Mozilla Foundation Seeking Switch Success Stories

maggeth writes "mozillaZine has a story about how the Mozilla Foundation is looking to know if any organizations have switched to Mozilla products. Is your organization among them?" Can anyone point out an example of a library system switching? Lots of public libraries use PCs set up as kiosks running a web interface to their catalogs, and they all seem to use IE -- so, no tabbed browsing.

From IE to Firefox, personal usage:

[halo1982]

Since Firefox came out all of my friends have ridiculed me for using IE, and I had played around with it a bit but was not impressed. I've been a faithful IE user since 2.0 (I know =P) and wasn't about to change.
However lately I had been working on a website and in the cross browser testing I've been using Firefox 0.8 and on for Mozilla compatibility. Its taken extensive use of Firefox but I've almost completely switched. I love the tabbed browsing and it renders so much faster on my computer. I've also found it seems to handle some websites better than IE, especially with unknown extensions. I just wish it had Windows integration, but maybe someone will figure that out. Microsoft has a lot to worry about for IE 7. Firefox is improving with every version and I have fewer and fewer reasons to use IE.

Re:Slightly Off-topic

[partiallynothing]

You can use the "tabbrowser extensions" extension available from update.mozilla.org. It allows tabs to be dragged and droped, duplicated, auto-reloaded (usefull if you have your e-mail page open), named, colored, and saved upon exit. Overall it is *very* usefull.

Re:Slightly Off-topic

[Akaihiryuu]

Mozilla does this if the browser or computer crashes (like a power outage) suddenly...it'll offer to restore the tabs you had open before when you restart the program. I don't know about having it *always* do that, but apparently the functionality is there.

TabBrowser extensions

[purplepaste]

TabBrowser extensions
http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-i nfo/tbe

Probably one of my top 3 favorite extensions. Gives you a lot of control over tabs, saves your last sessions, allows you to reorder tabs, group tabs with the tab they were linked from, and a lot more.

Library

[Vadim Makarov]

Trondheim public library [folkebibl.no] is using Mozilla on its public PCs (30 machines). I'm not sure if they switched from IE, however.

Re:Locking down Mozilla?

[vox_gabrieli]

I work in a large AD environment (10s of 1000s of users), and the group policies are unreliable at best. We get several problem tickets per week of users whose browsers have missing proxy settings. And "locked down" is a bit of a misnomer as well. Any idiot with Notepad can create a .reg file to un-"lock down" most of the settings.

That said, the best I've found is to use SMS (another unreliable technology) or login scripts to set the various things in prefs.js. This kind of scripting is a little more difficult than the equivalent IE scripting, I suppose.

Sessionsaver ...

[Anonymous Coward]

..."Remembers loaded tabs and their history items when Firefox is manually closed, then restores the tabs and history items when next started. The saved session can also be manually restored or updated at any later time via the items in the File menu"

http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/sessio ns aver

It can also reload tabs after a crash automatically. I can't live without this plugin.

Enjoy =)

Problem with Mozilla ...

[altp]

... in a public library, or any public place, is its lack of integration into Microsoft's active directory.

I'm a sysadmin at a university library, and we have to run Windows for plugins that professors require for their classes. Mozilla nd Firefox can't be locked down like IE can through the active directory. A security change is a couple clicks in a central location with an Active Diretory and IE.

With Mozilla we would have to visit each workstation.

Re:Locking down Mozilla?

[altp]

Lock out the registry tools and they can't import a registry setting.

Adelaid university library

[Anonymous Coward]

The Barr Smith library of the University of Adelaide http://www.library.adelaide.edu.au/ [adelaide.edu.au] in South Australia uses Mozilla firefox on SUN workstation for access to library search and reservation system.

Re:Tabbed Browsing for Libraries?

[sonic_ak]

For me, tabbed browsing is something that seemed pretty lame, until I started to use it. Basically, I'll often be reading something and want to check out a link, but I dislike opening multiple windows and I want to finish what I'm reading first. The next step was that when I'm reading something sometimes I'll think of something else that I want to look up, and so I open a browser tab and put in the address and switch back to the original tab. Finally, Camino comes with an 'open bookmarks folder' option, basically allowing me to open all of my news sites or webcomics with one click, and load them in paralell, small, small, but nice. Once you get used to it, you find yourself depending on it.

Re:Libraries

[dema]

There is actually an extension [mozilla.org] for Firefox and Mozilla to put it into a kiosk mode under any platform. XPI's are stupidly easy to install and manage. There is also Kiosk Project [mozdev.org], which is working on a kiosk setup for linux that involves the browser and twm.

Great browser... optimized builds avalable too!

[sweepkick]

I've been using Mozilla Firefox for 3 weeks now, and lemme tell ya... i'm not going back to IE. Great, great product, and it's simply wonderful to see a product finally give IE a run for the money (been a long time coming since the Netscape browser wars).

Incidentally, you can download *optimized* builds specific to your particular processor here:

MOOX [www.moox.ws]

The proper builds run noticeably faster on my AMD XP and Centrino procs.

We switched!

[cspenn]

We're an aggressive small business based south of Boston, one of the quietly prospering dotcoms that didn't get razed by the bubble bursting. About a year ago, I was brought on to help manage the many technology challenges facing our company, and one of them was taming the chaos of the Internet from an end-user perspective. Mozilla FireSomething was exactly what the doctor ordered to reduce chaos and help bring safer browsing to the company. Combined with Thunderbird's built in spam reduction, our use of Mozilla products and the switch away from Microsoft-based products has kept us safe from a majority of exploits available today. We've even begun developing to take advantage of Mozilla's unique features, like tabbed browsing, which expedites the processing of student loans. No more browsing with hundreds of IE instances open, just one clean, easy to manage browser interface with tabs. If you ever call in to StudentLoanConsolidator.com to have your federal student loans consolidated, the clicking sound you hear in the background is our in house loan consolidation application and several tabs in Firefox being opened just for you.

Kudos to the Mozilla team for making our work more productive than ever!

Re:Problem with Mozilla ...

[Coventry]

Wow, thats a pretty bad problem you have there. Let me describe how we handled it 'back in the day' (1997 1998) on a novell network with windows clients all using netscape 4, at the university I worked for.

A login script.

Yup, a simple batch file.

All it did was copy down the bookmarks and preferences file from the known-good and approved copy on the server to the local profile upon login.

Now, it sounds like you might not want to do that for bookmarks, but for preferences (which includes the locked-down settings) you could just push it down when people log in.

No offense, but there are many situations where a admin won't be able to manage a peice of software via AD; maybe you should invest some time into learning about login scripts?

For example: for the same netscape install I mentioned above, we would sometimes push down updates, including new plugins, all by just copying the new files and applying registry patches in login scripts. So, the day after a point release came out that fixed a security bug, the login script would need an extra 60 seconds (since we'd enabled the copy-down of the update).

Moz/Firefox doesn't need registry patches though, so you won't even need a good uninstaller utility like cleansweep to help you find the changes an update makes.

Re:Unfamilliarity

[blue trane]

Central Washington's library [cwu.edu] uses Firefox excusively on all public internet terminals.

Re:Locking down Mozilla?

[magefile]

Go to the Firefox extensions page, and go to the xKiosk homepage - the guy who wrote it put together some docs on creating a web kiosk (public use type stuff). Probably similar to what you're looking for. I'm pretty sure it's not OS-specific.

galion.lib.oh.us

[jonadab]

Galion Public Library uses Mozilla.org browsers exclusively. (I'm the
computer guy.)

However, we previously used mostly Communicator. We did have MSIE on *one*
computer at one point, but that system was so much trouble that when Windows
got cranky and needed to be reinstalled, we didn't bother. The librarians
were offering to dig a hole in the flower gardens and bury it; they weren't
interested in having it fixed; they wanted it replaced. Also, reinstalling
would have been a problem since we didn't have the original driver disks
(not my fault; we didn't have them when I was hired), and with its being a
Compaq Deskpro (no model number _anywhere_, and there are dozens of models,
and you have to know which one you have...), finding the correct drivers on
the net was promising real pain. This was late 2000. I put TurboLinux on
it and it served as a CGI server for a couple of years after that without
incident.

None of the librarians has ever asked me why we don't use MSIE. (Some of
them have asked me about the difference between Mozilla and Netscape, though.)
No patron AFAIK has ever specifically asked for Internet Explorer either. I
do get occasional complaints from patrons about certain plugins not being
installed (most frequently Flash), but that's not nearly as many complaints
as I get about the Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail interfaces (neither of which we
endorse or recommend; we officially do not provide email: we merely provide
access to the web).

I should note that our catalog stations within the library are not web-based.
We have a web-based catalog so people can get to our catalog from home, but
within the library the catalog stations are VT510 dumb terminals, connected
only to the automation system via ports (on a DECServer) which are only
privileged for OPAC (i.e., the catalog) and nothing else. For our older
patrons, the dumb terminals are easier to use and less intimidating than
a web-based system. (The OPAC literally tells you what buttons to push,
and there's no need to know how to use a mouse, which is good because a
lot of people around here aren't comfortable with computer mice yet.)

Re:Libraries

[Fweeky]

Opera has a kiosk mode [opera.com] built in, too.

Firefox in library success story

[Anonymous Coward]

Avondale College http://www.avondale.edu.au/ [avondale.edu.au] has just migrated the web-based library catalogue (http://www.unilinc.edu.au/ [unilinc.edu.au]) machines to run Firefox. It's much better than IE in many ways - the UI has been customised to remove all non-nesescary buttons and a simple window manager has been used to make FireFox full screen. The XUL files make this nice and easy. IE had a problem with not loading pages, not following META refresh all the time and the entire windows system was unstable and insecure. The new firefox solution fixes everything.

Re:apple

[CeleronXL]

It is compatible, you just have to refresh. It's one of those weird Gecko bugs that's gone after a refresh. Meh.

My Org

[The Fifth Man]

www.nscp.org
National Society of Compliance Professionals, a nonprofit, membership organization dedicated to serving and supporting compliance officials in the securities industry.

We switched over after installing a version of Windows WITHOUT IE in it (plugging my process):
http://home.earthlink.net/~vorck/

(Sorry, too lazy to add HTML tags by hand)

Re:Unfamilliarity

[online-shopper]

I beg to differ. at NCPL, http://www.ncpl.lib.in.us/ [lib.in.us] we use Mozilla on *all* of our patron machines and on somewhere around 60% of our staff use it(we have both IE and Firefox installed on the staff machines, so they can choose). Not only do we use Moz, but we use linux for all of our patron systems(even the two Macintoshes) and plan on doing a migration of the 20 or so staff machines to linux next year. so yes Virginia, you do see Mozilla in Libraries

Re:Libraries

[Laxitive]

You don't need a window manager at all. The following script would do just as well:

while :;
firefox --whatever-options
done

Whenever firefox exits, it would be restarted immediately. Disable CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE in X, and you're set.

-Laxitive

Re:Library

[More Trouble]

You mean the computers all update themselves automatically from a central server, or is it something else?

Check out radmind [radmind.org]. It's sort of an imaging and tripwire tool all rolled into one. Runs on Linux, Solaris, *BSD, and Mac OS X.

:w

Re:Library browser use

[jonadab]

> Most patrons are barely capable of using existing public-access terminals
> let alone a multi-tabbed browser.

Most patrons don't use the tabbed browsing feature, no. I have the tab bar
configured to hide when only one tab is open, for just this reason. Some
patrons do, however, appreciate the fact that closing the browser window
automatically logs them out of everything. (This is because I configured
cookies to have a limited lifetime of the current session, but the patrons
are more interested in the result than the implementation.) If it's possible
to do that with IE, I don't know how. As the computer guy, I appreciate
something different about Mozilla: less maintenance.

> Additionally, the majority of catalog lookups

This is irrelevant for us. Our catalog stations in the library are dumb
terminals. We only use web browsers for actual web access. (We do have a
web-based catalog, which patrons can access from home, but it's not used
within the library, generally.) This will change when we migrate to a
different automation system, but that's a couple of years out still.

Re:A minor story

[HungSquirrel]

For situations like yours, it is possible to run Firefox and your profile (with your extensions, bookmarks, etc.) completely from a USB thumb drive [texturizer.net].

Re:Locking down Mozilla?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have a look in the chrome directory where you installed Firefox. There's a file in there called "browser.jar" which contains information on what menu items appear in Firefox. If you unzip the file you'll find a number of files that control how the browser lays out its menus. The one you want to edit is "browser.xul".

From this file you can unbind keys from executing commands, set it so that when you create a new window it actually opens up a new tab in the current browser, restrict users from changing the look of Firefox (ie, remodelling toolbars), and most importantly, stop them from getting to the preference menu.

There's a good guide for doing all of that stuff here [lib.mi.us].

The company that i'm doing contract work for is soon to be using Firefox on all of their 300 Point-of-Sale systems, and i've implemented a lot of the stuff from this guide on their browsers.

Re:Switched from Mozilla back to IE

[Tim C]

We tried firefox but with w2k's 256 color limitation on terminal sessions

I've used Win2K Terminal Server quite a bit, and I've never seen a 256 colour limitation. You can choose to limit the colour depth (eg to save bandwidth), but it's definitely not a hard limit. I'd suggest you take a look at the configuration of your server (and possibly clients)...

Re:apple

[_xeno_]

It appears to be Bug #18827 [mozilla.org] (you'll have to copy and past the link to a new window thanks to Mozilla fearing Slashdot comments).

Which was supposedly fixed four years ago.

Re:Courtesy of Ellen Feiss

[override11]

Its more simple for me, my wife helps me download good porn, then we watch it together. :) She likes big perky boobs!

Re:Unfamilliarity

[mangu]

MS IE is definitively better ... for multilingual sites.

How so? The only "advantage" I can see in IE in this regard is that it ignores the "encoding" tag in the HTML header. That way, if the site is marked as "iso-8859-1" in the header, but actually contains unicode chars in the body, IE will show accented characters as the dumbass who created the site intended. However, I'd classify that as a bug, rather than a feature.

K-Meleon

[TheSource]

Well, it's not Mozilla specifically, but I work at the Chattanooga Public Library [chattanooga.gov], and we have put K-Meleon [sourceforge.net] on our public access (kiosk) computers, and it's a Gecko-based browser. It's been a pretty good experience so far, with a few kinks that have needed ironing out, but far fewer problems than on the few machines we have that still run IE.

We've also switched to Firefox for our desk and office machines, and that has worked wonderfully. I've just had to delete all of the shortcuts to IE so that nobody uses it "accidentally". It's reduced my problems with spyware from a flood to a trickle.

Re:Switched from Mozilla back to IE

[psychophil.com]

Well maybe you know something that Microsoft doesn't know. Windows 2000 Terminal Server is limited to 256 colors. I'm not talking about citrix, 2003 terminal server or XP terminals.

Just take a look at knowledge base article 273725 [microsoft.com].

CAUSE
The error message is displayed when you start a program that requires a color palette of more than 256 colors. However, Windows 2000 Terminal Services is limited to 256 colors.
STATUS
This behavior is by design.

Re:Switched from Mozilla back to IE

[WuphonsReach]

We tried firefox but with w2k's 256 color limitation on terminal sessions, most toolbar icons showed as black squares rendering the software unusable.

One theme that does work in 256-color Terminal Services is "708090-lite" by Ronald Buehlmann [ormaxx.ch]. It's not the prettiest, but it does get the job done.

I used to know a good color theme, but it wasn't updated yet when I moved to Firefox 0.9, and now I've forgotten it.