Mozilla Foundation Seeking Switch Success Stories 537
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: (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Slightly Off-topic (Score:2, Informative)
TabBrowser extensions (Score:5, Informative)
http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-
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 (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Locking down Mozilla? (Score:4, Informative)
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 ... (Score:2, Informative)
http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/sessi
It can also reload tabs after a crash automatically. I can't live without this plugin.
Enjoy =)
Problem with Mozilla ... (Score:5, Informative)
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? (Score:5, Informative)
Adelaid university library (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Tabbed Browsing for Libraries? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Libraries (Score:5, Informative)
Great browser... optimized builds avalable too! (Score:2, Informative)
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! (Score:3, Informative)
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 ... (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Locking down Mozilla? (Score:4, Informative)
galion.lib.oh.us (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:3, Informative)
Firefox in library success story (Score:2, Informative)
Re:apple (Score:3, Informative)
My Org (Score:2, Informative)
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 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Libraries (Score:4, Informative)
-Laxitive
Re:Library (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Library browser use (Score:3, Informative)
> 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 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Locking down Mozilla? (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:3, Informative)
Which was supposedly fixed four years ago.
Re:Courtesy of Ellen Feiss (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Unfamilliarity (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:2, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:3, Informative)
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.