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Firefox Continues to Bite into IE Usage
InformationSage writes "According to Information Week, Firefox usage is now over 6 percent, pulling Internet Explorer usage down below 90 percent. 'Firefox is currently the only browser that is increasing market share on a monthly basis, and it is growing at the direct expense of Microsoft's Internet Explorer'"
Microsoft are hoping that by taking leaves from Mozilla's book, such as Tabbed Browsing and putting them into IE7, the will stop the users who are not very tech savvy from changing to firefox, therefore still keeping the larger user base
Mozilla has an advantage with the fact that they can release a new version practically anytime, with updates nightly or anything. IE updates have to go out to everyone using it, and in general the people will not know as much, therefore creating more trouble.
Business Voyeur
Any statistics of Firefox usage based on http log analysis will have to be adjusted upwards by some unknown factor based on how many people surf as MSIE using the User Agent Switcher Extension.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
http://www.frontmotion.com/Firefox/
MSI Package can be rolled out with Group Policy in an Active Directory domain.
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While Internet Explorer can be managed using group policies, which you have to use to lock down windows anyway, that doesn't mean firefox is entirely unmanageable in a network environment.
.ini-style settings or profiles stored in directories for ages. Using shared or synchronized files (with appropriate permissions) to propagate settings has been a common way to manage applications for ages as well.
Firefox accepts a startup flag (-profile d:\foo) that tells it what it's configuration directory is. You can install firefox on a shared directory, and have it retrieve settings from a (read-only) shared directory (or on a per user basis).
While it's not as finegrained as internet explorer's policies (where you might prevent some-one from changing only the homepage, and nothing else, or vice-versa), it's by no means unconfigurable.
This sort of thing should hardly come as a surprise. Applications have been using
Now, it's a shame firefox doesn't come with a handy-dandy MSI file, but then, neither does Internet Explorer. Then again, "deploying" firefox is a question of copying/sharing a directory and adding a shortcut with a -profile flag. Much easier and less prone to failure than a (remote/MSI) IE install.
Also, check out sysinternals. They have some real handy tools like PsExec (in the Pstools package); basically rexec for windows, which can really ease your pain when managing a zillion workstations where some change needs to be applied NOW.
And for more security options, check out windows-2003 server and XPs "software restriction policies"; and the great tdifw firewall (no GUI, just a service configured by copying a text-based file to your workstations and restarting the service, mucht better than any Norton offering) (wipfw might also be nice).
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Firefox has a master configuration directory. Pretty much every single aspect of the browser is configurable through that directory. In fact, you can do a lot of things with it there that you can't with IE.
If you want to set a particular action for your people, edit the configuration stuff. There's a lot of documentation on how to do it.
Mozilla is making their browser configuration work pretty much the same as everything else in OSS: through config files, which considering the complexity is probably a good idea.
With a GUI you'd have to play "find the menu item" to get anywhere. Ironically, though, if you want to do that, then you can log in as superuser (admin), and edit this file through the browsers config inteface for most versions of it (and for most parts of the configuration).
But to switch subjects, your "corporations are a much bigger market than home users" comment is almost certianly wrong when you're not talking about an app that you sell to users.
Consider this:
1) Almost everyone who works in a corporate environment has computers to work on at work, and ones for home. Thus, almost every corporate user is also a home user.
2) Not everyone who has a computer is in a corporation. Thus, there are a lot of home users who are not corporate users.
The bottom line is that there must always be more home users than corporate users. Sure, they may not actually want to buy Mozilla, but that doesn't mean there aren't more of them.
It makes sense that Mozilla would concentrate on its primary marketshare. Especially when it does what you want. They probably assume that if you're paid to do global configs, you can figure out how. I suppose that was a wrong assumption in your case.
Are they asking to much of Windows admins?
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Here's what you have to do:
Make your base image with firefox installed and configured the way you want it.
If the users login with a generic login, like "computerlab" then all you have to do is make note of the location of their profile directory. Set the files in there writable only by system and administrators after you configure firefox the way you want. If you need to make any changes after that, use a GPO and have windows run a bat file on startup(when it will run as system) that replaces any changed files in the profile. Deny users the ability to create new files in c:\documents and settings\%username%\application data\mozilla\firefox\profiles. This is the easy scenario.
If your people are logging in with their own idea, then you have to work around Firefox/Mozilla's assinine profile directory naming convention, arguably the stupidest thing they've done. Everything as before, except your script that runs on computer start up has to loop through all of folders in c:\documents and settings and then find out what Firefox decided to name the default profile. *Then* you can copy your files.
IMO, the profile naming convention and the refusal to use registry settings under windows are the two biggest mistakes made by the Firefox team. Because I can't write a custom adm file to make a GPO to control firefox in a lab, I can't role it out. It takes too much of my time to configure and then work around the problems with the software. With IE, I just set a GPO and suddenly no one can run activeX components. No one can override the popup blocker, no one can set the home page or change the backgrounds.
Firefox may be more secure out of the box, but the inability to easily manage it in lab settings makes it less secure there.
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Have you hugged your penguin today?
This could be especially bad news for Firefox if IE 7.0 incorporates MySoft Technology's Maxthon code. I've been running Maxthon for over a month (I started with Version 1.12.00 and recently updated to 1.2.00) and believe me, once you're used to Maxthon it's hard to go back to the "stripped down" Firefox. Not only does Maxthon have tabbed browsing, but also true mouse gestures and the very powerful AD Hunter function, which can block out many online ads that slow down the computer and/or install spyware/adware without your knowledge in addition to blocking out most pop-up ad windows.
But Maxthon is still completely vulnerable to all those nice IE exploits that are dropping spyware on people's machines. *THAT'S* why a lot of people are dropping IE, rather than some usability or feature issue. Heck, I made the mistake of checking out a site in IE for my girlfriend when she was visiting. It auto-installed spyware on my fully patched WinXPSP2 laptop (hadn't installed any BHO protection).
As for ads, just drop in the powerful, full-featured AdBlock extension. The fact is, just about any feature you can think of (and every feature in a shell like maxthon) is available for Firefox as a free, open-source, easily installable extension.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc