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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."
It runs great on OS/2! I can format floppies and browse the web... AT THE SAME TIME!!!
...since IBM has tradition been a huge advocate of open source.
This may be the best possible reference case for the average IT guy trying to convince his/her boss that FireFox is a good solution for a corporate environment.
Having IBM as a good example to use when pushing for corporate adoption of Firefox is a great thing for people working in this area. Although, it must be said that IBM are less likely to have troublesome components (IE specific webpages, ActiveX components) within any intranet pages than other companies due to their own products in that area (I'm thinking Lotus..).
Business Voyeur
Meaning 20,000 more downloads not counting on the Official Firefox Download Counter.
João Pinheiro
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!
In other news Microsoft countered by saying that after conducting an extensive poll of it's thousands of employees that "tabbed browsing" was not something that internet users wanted.
They also added that most Softies said that 1 "tab" would be enough for anyone.
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.
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.
This is not the sig you are looking for...
No matter what one thinks of IBM and its products, they are creating the blueprints companies around the world are using to get themselves out from mess they've all put themselves into with costly Microsoft products.
The headline isn't IBM back Firebox, but IBM shows the commercial world the way out of the quagmire of Microsoft dependance.
After this past fall semester, the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Nebraska begin setting Firefox as the default browsers in all the teaching labs due to problems with IE. Previously, at the end of each semester, the techs responsible for these labs would spend a lot of time cleaning up the malware coming in via IE. Now that this semester is over, the word is that the switch proved successful in terms of not having much to clean up.
Having done so much with so little for so long, I now can do anything with nothing at all.
Where are today's articles about Google!? There's 4 articles about Firefox and nothing, NOTHING, about Google!!
my blog
With IBMs large scale support for OSS , and its moves to replace the windows desktops with linux not to mention its sale of the PC business , Its only natural that they would move people on to an open browser.
.Acceptance in the corperate market would mean a great deal of people will be using firefox at work , which would perhaps have the knock on effect of them using it at home .
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What will be intresting to see is if this has a knock on effect to other large corperation as IBM is still very very influential.
This more than anything could be the break firefox needs toward wide scale acceptance beyond the 10%
When firefox has more than 30% of the market perhaps then we could relax in the knowlidge that most sites would then see fit to not specialise their code for IE
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
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.
Oracle has Firefox in the base image for over six months. That means its comming on all newly installed and reinstalled machines. In addition to that anybody can install firefox through standard application installer as any other application. Mozilla has been there for almost two years now. You get support for all applications in the base image through the IT support staff.
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.
How.
1. Buy using Firefox IBM will require all web based apps the company develops or uses to be browser neutral. These means that Microsoft's IE only solutions are not an option.
2. Firefox runs on Linux and Mac as well as Windows. Since all web based apps can now run on Firefox they can also run on Linux and Mac.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
TFA says IBM will effect FireFox by hosting it on internal servers and providing help desk support.
Oh...wait...did you mean to ask "I wonder how IBM will effect FireFox?" or did you mean to ask "I wonder how IBM will _affect_ FireFox?" Because those are two entirely different questions.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Hopefully, this might lead to IBM helping with developing good tools for remote management of Firefox. It would be very helpful for all the people having big deployments. If Firefox is to be ubiquitous, this is needed.
As I also said below, it should -- IBM people did the OS/2 port of Netscape and then Mozilla for years, and IBMers are still heavily (if informally) involved with the OS/2 ports of Mozilla and Firefox.
:-)
If Firefox was a multithreaded browser it would be a little bit better, though, at least under Warp.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
According to IBM's site http://www.ibm.com/ibm/us/ they currently have 329,000 employees. With an organization that large you don't simply install a new application and hope for the best!
You are correct, it is just a web browser, but when Jack and Jill in accounting cannot figure out where their 'Favorites' list went to and call the help desk, help desk staff need to know the answers. Granted, that is a simple question to answer, but think of the 100 other things that might be different between Firefox and IE (common message text for browser warning dialogs, etc), with 329K employees, even if only a small fraction of them run into questions it can mean time wasted by both the employee asking the question and the help desk person trying to find the answer. That time adds up quickly.
In any case, I see this as a huge success for Firefox!
These "MS shops" will eventually pay for their lack of vision. Told them, we did. Listen, they did not. Now, screwed they will be.
Yoda, you are not.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz