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

[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!

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