IBM Backs Firefox In-House

An anonymous reader wrote in with the link to a CNet story describing IBM's adoption of the Firefox browser for internal use. From the article: "Firefox is already used by about 10 percent of IBM's staff, or about 30,000 people. Starting this past Friday, IBM workers could download the browser from internal servers and get support from the company's help desk staff. IBM's commitment to Firefox is among its most prominent votes of confidence from a large corporation."

Comments

Great Reference

[boeserjavamann]

What could be better than Big Blue backing up Firefox? And why not? OS is already a Thing for IBM. Just look at the IBM-sponsored Eclipse Foundation. Congrats Firefox!

Probably a greater effect than at work

[SteelV]

Once these employees are using FireFox at work, there is a good chance that they'll start to use it as home, as well (once they get used to it, and if they like it more than IE which usually seems to be the case). Then they can tell family and friends (I've personally only convinced a few people to switch, but those ten or so have told others, and it spreads).

Personally, I prefer Safari over FireFox (I don't need too many extensions, just a simple browsing experience) but when I'm on a windows machine I only use FireFox.

About time

[M3rk1n_Muffl3y]

I work at a major investment bank and just yesterday they decided to send a memo around saying that Firefox is not to be used. I wonder why that was? No, really does anyone have any suggestions.

Tech Support / Costs

[RailGunner]

I'd personally like to see an estimate on the costs savings of switching to Firefox from IE. It costs IT departments a lot of (wasted) money cleaning up desktops that have been compromised by a malicious ActiveX control.

Since I'm sure some bean counter had to approve the switching, it seems to me that some cost analysis had to be done, and they realized Firefox would have a lower "TCO".

I'm sure getting away from being dependent on a rival's product factored into the decision, but I'm pretty sure cost factored as well.

Re:Surprising no one...

[Spiked_Three]

You obviously have not been around very long. 20 years ago IBM would gladly sit at the table and argue why proprietary systems were better. Sure, they are singing the 'open source' and 'open standards' line now, but it IS NOT tradition, nor should it be thought of as anything more than a phase they see as the way to make the most money at the moment.

Will Firefox make it to the systems as default?

[bogaboga]

Will Firefox make it to the computer systems IBM ships as the default browser? That will even be better. Can IBM flex muscles here? I doubt. The surest way of denting IE's share is by governments ordering PCs specifying that the browser installed should meet all W3C standards that the browser supports 100%. I understand that in procurement, specifying a product name is not allowed, so mentioning Firefox as the browser is a non-starter.

Re:Good example?

[Zlorfik]

As an IBM employee, I was shocked how virtually every internal app worked with Firefox right from the get go.

That's when I knew this browser was for real in terms of being an IE replacement.

Didn't they announce a transition to linux too?

[nietsch]

Wasn't it about a year ago that IBM top honcho declared that all of IBM would switch to using linux? Now that would be a impressive feat if they pulled that off.
10% of IBM employees pales in comparison to that. But the PR spinmeisters hoped you would have forgotten that already, i guess.