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Firefox Struggling to Compete as Corporate Browser
ericatcw brings us an article describing some of the obstacles Firefox is facing while competing with Internet Explorer for business use. Quoting Computerworld:
"Now nearly three-and-a-half years old and nearing the release of Version 3, Firefox no longer can be accused of being callow. And while many IE-only apps remain, plenty of others have been overhauled to support Firefox as well. However, other obstacles to broader adoption have emerged. Mozilla thus far has neglected to develop tools to help IT departments deploy and manage Firefox, and it doesn't offer paid technical support services to risk-averse corporate users. Janco Associates Inc. in Park City, Utah, currently gives Firefox a 16% usage share among visitors to 17 business-to-business Web sites that it monitors. Janco puts IE's share at 67% while giving 9% to Netscape and 3% to Google Desktop."
Who cares? Those of us that hope that Firefox gains enough market share that people will stop being morons and developing websites that only work in IE. Then maybe we'll get back to standards instead of browser specific webpages and extensions.
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We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
My immediate office and domain of responsibility is now about 55 users (started around 45). When I started in July 04, all but two users used IE. And over 80% of systems had a wide and various host of viruses, backdoors, and trojans. Within two weeks, installing Netscape 7.2 and FF .9, and an aggressive training schedule coupled with long hours after close of business, I was down to under a dozen problematic systems.
I installed FF1.0 when it came out, and have been able to keep users up to date pretty easily. Some of the savvy ones do it themselves; others need a little handholding. Which I don't mind, it gets me off the phone ;) More recently, I was praised by one of our netop managers in NYC for doing so, because the virus/spyware etc problems in my office are 9/10ths of other offices he oversees.
But I do agree with the article. One of the things holding back some of my sister offices is the very fact that, with 100+ users, it's inefficient or dangerous to have (certain) users as full desktop administrators, especially when they can't figure out which mouse button is the "right" button. So finding a way to easily deploy FF would make a lot of techs happy, in my corner here, if not necessarily the intraweb coders. :)
However there are similar situations which go the other way...
I know of at least one company that didn't want to develop/test their internal apps for more than 1 browser, but they have a number of mac and solaris based workstations in the company... Their solution was to have firefox installed on every machine and make people use that. Several of their internal apps don't work with ie at all.
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That's great information; but at the same time it's actually a really good example of lack of support contributing to so many corporations /not/ willing to use FF.
After all, it's not really practical for organizations that rely on NTLM for multiple servers to manually configure several hundred or thousand firefox installations to accept those specific servers -- never mind if the list of servers changes. Too, it's even more unlikely that they'll be able to trust the users to properly maintain and configure those settings themselves.