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IBM Makes Firefox Its Corporate Browser
e9th writes "Ars Technica reports that IBM has adopted Firefox as its company-wide browser. Firefox will be installed on all new employee computers, and all 400,000 employees will be encouraged to use it. Speaking of encouraging Firefox use, IBM VP Bob Sutor blogs: 'We will continue to strongly encourage our vendors who have browser-based software to fully support Firefox.' I hope this means that if IBM can't navigate a vendor's site with Firefox, they'll just look elsewhere."
I hope this means that if IBM can't navigate a vendor's site with Firefox, they'll just look elsewhere.
Oh, I couldn't care less about that. Let me explain "What freedom means to me." My company has more than a few apps that kept us on IE6 for the longest time. Why did they select IE6? Well, at the time, Internet Exploder was the only browser that allowed them to maintain strict policies and security settings across the company. It's still one of their big selling points that they have "slipstream installation" and "Group policy enhancements (total of 1,500, with 140 new in Internet Explorer 8)." Well, now that IBM has developed the Client Customization Kit and maybe -- just maybe -- they can get it to a point where an administrator can control proxy and policy settings in Firefox from one central IT position. It's this. It's this concept that is the answer to my question why I'm still developing to support the browser from hell. And I know I'm not alone.
So I'm adding one marble to the 'like' side of the scales of IBM (which they'll need a lot more of to tilt it back to even). I hope to see some serious support come out of this for FF's CCK.
My work here is dung.
IBM plans to roll it out to employees on new computers and will encourage its staff of 400,000 to use it on their existing systems.
Sounds like this will be a slow adoption if they are only setting it as the default browser on new computer systems and simply "encouraging" their installed base to use it. It probably does make sense to go slow like this with it, but it doesn't make for a sensational headline to say "IBM to slowly roll out firefox as the default browser as they replace hardware; encourages existing users to use firefox too".
Anyway, hopefully this does result in more robust corporate deployment tools for firefox as IBM spends more on it. Because frankly the ability to deploy and manage it in a large corporate environment now pretty much sucks compared to Internet Explorer. That corporate manageability is really the only thing that has been missing from firefox.
Notice that IBM is not going with Chrome, though it is a faster and better browser for the moment.
IMHO that is partly because Google could become competition in other IT areas for IBM. Who wants the competitions browser, on their machines, possibly spying on them?
Even aside from that, though Google has been more responsive ( & apologetic ) than Facebook, they have been (rightfully) censured for making things public that people always felt would be private ( and without notice).
In that regards, they are in same category of trust as Facebook ( low trust ).
I asked a Chrome enthusiast coworker if Facebook made a web browser, would he use it.
His answer. "HELL NO!".
I think it would take a lot of big organizations and many regular people to trust Google to provide software on their desktop that doesn't snoop on them.
At the place in which I work everyone is supposed to use IE. It has all these policies, lock downs, etc. For example they disabled tabbed browsing (???) . So instead I use Firefox or Opera. I don't have adminstrative rights, so I installed them in my personal directory and run them from there.
What is the point of strict browser management? Shouldn't security be managed via the network?
I'm a strong supporter of web standards (a real one, unlike Steve).
Yeah, that will boost your credibility.
I hope this means that if IBM can't navigate a vendor's site with Firefox, they'll just look elsewhere.
The fact that a company employed wrong web designers/programmers doesn't mean it's not good in what *it* does (save if what they do are websites, of course).
That's completely true, but not really relevant. You see, doing business means being good at working with others. Standards are a big part of that. If you have to go out of your way to do business with someone, like if they refuse to be paid in US dollars and will only accept canned tuna fish as payment, well, they have to be a whole lot better for you to go out of your way. Normally, who cares? I mean really, if some company wants to make it hard to do business with them, well that sucks and we move on.
The difference here is "embrace, extend, extinguish". It was Microsoft's largely successful plan to break and fragment the Web itself to make it harder for companies to write cross platform solutions and to, in turn, use anything other than Windows. Because a monopolist specifically went out and leveraged their monopoly to encourage the bad behavior on the part of people who make Web sites, we all have a vested interest in correcting that market damage and allowing the state of the art to progress at a normal rate again. To continue with the analogy, imagine if the RIAA had required all purchases of music to be paid for with canned tuna fish for many years, then finally lost in court and now we're in the situation where many record stores don't even have cash registers, but just special canned tuna counting machines. A big player in the market encouraging a move back to normalcy, while the record stores still are being pressured to only take tuna fish, is then important to all of us.
Now I recognize my example was downright silly. That was by design. I'm trying to explain the concepts involved, divorced from any real situation so everyone can see why it is important in principal. Then, if necessary, we can have a discussion about how the principal applies in this case. This isn't about punishing companies with IE only Web sites. It's about pressuring them to correct our broken market. That they have to suffer for what has happened is just one more piece of damage to be laid at MS's feet.
> and will blame the every development group that only supports IE when this fails.
And the exec will be right. There's no excuse for churning out IE only shit any more. A dev coding IE only is either a) lazy or b) incompetent.
Inside IBM, the central configuration and policy setting that people always cite as a major reason why the use IE still doesn't matter.
Why?
Because at IBM we get the admin logon to our machines and are treated like adults (want to format and install Linux? Sure go ahead just make sure you can still do your job), consequently there is no reason to have Corporate HQ centrally force various settings down the employee's throats.