Firefox and Open Standards the Way Forward

lamasquerade writes "A major Australian newspaper has a lengthy and detailed feature on open source/standards, avoiding vendor lock-in, and specifically the increasing uptake of Firefox by major organisations' IT departments. It touches on security and price advantages of open source but mainly focuses on open standards -- the perils of vendor lock-in, and their importance to technologies like the Internet and digital music. Linux, OpenOffice.org and even Bugzilla get a mention and all told it is a very pro-open source/standards article, especially considering it is in a mass-circulation publication."

Comments

Shame

[EdwinBoyd]

I work for a large company and sadly most of their intranet sites use ActiveX. This pretty much makes Firefox unusable to the point where most pages will display the dreaded non-IE page. There are ways around it for people that know what they're doing but for the average user it's a sad state. The cost involved in switching over to be compliant with non IE browsers is never going to be justified by the IT dept either I imagine this is the same with many large organizations and could be a stumbling block for Mozilla

Re:Shame

[lemnik]

I to am working at a large coperate with IE as the internal standard (we're not even supposed to have Firefox on our machines). That said Firefox works great on their network (though they don't use CaptiveX). I'd like to see some sites using XUL for admin backends etc. Lets make some sites Firefox and Mozilla specific and see what happens :P

Re:Shame

[mrchaotica]

Ah, they fell for the lock-in. Since there's no way they'll think far enough ahead to realize "hey, it's going to cost N-squared million dollars* to KEEP IE because we're going to have to bend over to Microsoft in perpetuity", I guess sadly the only thing to tell them is "I told you so." : (

*i.e., more than the cost of switching to Firefox

Re:Shame

[LegendLength]

Is ActiveX support hard to add technically? i.e. is it as simple as wrapping some DLL on windows?

Note that I understand the lock-in and other bad aspects of ActiveX. Just wondering if it is a totally philosophical decision by the FireFox team or partly a technical one.

Re:Shame

[fpga_guy]

I work at one of Australia's largest Universities, and recently contacted one of our service departments regarding a web application that gave a "Bad browser" message when accessed with Mozilla. I emailed asking if they had considered supporting a standards-compliant browsser like Mozilla.

Here is the response:

"Thank you for your email and information. You are the first to request this and quite frankly I had not considered it. I had always followed corporate policy - with central IT not supporting these I figured why should I? "

This is what we are up against.

Needless to say I have just forwarded a link to the main article!

MoFo == US based charity?

[rsborg]

Mozilla Foundation (aka MoFo) is a "US based charity"??? I would pretty much agree... but this is the MSM we're talking about!

In any case, it got me interested in De Bortoli Wines. So I checked out their webserver OS: Netcraft reports:

http://www.debortoli.com.au was running Apache on Linux when last queried at 22-Mar-2005 02:34:05 GMT

I wonder if they financed this article...? I mean, Firefox is pretty damn kewl.

The next generation web apps will be different

[cyberjessy]

Anyone who is following the IE/Windows road-maps will find that the article is fundamentally flawed, in analyzing the intentions of the Vole. They are not trying to fight Firefox with better HTML and CSS compliance (though that is what they want people to believe). It is all about turning web applications into rich clients. In Longhorn, web sites can present a fully rich client to browsers through Avalon.

Although, I am gonna get burnt for ignoring the benefits of cross platform capability, rich clients do have some significant advantages over web pages. This is especially true when it comes to businesses. For intranet applications, cross-browser compatibility will NEVER be the deciding factor. Security too will not be, since the application will be trusted. Features however will be.

Personally, I don't like the idea of hundreds of powerful PCs simply used for rendering web pages. They are not that incapable.

I know XUL is similar, but I doubt applications will be built on that. IE is standard in most organizations. And most of the Firefox acceptance is since HTML is supported on IE and Firefox. Building an application that will work only of Firefox (with XUL) might be a more difficult decision.

Re:The next generation web apps will be different

[spagetti_code]

I must agree with this comment.

Anyone who is in two minds about this should simply try Outlook Web Access in Exchange 2k3. You have the option of the 'Premier' interface in IE (its very very good - good enough to ditch lookOut) or 'Standard' in anything else (which is ok, but relative to Premier its poor).

Richness of web apps is MSs bet on what will force a new defacto standard for the web. Remember - MS **do not care** about standards - they care about customer lock in, they care about protection of their dominant position on the desktop and (at the most basic) the bottom line.

So with that in mind - look at what is coming down the pipeline:

• .Net - lock in to Windows (Ignore Mono - MS will work hard on FUD to make it unpalatable to corporates, and if it doesn't go away they will pull out a few dozen of their patents)
• C# - lock in (see above on Mono). Now this was a brilliant move - instead of having everyone develop in a language (C++) that was *just* portable (if you used the right syntax and libraries and twisted your tongue just the right way), they create a completely new windows only language. Just brilliant. And even better, we are jumping on the C# bandwagon at a staggering rate.
• IE7 - "better implementation of standards", which in reality means a whole new set of subtle incompatibilities and no support for css2. End result - web devs pick IE or spend hours trying to make code look good in Firefox, Mozilla, Opera blah blah. Lock in!
• Win32, no sorry WinForms, damn! I mean XAML.
• Proprietary SOAP compression. I mean DAMN how do you take a reasonable standard like SOAP (aside from it being far>/i> more complex than it should be) and add non-portable compression! I smell.... lock in.

Remember people - MS are being good corporate citizens if they look after their shareholders, which means revenue, which means a dominant position. Gotta love capitalism.

Re:Is Firefox really more secure than IE

[the_womble]

Everyone touts Firefox being more secure than IE, but is it really?

Yeah, just like what happened to Apache becuase it has a bigger market share than IIS, right?

which I consider to be a superior product

And I consider a 1975 Skoda is a superior product to a Rolls Royce.

You must really like Active X as that is the only "advantage" IE offers that I can think of.

Re:For those who don't know....

[stylewagon]

exactly, smh even managed to put the firefox logo on their frontpage (albeit slightly rotated for some bizzare reason). see it for yourself: jpg version or pdf version

What standards?

[HeroreV]

I've been searching in vain to find exactly what standards Firefox supports (or the gecko rendering engine, or whatever is responsible for it). Is there some mystical list somewhere that will tell me what Firefox does and doesn't support? What about XHTML 1.1? Or full CSS 2.1?

grumble grumble....

[MetalliQaZ]

I get more and more pop-ups in firefox every day.
is that bad....or good

Re:1998 called....

[Tim C]

Netscape 4 was still good in 2000.

Netscape 4 was *not* still good in 2000. I used it exclusively, but only because I was too much of an anti-MS zealot to use IE (now I'm too used to Gecko-based browsers to use IE 6, but I digress).

NN 4 crashed at the drop of a hat, was dog-slow at rendering anything even vaguely complicated, and had to reload the page to resize it (which is utterly, utterly unforgivable).