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Mozilla Foundation Seeking Switch Success Stories
maggeth writes "mozillaZine has a story about how the Mozilla Foundation is looking to know if any organizations have switched to Mozilla products. Is your organization among them?" Can anyone point out an example of a library system switching? Lots of public libraries use PCs set up as kiosks running a web interface to their catalogs, and they all seem to use IE -- so, no tabbed browsing.
Since Firefox came out all of my friends have ridiculed me for using IE, and I had played around with it a bit but was not impressed. I've been a faithful IE user since 2.0 (I know =P) and wasn't about to change.
However lately I had been working on a website and in the cross browser testing I've been using Firefox 0.8 and on for Mozilla compatibility. Its taken extensive use of Firefox but I've almost completely switched. I love the tabbed browsing and it renders so much faster on my computer. I've also found it seems to handle some websites better than IE, especially with unknown extensions. I just wish it had Windows integration, but maybe someone will figure that out. Microsoft has a lot to worry about for IE 7. Firefox is improving with every version and I have fewer and fewer reasons to use IE.
You can use the "tabbrowser extensions" extension available from update.mozilla.org. It allows tabs to be dragged and droped, duplicated, auto-reloaded (usefull if you have your e-mail page open), named, colored, and saved upon exit. Overall it is *very* usefull.
Regards, Rob
TabBrowser extensionsi nfo/tbe
http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-
Probably one of my top 3 favorite extensions. Gives you a lot of control over tabs, saves your last sessions, allows you to reorder tabs, group tabs with the tab they were linked from, and a lot more.
That said, the best I've found is to use SMS (another unreliable technology) or login scripts to set the various things in prefs.js. This kind of scripting is a little more difficult than the equivalent IE scripting, I suppose.
I'm a sysadmin at a university library, and we have to run Windows for plugins that professors require for their classes. Mozilla nd Firefox can't be locked down like IE can through the active directory. A security change is a couple clicks in a central location with an Active Diretory and IE.
With Mozilla we would have to visit each workstation.
Lock out the registry tools and they can't import a registry setting.
There is actually an extension for Firefox and Mozilla to put it into a kiosk mode under any platform. XPI's are stupidly easy to install and manage. There is also Kiosk Project, which is working on a kiosk setup for linux that involves the browser and twm.
Central Washington's library uses Firefox excusively on all public internet terminals.
Galion Public Library uses Mozilla.org browsers exclusively. (I'm the
computer guy.)
However, we previously used mostly Communicator. We did have MSIE on *one*
computer at one point, but that system was so much trouble that when Windows
got cranky and needed to be reinstalled, we didn't bother. The librarians
were offering to dig a hole in the flower gardens and bury it; they weren't
interested in having it fixed; they wanted it replaced. Also, reinstalling
would have been a problem since we didn't have the original driver disks
(not my fault; we didn't have them when I was hired), and with its being a
Compaq Deskpro (no model number _anywhere_, and there are dozens of models,
and you have to know which one you have...), finding the correct drivers on
the net was promising real pain. This was late 2000. I put TurboLinux on
it and it served as a CGI server for a couple of years after that without
incident.
None of the librarians has ever asked me why we don't use MSIE. (Some of
them have asked me about the difference between Mozilla and Netscape, though.)
No patron AFAIK has ever specifically asked for Internet Explorer either. I
do get occasional complaints from patrons about certain plugins not being
installed (most frequently Flash), but that's not nearly as many complaints
as I get about the Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail interfaces (neither of which we
endorse or recommend; we officially do not provide email: we merely provide
access to the web).
I should note that our catalog stations within the library are not web-based.
We have a web-based catalog so people can get to our catalog from home, but
within the library the catalog stations are VT510 dumb terminals, connected
only to the automation system via ports (on a DECServer) which are only
privileged for OPAC (i.e., the catalog) and nothing else. For our older
patrons, the dumb terminals are easier to use and less intimidating than
a web-based system. (The OPAC literally tells you what buttons to push,
and there's no need to know how to use a mouse, which is good because a
lot of people around here aren't comfortable with computer mice yet.)
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
You mean the computers all update themselves automatically from a central server, or is it something else?
:w
Check out radmind. It's sort of an imaging and tripwire tool all rolled into one. Runs on Linux, Solaris, *BSD, and Mac OS X.
Have a look in the chrome directory where you installed Firefox. There's a file in there called "browser.jar" which contains information on what menu items appear in Firefox. If you unzip the file you'll find a number of files that control how the browser lays out its menus. The one you want to edit is "browser.xul".
From this file you can unbind keys from executing commands, set it so that when you create a new window it actually opens up a new tab in the current browser, restrict users from changing the look of Firefox (ie, remodelling toolbars), and most importantly, stop them from getting to the preference menu.
There's a good guide for doing all of that stuff here.
The company that i'm doing contract work for is soon to be using Firefox on all of their 300 Point-of-Sale systems, and i've implemented a lot of the stuff from this guide on their browsers.
We tried firefox but with w2k's 256 color limitation on terminal sessions
I've used Win2K Terminal Server quite a bit, and I've never seen a 256 colour limitation. You can choose to limit the colour depth (eg to save bandwidth), but it's definitely not a hard limit. I'd suggest you take a look at the configuration of your server (and possibly clients)...
It's official. Most of you are morons.
How so? The only "advantage" I can see in IE in this regard is that it ignores the "encoding" tag in the HTML header. That way, if the site is marked as "iso-8859-1" in the header, but actually contains unicode chars in the body, IE will show accented characters as the dumbass who created the site intended. However, I'd classify that as a bug, rather than a feature.