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."

Comments

Missed Advertising Opportunities

[SlashdotOgre]

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.

Re:Installed != Used

[arachnoprobe]

but: installed = usable = choice = better

Re:disappointing numbers

[LindseyJ]

We defiantly have a long way to go to catch up to their European counterparts.

Indeed...

Re:If OSS can conquer Universities...

[Noksagt]

And that's the problem right there. You have to learn, and read, the syntax yourself.

There are "WYSIWYM" editors for LaTeX, as well as programs which help you write it. I agree that the learning curve is what prevents adoption, but it isn't an insurmountable barrier. Another barrier is the added time of processing the document

That's a lot of work for just marking up documents, especially since Word or WordPerfect can do a decent job with a lot less of a learning curve.

WYSIWYG line optimization doesn't look as good as page optimization. These formats are quite fragile & don't look the same when rendered by other installations of the software & sometimes other installations won't even be able to open them. Furthermore, there is a learning curve involved in using these "properly" (with styles & contents generation). This might be fine for short documents, but these don't scale well.

LaTeX makes some sense if you are doing lots of documents professionally

Or even a single, complex document (such as a thesis).

but for someone who's likely to only write a handful of papers it's overkill.

Depends on what is happening with those papers. Many journals now strip away all formatting & so it doesn't matter if you give them a Word Doc or a LaTeX article--the two should look nearly the same in print. Sometimes, the author is burdened with making sure everything looks fantastic & a minimal amount of time can be spent to make a document that DOES look better. Some journals will only take DOC or only take LaTeX, which decides the format you should use. LaTeX still has a place in academia.