are using mostly Solaris or some are using Red Hat (7.3/8/9).
The other half is ALL IE, Outlook, Exchange.
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Free your mind.
Sorry, but the real geeks use Mutt ... graphical email clients are for geek posers ;)
(Score:-1, Wrong)
I use KMail, it's quite a good mailer IMHO.
Really? Everyone I know uses pine, Eudora, or Mail.app - you should be careful about making assumptions based on your own personal circumstances before you try to extrapolate data for use at an organization.
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
We rolled out IE5.01 using the IEAK (Internet Explorer Administration Kit). It would be a great thing if one could customize Mozilla in straight-foward manner for corporate deployments.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
I don't have a GUI you insensitive clod!!!
Unless all your clients are running Win2k with the antitrust service pack, and have no permissions....you can't elminate Internet Exploder.
I've installed the Netscape versions of Mozilla on the systems I maintain, and urge people to use them. It seems to work.
All public workstations at Columbia University have Mozilla as their default browser.
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.
We chose Mozilla to go along with IE and Outlook. All the Netscape users are happy (we used to standardize on 4.77), all the Outlook users are saying "WTF is this dragon head on my desktop"
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
In the corporate environments where I've been working, Microsoft servers, browsers and email remain the status quo.
As a web developer, I use Mozilla because it's stricter about standards, and pages that render well in Moz almost always look the same in IE, while the reverse isn't true. One coworker gives me a (humorous) hard time about my refusal to use Microsoft FrontPage or IE when our company is unquestionably "a Microsoft shop".
Seems like there's no businesses -- certainly not incorporated ones -- want to hire experts in free software like Linux, Apache, PostgreSQL and Mozilla when 2kServer, IIS, SQL Server and IE are what all the other big companies are using first. Mozilla's got an uphill battle, and it knows it.
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"
I work with small businesses, anywhere from 5 to 100 users. I have 3 clients of 20, 25, and 45 users respectively all using mozilla mail. Hell, I even have the 45 person shop switched over (almost everyone) to the ALPHA thunderbird. I just don't need the hassle of outlook virus issues, the users who don't use IMAP can keep their POP mail on their /home directory n the server, the address book talks to LDAP. I use the latest SuSE mail server which integrates LDAP address books out of the box,as well as webmail.
I am switching to thunderbird because we have some corporate partners who have B2B websites that require IE5 or better, so I need to standardize on IE unfortunately. Thunderbird can invoke your default browser in windows, unlike Moz Mail.
Well, I love it, but not exactly in an enterprise setting.
"as I realize 99% of us geeks already use [Mozilla]."
Sorry kid, but where I come from, 99% of people use Outlook and/or Exchange. Exchange or not, Outlook 2000 and XP are very capable email clients, and the easy calendar/contact integration and Palm synchronization make them the real winners. (By the way, there is a patch for Outlook 2000 that disallows opening of any harmful attachments. This comes standard with Outlook XP. I switched from Eudora two years ago and I've never even been able to open a virus-laden attachment, let alone send one, as it asks for confirmation when a program tries to automatically send something.) I browse the web using Mozilla (I'm using it right now), but Outlook wins hands-down on email.
If you want to standardize, standardize on the server side, not the client. Most organizations I have worked at standardized on IMAP (whether they did so through Exchange or another IMAP server.) IMAP has the advantage of keeping everyone's email on the server so people can access it through the web, at multiple computers, etc. The disadvantage, of course, is disk space -- you're going to need at least 10MB per account, and preferably 25MB or more, which quickly adds up. Plus, you're going to need to find a reliable way to back that up, and tape drives are expensive.
My recommendation is to standardize on IMAP, set up some webmail, and have some HOWTOs for several email clients. This being a college, you're going to find that most everyone will be using Outlook Express. Include HOWTOs for Mozilla, OE, Outlook, and whatever you choose as your webmail solution (there will be people who use the webmail exclusively.) As long as you set the standard on the server side, I don't think it's necessary to set a standard client -- just a recommended one. If you want that to be Mozilla, so be it, but understand that not everyone is going to want to use it.
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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.
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!
Can you list some bugs please? I have used Mozilla as my sole email client for several years now and had no problems. This includes multiple incoming account using both POP and IMAP (had some problems with IMAP but they were servers not following the RFC's correctly and were fixed with a server patch once the vendor was notified), multiple SMTP accounts including one using SSL, multiple LDAP accounts, etc.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
hmmmmmmmmm... I dunno if the author is looking for a survey that will hold water statistically (Slashdot, impartial? HA!). Seems like they just want to hear stories of "how and why", stuff like that. y'know, just finding out what the rest of the family is doing ^_^
Standing at the very edge of my imagination, I peered into the inky void and realised -- I couldn't think up a new sig.
"Everybody generalizes from one example. At least, I do."
-Steven Brust
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 :-)
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I'll take a few random crash bugs as apposed to the over 30 megs of "security" updates one has to download for IE paired with windows. So since crash bugs are such an issue, I'll assume companies should also not be using IE? Any Microsoft software whatsoever?
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.
I guess I am in the 1% of geeks who do not use Mozilla at all, then. I've used the 1.0 series, and while there are some nice features I have no compelling reason to switch.
I would hope that 99% of geeks were using a browser other than IE. But considering the existance of Opera, Konqueror, etc, this non-IE browser does not need to be a Mozilla-based browser.
Unfortunately, this statistic is probably not correct, and there are a lot of geeks using IE. But can they really call themselves geeks then?
#!/
No one is going to touch mozilla until all the crash bugs are closed. I've had a crash bug open since moz 1.1 and its still not resolved.
/)
/) in the mozilla URL bar. then click on the crapzilla.html file that is shown in the file list.
From the bug you mentioned:
Follow these instructions EXACTLY. Open up your version of mozilla (1.4 or nightlies)
Make sure you have the recommended version of java installed (1.4.1 is recommended by the mozilla 1.4 release notes, or any other version will do)
Start up the javascript console and the java console in that order.
make mozilla fill 1/3 of your screen with the javascript console taking up another 1/3 and the java console the last 1/3.
put the 3 files (crapzilla.html, crapzilla.java, crapzilla.class in your root drive (c:\ or
type c:\ (or
wait till the counter counts down to 1500 and you will see a alert box. press Cntrl-Q to exit mozilla, click on the javascript console and hit file->exit, then quickly switch to the java console and hit the close button.
mozilla should now crash with the talkback window.
Yes, I'm so sure that this particular bug is going to prevent millions of people from adopting Mozilla-based products.
Besides, is their a huge advantage to centralizing on only one email app?
:). But, for the time being at least, we are still using Exchange for the mail server. I use Moz Mail to interface with Exchange strictly via IMAP, but there are still some here who use Outlook and interface "natively" with Exchange.
Well, many large enterprises standardize on Outlook because they use Exchange as their mail server. They do this so that they can use extra mail features that Exchange provides, like marking messages for follow-up or recalling messages. Admins at my former employer used follow-up flags to remind us that, say, we had to fill out an HR form by a certain date. The e-mail would be flagged for follow-up by such-and-such a date, an appointment would be added to the calendar (if memory serves), and the admin can configure a reminder to pop-up on my screen if I don't clear the follow-up flag by a certain amount of time before the deadline.
The real biggie is the ability to see everyone else's calendar and schedule meetings based on that. You can also do things like marking individual attendees as optional or required; setting up a uniform reminder time that will appear on all attendees' screens; replying to a meeting request as confirmed, tentative, or decline the invitation; proposing a new meeting time; etc. It's actually pretty powerful, and works well in large, beauracratic organizations. You can do similar things with tasks and the journal.
However, I have recently jumped ship to a small company, and much to my delight they are getting off of Outlook and onto Mozilla Mail because the "desktop engineering team" (two guys) are big into OSS
My next comment on the 50%, how many of them were Opera or Konqueror users spoofing as MSIE?
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
Newer versions of kmail will just display the raw html with a link at the top of the message pane that says:
Note: This is an HTML message. For security reasons, only the raw HTML code is shown. If you trust the sender of this message then you can activate formatted HTML display for this message by clicking here.
"Here" of course being clickable. Its pure entertainment looking at some of the truly evil Outlook-exploiting shit in some of them. I can easily read mails sent to me from trusted users with clueless clients and still not pull images from spammer servers. Kmail Just Works.
just answer the question and stop criticizing the submitter (me!), picking apart what a "geek" is, or going on about my choice of words? I did not ask for a review of Mozilla, or what other email/web clients exist, or your opinion on standardizing on a product. BTW, we standardize so we can provide suppoprt to the 3000+ computers here.
No one is going to touch mozilla until all the crash bugs are closed.
Mozilla -> crash here and there
IE Exploder -> pop-up, pop-up, pop-up
Mozilla Email -> crash now and again
Outlook -> Mails to everyone in your address book of the latest Nicaragua money that was made by Penis enlargment pills.
The internal struggle of what to use continues for me!
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
Not to be a smart ass (well, sorta), but what about IE? IE is at least as "unstable" as you report Mozilla to be. In my case, I've found that IE crashes far more than Mozilla does, yet I use Mozilla more than IE. I don't think that this is a criteria that many will be using to judge browsers, as both are relatively stable.
:) and the lock-in you get with MS Exchange, but the huge drawback being the fact that it is so easily comprimised by viruses and worms and whatnot.
:(
Seriously though, how many open crash bugs are left? It seems that the one you point out is somewhat complicated to duplicate, involves Mozilla interacting with Java (something that seems to cause most browsers some consternation), and is not an issue for 99% of the web-browsing public.
Not that this has anything to do with Mozilla Mail in the least. A comparison between Outlook and Mozilla Mail or Thunderbird might be a little more on topic. It seems to me that all three are, like their browser counterparts, fairly stable, and offer a fair to decent email experience.
I find that a big draw for Outlook would be it's well designed UI (seriously, it's about the only thing it's good for!
Sadly most people seem to be insanely ignorant of this point, and just keep chugging along, happily flooding the internet with Klez, Bugbear, and Sobig.
I think that the great feature that could attract people to the Mozilla team's offerings is the built-in Bayesian spam filter! Much like pop-up blocking, and, to a lesser extent, tabbed browsing, this is the kind of feature you can mention to somebody, and they go "Oh, hey... that's pretty cool!" It's definitely something that people need, given how much spam is out there, but if people don't know about it, then they will content to wallow in mediocrity.
-Colin
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.
Here are the stats for the people that click on my sig link from slashdot.
46% Netscape Navigator 5
34% Internet Explorer 6
7% Internet Explorer 5
6% Opera 7
2% Konqueror 3
1% Opera 6
1% Safari
< 1% Netscape Navigator 4
< 1% Konqueror 2
< 1% Internet Explorer 4
< 1% Netscape Navigator 3
< 1% Opera 5
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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
I've noticed that because MS has integrated IE with the OS, when IE crashes it often brings down my whole system, requiring a reboot, but when Moz crashes the system is fine and I just need to reload Moz and keep going.
Personally I find IE crashes much more often than Moz, but even if they both crashed with the same frequency it's a much bigger hassle to recover from an IE crash.
I have never had any of these problems. I am using Windows 2000, IE 6, both fully updated. I have the Macromedia stuff installed and maybe a couple other plugins.
I don't know what you people are doing.
BTW Don't use File->New Window, click on the shortcut.
"How do you know?"
I worked at Sun until May 2002. I have many friends who still work there whom I speak to daily. I often ask them about Netscape 4.7. I've long since dropped support for it on my own websites, but I'm hoping that the last few remaining holdouts will finally leave it.
If you still don't think I'm for real, ask any Sun employee what "dtmail" is. They will know exactly what you are talking about. Most of them will then go on a rant about it, just like I used to when I worked there.
"What 'standards' are you refering [sp] to?"
How about CSS1? Or nested tables? Or really, any standards-compliant markup? Don't even get me started on CSS2 or any moderately-complex CSS1 markup. My websites all validate to XHTML 1.0, but they don't work in Netscape 4. If you seriously believe that Netscape 4 works with web standards, I invite you to Google Netscape 4 sucks and read the many, MANY articles posted by infuriated web developers.
Personally, I use Mozilla, and it's great as far as standards-compliance goes. Netscape 6 is decent and Netscape 7 and 7.1 are fine. NS4, on the other hand, is a complete joke and a waste of time to develop for. It needs to disappear once and for all.
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if you check again does it say 100% slashdotted?
Now consider the same in Mozilla. Mozilla crashes, you don't know why blah blah. Your first port of call is Bugzilla and best case you find the bug is already logged. Reading through the comments you learn of a trivial to workaround (e.g. disable a pref). Better yet someone has already produced a patch so you roll your own version of Moz and apply it or wait for the next and reasonably frequent milestone releases. Problem solved. If there is no bug, log one, track it, ask the community for help. If you get no response, pay whoever it might be Sun, Red Hat, Netscape / AOL $$$ to fix it.
So worst case you're no more out of pocket than you were with MS. Best case you get fast and free support, a detailed description of the issue and progress updates as it is worked on.
The reason many geeks don't like IE is precisely because it doesn't "just work". Not on the OS platform they'd like to be using.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
The general policy of sending people e-mail that is mean to be "run" is a dumb, dumb idea in the first place, and that we can blame on Outlook. The fact is that those "idiot" users are just doing what the software has trained them to do - click on attachments to view them in whatever application is configured for them to run in. See a word doc - click on it to view it. See an Excel spreadsheet - click on it to view it. See a zip file - click on it to view it. See a virus program - click on it to view it - Oops!
The idea of using executable content (which is what a word document or spreadsheet really *are*) as a normal, everyday typical way to operate your business is what leads people to run things they see in their e-mail without thinking. They aren't thinking "I'm running this file". They are thinking "I'm looking at this file."
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
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.
This is 100% wrong and I don't understand why nobody wrote it yet. If 99% geeks use Mozilla for mail, then who uses Mutt, Pine, or Evolution? Mainstream people?
Oh, please. These same systems work perfectly well with Mozilla et al on Windows, or with Linux. I've witnessed this personally. MSIE is a load of crap with the capability to bring down the entire operating system, and Microsoft has next to zero incentive to make it otherwise.
The only thing I can possibly grant you is that in Windows, drivers are generally written by the hardware manufacturer, as opposed to maintained by people who care about how well they work after the sale has been made. But then again, that's really a point for Linux, isn't it?
IE is so much easier in every way.
Insert the following LINE into an html file and open it in IE:
<input type text>
I have IE 6.0.2600.0000, and this single line will crash IE producing the MS "talkback" dialog. I don't have to even load a java class file to produce the same type of behaviour. So obviously IE is superior!!!!
LOL
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.