IBM Backs Firefox In-House

An anonymous reader wrote in with the link to a CNet story describing IBM's adoption of the Firefox browser for internal use. From the article: "Firefox is already used by about 10 percent of IBM's staff, or about 30,000 people. Starting this past Friday, IBM workers could download the browser from internal servers and get support from the company's help desk staff. IBM's commitment to Firefox is among its most prominent votes of confidence from a large corporation."

University of Nebraska Already There

[elecngnr]

After this past fall semester, the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Nebraska begin setting Firefox as the default browsers in all the teaching labs due to problems with IE. Previously, at the end of each semester, the techs responsible for these labs would spend a lot of time cleaning up the malware coming in via IE. Now that this semester is over, the word is that the switch proved successful in terms of not having much to clean up.

Oracle there for some time already...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle has Firefox in the base image for over six months. That means its comming on all newly installed and reinstalled machines. In addition to that anybody can install firefox through standard application installer as any other application. Mozilla has been there for almost two years now. You get support for all applications in the base image through the IT support staff.

Re:Download count

[JoaoPinheiro]

http://www.spreadfirefox.com/download_counter.php? ff=1 [spreadfirefox.com]

You can find out more information about it here [spreadfirefox.com].

IBMer here...

[Thaidog]

Firefox now comes with the workstation build for all the L1 monitoring workstaions in ebiz ops. I used Firefox to monitor the NYSE website we host. I get my work done much faster than with IE ;)

Re:About time

[Anonymous Coward]

CSFB is it? Don't worry, we, your support people have cheerfully ignored this, so we're happy.

how about having external support

[Anonymous Coward]

Try to apply for a job with IBM using anything other than IE. It doesn't work. IBM + Firefox will be news when they support it externally.

Re:Will Firefox make it to the systems as default?

[Slack3r78]

I love Firefox, but this approach will get you nowhere.

*NO* web browser in existence is 100% compatible W3C standards. Some are more compliant than others, but none of them are fully compliant, and Firefox has its quirks just like any other.

Re:More companies should follow suit ...

[onkelonkel]

TFA says IBM will effect FireFox by hosting it on internal servers and providing help desk support.

Oh...wait...did you mean to ask "I wonder how IBM will effect FireFox?" or did you mean to ask "I wonder how IBM will _affect_ FireFox?" Because those are two entirely different questions.

Re:More companies should follow suit ...

[BridgeBum]

Have you tried User Agent Switcher [mozdev.org]? I've had good success with
telling my 'IE Only' apps that I'm using IE.

Firefox runs *very* well under OS/2.

[Richard Steiner]

As I also said below, it should -- IBM people did the OS/2 port of Netscape and then Mozilla for years, and IBMers are still heavily (if informally) involved with the OS/2 ports of Mozilla and Firefox.

If Firefox was a multithreaded browser it would be a little bit better, though, at least under Warp. :-)