Slashdot Mirror
68% of UK Universities and Colleges Use Firefox
An anonymous reader writes "mozillaZine is reporting that over two-thirds of British universities and colleges have installed Mozilla or Firefox on their campus computers. They cite an open source survey by OSS Watch that also shows rising support for Mozilla Thunderbird, Moodle and Octave, though a decline for OpenOffice and LaTeX. Predictably, all open source offerings are blown away by Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office's 100% deployment rates."
Mozilla/Camino/Firefox is standards compliant, free and safe. I don't think IE7 can touch that.
...then the rest of the world shall follow! These numbers are deceiving though, because although more than two thirds of UK universities and colleges have it installed, it is only installed on "some" of their hardware. It is depressing that the open source model and philosophy hasn't caught on with more force in universities, especially since it fits so well with many universities mission statements, to bring education and enlightenment to the masses.
At the Junior College I go to all, the computers in the labs have Firefox installed on them, and that includes the Macs. Though most people who use the Macs just use Safari instead.
google.slashdot
about:mozilla "And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror." --Mozilla, 7:15
Concidering we are talking school owned computers and the academic community is supposed to be all about GPL, Open Source, etc...68% sounds to me like something isnt quite working out the way it should.
Well to check whether your browser is standard compliant try using http://www.photobloggers.net/ It's not only well coded..it's very handed as well :p
We have Firefox on all PCs where i study (not on the Macs though, for some reason (Art academy...)).
But alot of people probably don't know what Firefox is, and if they do, some of them probably don't want to change old habbits.
So, Installed != Used.
It's good to hear Firefox use is increasing, but it has always frustrated me how many people have never even heard of OpenOffice.org. While I was working at a university last year a few times I had to pick up some cables from the bookstore, and on two occasions the person behind me in line was planning to buy MS Office. In both cases I suggested OO.o -- something the person had never heard of -- and in both cases the person decided to post pone purchasing MS Office until after they try Open Office. Since it's free, I've found most people are willing to at least give it a shot; however it amazed me that I've never seen OO.o advertised in a campus bookstore. You would think that a university campus, full of students who could use that extra hundreds of dollars saved from not buying MSO more than most people, would be a perfect place to push Open Office.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
I can say this pretty emphatically that MS Office is exponentially better than the OSS equivalent, OpenOffice.
I migrated to OpenOffice in an attempt to make my PC software more legit, and man is it horrible. The interface is like the MS Office of 1994. They made the most innocuous things, like printing a standard A4 envelop, an effort in futility. After days of futzing with the built-in envelope template, altering my printer paper settings, and manually adjusting margins, I just gave up and googled for an answer. To my dismay, this was apparently a very common problem in OpenOffice. So I hunted, downloaded a template someone else had the patience that I didn't have made, and used it instead. I have it saved just in case.
This same task in MS Office? File > New > Envelope. Enter the addresses and print.
I'm a huge advocate of OSS, but in this case, OSS is light years behind.
In other news... widespread use of communist software leads students to piracy, joblessness, and anti-Americanism.
...Internet Explorer is present at 100% of British universities and colleges.
Am I the only one that feels like he's reading a website from another time or aprallel universe? I mean, OO.o and Firefox have sufficient market penetration and recongizability (hmm, is that a word?) to reference them without any background, but WTH are Moodle and Octave? And seriously, Moodle? Software names are getting worse and worse...
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
lol man dont u now, its because ff has added so much security, it supports 8092bit sll-encryptation for all sites and even colors teh adress-box to make it even more secure. u can even run ff on Lunix, which is even more secure, since Lunix users are basement-dwelling faggots who dont have anything to steal so theres no viruses for teh Lunix-kernal.
What?! Firefox is becoming popular? Oh man now I am going to have to use Opera in order to sneer down my superior nose at what browser people are using.
Come on now...really. So at least one computer at each of these universities has Firefox installed on it. Look, there's little doubt that Firefox usage is up. But, isn't this really non-news?
Likewise, there should be a significant number of programmers, hackers, coders, software professionals who would rather work in areas of their choice and work for the name recognition, and who would be willing to work for lower pay. If the Open Source community is organized or reorganized in the academic research model it would benefit all. Would it happen? I have no idea.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
What's wrong with those Brits? Why, at MY college, NONE of the lab computers had Internet Explorer OR Office installed on them! They all ran Unix (still do, AFAIK, this was ~5 years ago), and we LIKED it!
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
There's a big difference between "have" and "use". For example, I have Firefox installed but I don't use it, at least not as my primary browser.
Octave: http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/
I'm not bitter, I'm just unsweetened.
Okay, it was back in the 90s, but when I was at uni, there were plenty of UNIX workstations that didn't have either of those installed. I can't imagine things have changed so drastically in the last few years or that I went to the only university that used UNIX.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Seriously, when you see a word like "Moodle" that you don't know, why don't you just Omgili for it?
--MarkusQ
Octave: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Octave
I'm not bitter, I'm just unsweetened.
I doubt that. Unless you mean "100% of those polled have at least one license deployed". That would make sense, what with MSO being the accepted standard world wide and OOo / StarOffice not being 100% compatible with it.
Most schools I am familiar with (quite a few, as I work for one) use far more free office software--we use Star Office 8--than they use MSO. But everyone has to have MSO to communicate with other organizations that have MSO.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Sorry ,but that's the most nonsensical thing i have ever read .
Could you explain this further please , because it loks to me like your just flaming at everyone who uses firefox .
If you want too use an argument against Firefox , use a proper one ( like the memory leaks )
I think that at engineering schools, at least half the PC's would be running Linux or other x86 Unix varient. At my old school that was the case the last time I walked through a lab.
When I was in school there was near 0 support for anything PC related. Everything was Unix or Mac. Last time I went back (2 years ago) it was pretty much all Linux as far as I could see.
Think Deeply.
I just really wish that our University would use Firefox instead of Mozilla. And allow customizations on your account like PDF openers and such things.
Moodle is a course management system. What a University would want with one of those, I don't know. Half of my lecturers never turned up on time and one simply photocopied the course textbook as notes and read from it during lectures. Even those I had some respect for (one was a Dr. Who fan) were hopelessly disorganized and seemed to prefer it that way.
Now, I am a little surprised they said more about LaTeX (which is in decline because the friggin' developers aren't developing! I've never seen people drag their feet so much) than they did about Open Groupware (an Open Source Exchange replacement that is very respectable), Beowulf/Mosix/OpenMosix/Kerrighn (which turns a barely-used lab into a giant supercomputer wihout stupid license modifications), or ReLaTe (an Open Source videoconferencing + whiteboard suite developed by the University College of London for remote teaching).
There is a LOT of aspects to Open Source I would love to know if/how the Universities are aware of. I happen to think LaTeX is superb and wish Firefox would parse the markup, but I don't think it's an area of Open Source that schools, colleges or Universities need to focus on. What I do want to know is what they ARE focussing on and what they DAMN WELL SHOULD focus on.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I am going to create a search engine called glappershnoodlifrica, which will index only projects with utterly stupid names.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
My university is part of the 32%. Sucks. It means that I have to keep PortableFirefox on USB stick.
catch (HumourFailureException e) { e.user.send("You, sir, are a humourless idiot."); }
The UK universities that I've known have firefox installed, but often it's not the default.
What is usually the case is that general machines (and library machines) use internet explorer, and specific departmental lab boxes have a choice of several browsers, but again internet explorer is the default. At least this is the case in the uni's I've studied/worked at or visited, in so far as I've noticed.
A saving grace is that I've never seen one that uses outlook or outlook express as a default email client. Oddly at my last uni the default mail client was pine.
I prefer Mutt, because I'm some kind of retro wierdo who still goes on about Elite on the BBC model B.
on pretty much all the computers. Does that mean we are cooler than these places?
Nyhetsankaret.com -- det bÃsta av Sveriges Nyhetssido
...just over the past year, I've had 6 Clueless Windows Users bring their machines to me complaining that "something's wrong with the Web." After the typical malware uninstall and registry clean, I then ditched the IE icon from the desktop and replaced it with Firefox (with text below reading "Surf the Web!" so they'd know what it's for) and then sent them on their merry way (along with the free edition of AVG). Casual conversations with other folks in my position (not a pro tech; just the guy all the friends and family go to first when something breaks) indicates I'm not the only one doing this. Of course, to Microsoft's Marketing Department these folks will always be counted as Internet Explorer users because the program was used once and -- HEY! it's still installed, isn't it? -- so it must be because it's being used. And, of course, I've got three boxen which started life as Windows machines and which are now running various versions of Fedora Core. And they're still, I'm sure, showing up as part of the 890 million active Windows installs on Microsoft's Annual Report to Stockholders because neither Forrester nor Gartner nor IDC has a clue how to gather statistics on machines like mine, so they choose to simply ignore an entire statistically significant data category.
The anonymous reader wrote:
But that isn't quite what the survey said. The OSS survery reads
One notable exception to this would be Internet Explorer deployment on any Macs. Internet Explorer was insecure and underdeveloped after the Puma version in Mac OS X v 10.1 went live. It was no longer bundled on new Macs or OS X install discs when Tiger shipped.
While a number of Microsoft products are obscenely widespread despite its quality and security flaws, it isn't 100% in use out there. I know it's not a really big deal, but perhaps a small ray of hope may keep some developers and users from pulling the trigger on a dark an lonely night.
I happen to be an admin at a UK university and the thing that bugs me is how to keep Firefox up to date on Windows (on Linux this is a non issue). Because of this sole point, I am unlikely to roll it out across our Windows labs. What are folks doing when the people using the machines don't have the rights to install software globally? More explicitly, what are people doing when they don't have Zenworks or Active Directory for software distribution? Do you just reimage/ghost all your machines?
The answer is doubtless obvious but I'm more than happy to be clued in.
However, researchers for academic institutions don't usually make peanuts either. They may make less than the would if they worked in private sector, but they still get paid pretty decently. Also, they get quite a few perks beyond doing what they are interested in. The also get a lot of holidays and get to go on sabbatical every once in a while. They can also get some pretty interesting research grants. I know a psych prof at my alma mater who got a grant to sail around the world so he could study the mindset of a middle aged man who is sailing around the world.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
You might try Portable Firefox. This doesn't require installation & is set to keep all needed files in a subdirectory. You could keep it on a USB stick, your roaming profile, some other network drive, or individual workstations.
Installed is better, but there is a work-around for some users (though certain workstations may be configured such to not allow unknown apps to be executed or allowed network access).
That's odd.
My thought when I found it (and I specifically googled for such a site to use in the joke above) was "How funny! This site is a complete google rip off!" Exactly what I need for this joke!
I hope our senses of humour never shake hands!
--MarkusQ
Having watched a trainwreck of a 30 seat Open Groupware implementation about 8 months ago, I wouldn't sing its praises too much yet. It's just desperately unfinished and contains catastrophic bugs (uninstall the OXLook plugin, and it sometimes deletes the whole calendar on the server) and annoyances (random stack traces in German when starting Outlook).
Stay tuned, it's very promising, but not ready for production usage.
Quite the reverse, as you would have seen if you were at last week's Practical TeX conference.
I was surprised at their comment because I have installed more copies of LaTeX in the last year than ever before, especially in the Humanities, and my summer courses in LaTeX were oversubscribed by 10x, with almost every attendee reporting they were sick and tired of wordprocessors messing around with their formatting and being unable to do the things they wanted.
How disheartening it is that MSOffice is 100%. That piece of crap. Even more disheartening is that LaTeX is declining. I'd understand why openoffice is down, I abandoned it, but LaTeX? Lyx is easier to use than MSOffice.
You make me want to puke. the end. Flash works on Mozilla Firefox, and almost all browsers and operating system combinations and Adobe can successfully report I believe a 97.7% installation of all computers connected to the internet. You can find that statistic here. http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashp layer/. Thanks - now go kill yourself.
-- www.kiwicommunications.com --
The use of Firefox is heavily recommended and promoted where i work, and this is true worldwide for every franchise of the company. We use online databases extensively all day long. Somes uses Opera too, but no one is using IE, really. The vast majority of people are now using Firefox, and i don't see that changing, even with the IE7 beta 3 and the eventual final release. Perhaps this is just a trend, but thats a good sign of Firefox's ever growing popularity, even if other alternatives like Opera seems a better choice to me, for performance's sake!
I love it. The site is down, but the article is google cached. ^ ^
It's been a long time.
I teach out of town usually, but am in my local high school to teach summer school. They do not have Firefox anywhere on their computers. Bummer. On our school computers we use nothing but. That's mostly because I get to choose which way we go at my school.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
It doesn't say "68% USE firefox", it says "68% deployed FF on SOME of their computers". Big deal. It doesn't say they don't use IE either so there is no way to know exactly how many people are using it.
The IE/FF argument is boring. They both browse and they both work. How about arguing some current issues??? Nobody cares what browser you use. If you like FF, use it. Good on ya. If you like IE or something else, use it also.
*sigh*
people probably don't know what Firefox is, and if they do, some of them probably don't want to change old habbits.
Nuts. People are learning and those that know show a marked preference to a browser that's actually been improved over the last five years. FF installed on a computer is going to be used because it's going to be the default browser. In every instance, it's there because the machine's owner thinks IE sucks and that FF will reduce maintenance of their machines. Why else would they bother? User choice? Ha ha ha.
There are two cases of install and both likely make FF the default browser. The first, and more common than you expect, case is a Linux box. IBM has rolled out thin clients at the Union of my University and they are heavily used. The second case is FF on Windoze for security and compatibility reasons. Obviously, FF will be the default on such a machine and IE might even be hidden. Yes, some people might have Apple set ups but they will mostly use Safari.
Only a fanboy would bother to pull up a non default browser, so the ignorant will learn and once they learn they like. Only the most stubborn of people still use IE by choice if they are familiar with any other browser. The only reasonable explanation I've ever heard for an IE preference was familiarity with shortcuts. Fair enough, that's a habit that will die hard. It's not one that makes life as easy as it could be, however. Watching them browse with a bazillion open and overlapping windows was painful to say the least and the same kinds of shortcuts are available on all the more feature packed alternatives. Most people who spend any time with another browser soon loath IE.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
However, I do agree that I wish this could track multiple revisions & color based on the commiter (a'la Word) & that there was a more formal mechanism for "human-readable comments."
Why cant/wont/shouldnt the newly minted millionaires from the software fields and high tech fields endow institutes whose charter would be to maintain and enhance Open Source/Freely (as in speech) Licensed software? These software institutes might not pay their programmers as much as google or microsoft, but their code would be openly published and dissected and reviewed and discussed. People who produced high quality code would be highly regarded in their community and this prestige might attract some really good talent.
I think promoting Open Standards, interoperability, preventing vendor lock-ins etc are greater service to humanity and funding research about "mindset of middle aged men with a penchant for sailing".
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
A woman? On Slashdot? Is the world about to explode Dogma-style now?
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
I have Firefox installed also, but I use IE (yes by choice, because it works for me, and I like the way sites look in it)
That being said, it said 68% of Universities have Firefox installed, but how many of the students ACTUALLY are using it?
Just not seeing how this is news thats all.
Regards,
MBC1977,
(US Marine, College Student, and Good Guy!)
Regards,
MBC1977,
The university I go to has Firefox installed on all the computers, but I can count on one hand the number of people that actualy use it. Most people use Internet Explorer because the big blue E has not been removed. A good follow up study would be to see how many students at that 68% of UK universities actualy use Firefox.
the real question is how many can uninstall IE?
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
Hell, go to my College. Every single PC and Mac I've ever came in contact with in any of our labs has Firefox as the default browser.
I'm quite certain you'd be laughed out of a lab room if you were caught using IE other than testing HTML/CSS.
Perl, n. A language spoken by Eskimos.
...despite several promises throughout the whole of last year that we'd at least get to use Firefox.
You don't realise how painful MS software is until you're forced to actually use it. For an entire year. MSVC 6 doesn't even have line numbers.
That's why I (a humanities person) switched. Word's footnote and column frustrations drove me crazy. LaTeX with Koma-script and Ledmac produce beautiful documents.
I would very much doubt if most of the people who were asked to respond to the survey are really aware of the use of software within their institution.
Before I retired I was a senior member of computer services within a UK University. A survey like this would be considered low priority by the typical director and it would be passed-on to a (typically) random (almost certainly) low-level member of staff to complete.
Now some of these will have quite a good "grapevine" knowledge of what is going-on within their institution; but many will only know what is "policy" or installed on centrally-provided systems.
Departments tend to be fiercely independent in what they do - typically more so if there are strict central policies to the contrary.
To get reliable results, the questions would have to be (actually) answered by someone who had authority, respect, and time - all of which are likely to be in short supply in the computing services of a UK University nowadays.
If the campus contains even a single PC running a relatively modern version of Windows, then it'll have IE installed and will count towards that 100% installation base figure. When I was last at Imperial College (about 8 years ago), it had at least 1000 NT workstations (as well as a large number of VAX machines, alphas, sparcs, etc).
Might as well report that 100% of campuses featured running water and indoor toilets.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Security:
o d=11o d=4227
Take these two graphs for example - http://secunia.com/graph/?type=cri&period=2005&pr
and http://secunia.com/graph/?type=cri&period=2005&pr
In short, you'll notice that although Firefox suffered more vulnerabilities, the percentage of 'severe' flaws are noticeably lower than those of IE. In other words, a bug which could expose browser history is far less significant than one which allows arbitrary code execution.
Oh, and not to mention the extensive library of browser extensions Firefox has for it. Adblock plus for example (http://adblockplus.org/) - you never have to see ads again! In fact, if you really can't be parted from your beloved IE, there's even a "View in IE" extension - http://ieview.mozdev.org/
In other words, Firefox is the "dogs bullocks", as we say in the UK. Get involved!
throw new NoSignatureException();
I have a few minutes before I rush off to work...
Yes I can arrange for administrative rights on all the target machines (I believe due to their set up anyone who can access the Administrator account on one will have the same rights on another). And yes they are all part of the same domain so if that is not workable a user with access to all of them can be created.
I've cast a quick eye over unattended and it certainly DOES look interesting (the points discussing other installation processes were enlightening too).
To the person who suggested frontmotion - that's interesting but I would like a en_GB build, it throws away the Mozilla branding (because it's not officially blessed) and has the disadvantage of not being a trusted source.
To the person who posted a bugzilla link - thanks, a quick skim is already proving informative.
OK, I found this on rolling out firefox using unattended. It's cumbersome, but, for the current time, works.
Cheers,
Michael
Seriously its not that great a browser. Its just become the poster child browser for the anti MS camp. Opera and Safari 2 are better.
Many colleges use this site to download elearning materials. The web stats for 'browser' show 3/4 of all downloads are IE6
s um
http://nln.mimas.ac.uk/webstats/Summary.html#brow
This is only one service but this does contradict the claim made.
Hermes - According to government records, the only names not yet trademarked are Popplers and Zitzles.
Fry - I know we'll call them Popplers!
Amy - Sure picked it!
Fry - Swish!
Perfect ... maybe one of the computer science grads can explain why perfectly good valid html / css which renders fine on MSIE and Firefox 1.0, suddenly gets FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition), when displayed on Firefox 1.5 ...
...
Here's the offending little s**t here
<td>
<img src="/images/square.gif" width="3" height="3" style="vertical-align:+1px" hspace="2" alt="">
<font size="1" face="verdana">Some Text</font>
</td>
A woman? On Slashdot? Is the world about to explode Dogma-style now?
You got a problem with that? Next, you're going to say we women can't drive cars, can't fly airplanes, can't hold down a job, have to stay barefoot and pregnant all the time.
Yes, we're perfectly capable of posting on the web as much as you are.
i am a soviet space shuttle
It was a joke. I wasn't trying to be sexist, just parodying the nature of some Slashdotters to go insane whenever there's a girl posting on Slashdot.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Which in turn requires versality, and to be able to cope with wathever one's thrown at. It requires one to be able to understand the fundamental principles (like, in the exemple of an office suite, the usage of Style to do proper formating), as opposed to memorise dumb command sequence as they appear in the most popular implementation (that will, in the end, not be that useful, because the current popular implementation has a tendency to change and break every few year), so that one can be quick in finding his way on new or different products.
So "preparing oneself for work in the real world" (as often touted to support MS-Office in universities) has in fact nothing to do with a particular office implementation, but more to do with the quality of the courses given to student.
One of the fundamental principle of how university is *supposed* to work is publishing his results regulary so they can be reviewed, reproduced elsewere, incorporated in other research, etc... (Yeah, I know, "supposed". When in fact the direction only pressures to have as much papers as possible in journals with the highest impact-factor, and to have as much grants as possible).
The fundamental freedoms associated with Free Software as advocated by th FSF (the freedom to use, the freedom to study, the freedom to modify, the freedom to re-distribute) is very close to those concepts.
The fundamental mecanisms behind proprietary software (protecting and hiding every last bit for the sake of "industry secrets" and trying to make "reverse engeneering" illegal, imposing restrictive EULAs that dictates exactly what and how an user should work, throwing patents at each other to kill competition) in NOT.
That explains while a lot of universities (specially here in europe) are interested in OSS concepts. (Maybe US universities have a closer relationship with the industry ?)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
When?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
OK I'm going to collect all the information I've found on this topic into this post for posterity.
Bugzila bug discussing Firefox MSI installer. Discusses Mozilla's view on things and what different people want in order to deploy Firefox on large scale desktops.
Instructions on how to package official Firefox releases into an MSI.
UK University admin blog talking about Firefox and System Administration. Talks about deployment of Firefox on enterprise desktops, issues with GPO and links to projects and resources and pros and cons with various packaging attempts.
3rd Party Frontmotion Firefox MSI installer. Pros - readily available. Cons - from a 3rd party (trustworthiness, how long will it be supported for, will they start charging...)