IBM Makes Firefox Its Corporate Browser 152
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."
Great News for Companies Scarred by IE6 (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [microsoft.com] 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 [google.com] 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.
Re:Great News for Companies Scarred by IE6 (Score:5, Informative)
¨P.S: I'm a Firefox fanboy.
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I've been pushing Chrome to all our users too. It seems to run a lot cleaner and I have fewer problems with the users that have jumped on the Chrome bandwagon.
Personally I only use Firefox when I need firebug to debug Javascript and I only use IE for a small handful of sites that intentionally block Chrome. As a developer I've realized if I code to Chrome I have almost no issues with IE or Firefox.
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Its great news that they have decided to go with Firefox, which will probably become a good example for other organizations who are sitting on fence. The blog also mentions that they will encourage their partners and customers to use it.
Kudos to Firefox and thanks to IBM, I can use arguments like "If IBM can go for it, why can't you?"
Can someone explain this to me? (Score:1, Interesting)
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?
They also offer an "open client" (Score:3, Insightful)
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I use the for-Debian "open client." It's actually pretty good and generally has pretty good support, etc. I have Chrome, Firefox, and Opera all installed, too. Most IBM sites work with all of them... actually, it's mostly embedded hardware stuff that doesn't work with certain browsers.
Re:Great News for Companies Scarred by IE6 (Score:5, Funny)
The Client Customization Kit has a URL of http://code.google.com/p/ff-cckwizard/ ? I'm so not looking forward to forwarding that to my boss :-s
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hilarious.
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Except if you have your security customer-side, you're doing it wrong.
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You can already do that all. If you could not this is not a failing of firefox but of you.
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I have been using group policy to manage firefox (especially proxy settings) since about 2004 on several hundred machines.
it is not built into the product, true, but still, search google for Firefox ADM templates.
Its really not hard at all.
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Globally-installed extensions can't be uninstalled from the browser UI (see /. passim for the Sun & Microsoft extensions which highlighted this).
And if you're locking down a desktop, you can restrict r/w access to the Program Files hierarchy, and the registry bits that matter.
So, yes, it can be locked down.
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But - do globally installed addons prevent a guy from firing up his portable Firefox? Hmmmm. I'll just bet it doesn't. I've found a few computers that were locked down pretty tightly. Portable FF ran on all of them. To prevent me doing so, they would have needed to uninstall and remove devices with which I can read portable media.
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Does the Windows permission scheme permit you to block execution of any user-writable code?
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Really not difficult to stop this, we've done it already. Windows 7 has applocker:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/enterprise/products/windows-7/features.aspx#applocker [microsoft.com]
And prior to that Vista/XP had software restriction policies.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc782792(WS.10).aspx [microsoft.com]
IBM tells Microsoft... (Score:2, Funny)
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The PC was invented by Apple, and the first computer ever sold as "PC" was the Apple ][. What IBM did, was creating the IBM PC based on the ideas incorporated in the Apple ][ like the extensibility with cards that fit in a standardized port.
During the whole of the 1980ies it was always the "IBM compatible PC", and only with the advent of the new standards set by Intel (and not IBM) like PCI and AC97 and USB, it became just the "PC".
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Extensibility by standardized ports was one of the big innovations in the IBM S/360, which predates Apple by more than a decade. Mostly what IBM did for the PC was legitimize it, saying 'this is a serious tool which can be used for business'.
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You lost me. Could you expound on your comment?
The IBM S/360 was a mainframe. The Apple ][ was a personal computer.
I would assume that all mainframes had ports, otherwise how would you hook up the peripherals?
Anyway let's get some facts straight:
The first "Personal Computer" meaning a computer that was sold and designed to be used by a single person was the IBM 601 Auto-Point Computer [columbia.edu] it was billed as a Personal Automatic Computer (PAC) and was announced in 1957.
The first "Personal Computer" aimed at t
Re:IBM tells Microsoft... (Score:5, Informative)
First off "IBM PC" is a brand name and that's what I was referring to, and you knew very well that's what I meant. Second.....
>>>The PC was invented by Apple
WRONG. The first personal computers were sold in the early 70s, and the most popular of those was the Altair (1975-77). The Apple I was not the first PC. ----- Then Radio Shack introduced the TRS-80 in 1976 and it quickly became the most popular computer up to that date (approximately 1 million sold), followed by the 1979 Atari 400/800 (1.5 million), and finally the Commodore 64 and Amiga 500 (30 million and 15 million respectively).
And now you know..... the Rest of the story. And you can erase that Steve Jobs 101 revisionist stuff from your mind. Apple I was not the first personal computer - the early 70s hobbyist computers were the first PCs.
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The Altair never sold as "PC". The Apple ][ dit. The Commodore PET sold as... well, as PET.
The name "Personal Computer" entered the market with the Apple ][. And the idea to have a personal computing device where the specification of several identical extension slots was open to everyone to develop new hardware for, is something different than an S/360 slot where IBM could sell you additional components that plugged in there.
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The Altair never sold as "PC".
But that doesn't mean it wasn't one. "[T]he first computer ever sold as 'PC' was the Apple ][" may be true, but, "[t]he PC was invented by Apple" is not.
Homer may not have called himself a poet (since he didn't speak English), but that doesn't mean he wasn't one.
Furthermore, the statement, "based on the ideas incorporated in the Apple ][ like the extensibility with cards that fit in a standardized port", while technically true, seems deliberately misleading, since the S-100 bus [wikipedia.org] predates the Apple II (or I)
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The Altair never sold as "PC".
But that doesn't mean it wasn't one
But it wasn't. Anybody who thinks the Altair was a "personal computer" must be off their meds.
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It's interesting that you now appropriate the name "Personal Computer" to the Apple II. As I recall, it was called a "home computer" at the time, as was the TRS-80 and the Pet and the rest of the genre.
The Altair and other forerunners were tinkerer machines that were at the time referred to as "microcomputers." Unlike home computers, they weren't prepackaged with keyboard/video assumptions, but instead, left even those most basic I/O decisions for the do-it-yourselfers.
But you are undeterred by IBM having
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WRONG. The first personal computers were sold in the early 70s, and the most popular of those was the Altair (1975-77).
The Altair was not a "Personal Computer," it was a hobbyist/kit computer. It had blinking lights, not something you could reasonably use for personal productivity tasks.
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The Apple I launched in July 1976 was a fully populated circuit board and nothing else no enclosure no keyboard no display no disk drives. The first complete computer available at retail that we would identify as a personal computer was the Commodore PET launched in January 1977 well before the Apple II. Not that it matters much because clearly lot's of people were moving very rapidly in that same direction at the time.
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The Apple I launched in July 1976 was a fully populated circuit board and nothing else no enclosure no keyboard no display no disk drives.
That's true. The Apple I was also a hobbyist computer, though a lot more advanced than the Altair. But my point was that the Altair was not a Personal Computer. Am I wrong about that?
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IBM sold the PC division (desktops and laptops) to Lenovo years ago.
Lenovo compatible (Score:5, Funny)
Do they still produce IBM-branded personal computers?
IBM sold the PC business to Lenovo half a decade ago. So now most desktop and laptop PCs are "Lenovo compatible".
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I think I'd go with with "Intel compatible". That's a little messy because of x86-64, but most of the parts on a modern PC are the way they are because of some decision Intel made at some point in time. Even the ones that run an Apple operating system.
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Yes, there are many pedantic quibbles available. Lenovo compatible is probably a quite clear description, it is just stupid.
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Yet all the support pages are still on ibm.com for those models...
and when I call support for our thinkpads, I get IBM in atlanta, and their onsite techs are IBM onsite techs....
All thinkpad development still happens in the US. Go buy a thinkpad. then buy an "ideapad". Completely different materials, build quality, support sites, plugs, adapaters, etc.
The sale of IBM computers to Lenovo was either really weird, or really botched.
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Apple is among the largest consumer electronics companies in the world. That defies small just a little bit.
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Sorry I keep forgetting.
I still think of Apple as that little third-party company that almost went bankrupt in the mid-90s (as happened with Atari and Commodore). I forgot they have a virtually monopoly with their iPod and iTunes divisions and are now raking in big bucks. However the MAC division is still rather small. What's Mac's share? 10%?
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What's Mac's share? 10%?
More like 6.4% [electronista.com].
Lenovo got 8.8%. I had never heard of Lenovo until now.
Having a quick look at the Lenovo web site, they have the same computers as IBM branded machines we have here in the UK. I guess they use the IBM branding instead of Lenovo here.
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IBM's PC division was sold to Lenovo. So no.
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> As annoying as Apple's various lockdowns are, at least they've managed to
> maintain control of their hardware.
And I'n sure things would be just peachy had IBM done likewise.
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You say that as if it's a good thing. "Maintain control" when it comes to personal computing is not a feature, it's a defect.
How will they manage it? (Score:2)
Re:How will they manage it? (Score:5, Informative)
And will they please release the management utilities via open source?
From the article
A number of third-party tools have been developed over the years to simplify certain aspects of organization-wide Firefox roll-outs. One of those tools is the Client Customization Kit [google.com] (CCK), which was developed by Firefox modification consultant Michael Kaply while he was employed by IBM. Kaply still actively maintains the tool and released an updated version [kaply.com] for Firefox 3.6 in March. IBM is using it alongside other tools to ensure that its Firefox adoption plan goes smoothly.
IBM already has developed the initial version. CCK is currently Mozilla Public License 1.1 [mozilla.org] and I have not seen any notice that they're changing that so your question is answered.
K THX BYE
Anytime, brah.
Encouraged to use it? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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That corporate manageability is really the only thing that has been missing from firefox.
Conversley, that's really the only thing that IE6 has going for it. There needs to be a little balance in priorities.
Re:Encouraged to use it? (Score:4, Informative)
FTA:
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".
As an IBM employee I can say that the Firefox install was recently pushed as a required update to existing machines, so not only new machines will be receiving it.
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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.
True; they should do this the normal corporate way: disable IE and only reenable it for the whiners.
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Bad news for banks (Score:5, Insightful)
This is bad news for banks and other big orgs that dodge supporting browsers other than IE giving the "cover story" that other browsers are wildcards in term of security.
People will ask if IBM can do it, why can't they.
I guess the admins of such orgs could always say
"Well, we do not have the resources of an IT company giant"
Yet, with all of those employees, going to all of those sites......
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I share your surprise, but there was an article about such a bank on /. just the other day
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Not using a "Facebook" browser (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Not using a "Facebook" browser (Score:5, Insightful)
Being fast is one thing, but it's really pointless when it's spying on you and makes it a headache to use sites because it randomly refuses to show images without explanation. I have a sneaking suspicion that, that whole spying things probably has something to do with it not being chosen.
Re:Not using a "Facebook" browser (Score:4, Insightful)
In my job I use the various browsers to varying degrees.
However, for my own use, I stick to Mozilla for ideological reasons: Firefox is their raison d'etre. They have a vested interest in keeping the web open and standards-based.
Apple and Google might someday decide that it's not worth developing their browser any further, or decide that it should really be a vehicle to promote their core services (media sales, QuickTime, ads, analytics etc) to the detriment of the user. I think it's revealing that neither Apple nor Google chose to invest in Mozilla instead of going it on their own - either it's impossible to work with the Mozilla folks, or they wanted to retain control, in which case you have to ask why.
Nevertheless, it's good for everyone that there's a bit of competition, so use what you like!
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I think it's revealing that neither Apple nor Google chose to invest in Mozilla instead of going it on their own
It is very revealing. It reveals how the Firefox engine is a piece of shit. It's so fucking slow, and fast becoming the IE of non-IE browsers. WebKit is obviously superior.
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Except they didn't go it on their own. Apple forked KHTML [wikipedia.org] into Webkit because KHTML was (and is) a substantially cleaner codebase than Gecko was (and is). Similarly, Google just forked Webkit instead of Gecko.
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but it's really pointless when it's spying on
Then go into tools and uncheck the 3 "please spy on me and give me goodies" boxes, and stop whining about it. This isnt rocket science, the instructions for disabling the "spying things" are posted in EVERY one of these discussions, and are simple enough for a 6 year old.
I know im being naieve here, but can this stupid FUD rumor just die? Chrome is NOT hard to make as "privacy safe" as any other browser, and unlike many others, is actually open source.
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LordLimeCat;
You are writing about other people being naive, but have you considered that not all of the "spying" issues in Chrome are have visible controls for the users to turn off by their choice?
Yes, the browser is open source but maybe the people examining the source code make mistakes, miss things or have a vested interest in not telling everyone.
Maybe Google has two sets of source code. One the publish and one with "spying" stuff in it they use to make binaries.
Google Buzz has already proven that Goo
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but have you considered that not all of the "spying" issues in Chrome are have visible controls for the users to turn off by their choice?
Except chromium is open source, and SEVERAL people (including myself) have audited Chrome to verify this. One poster mentioned that he ran it through a sniffing proxy for several days with no extra data. There are TONS of tools out there to verify what Chrome sends to Google; Sysinternals has FileMon and ProcExp which show you everything you need to know about what Chrome does, and Wireshark shows you all data that it sends.
The problem is its all to easy to throw out such accusations with NO proof or s
Re:Not using a "Facebook" browser (Score:4, Insightful)
Notice that IBM is not going with Chrome, though it is a faster and better browser for the moment.
Well, there's also the fact that Chrome is only a year or so old. Firefox, in all its iterations, has been around for almost six years. Which one do you trust more?
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Technically much longer even, since firefox is based on mozilla, which is based on netscape, which is based on mosaic...
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I wouldn't use a facebook-built browser not because of privacy concerns, but because there's no way it would perform well. Just look at Facebook performance. That should speak to their technical competence.
Re:Not using a "Facebook" browser (Score:4, Interesting)
Notice that IBM is not going with Chrome, though it is a faster and better browser for the moment.
As stated before, IBM wants to build a stable linux environment to eventually replace windows internally, and the chrome port for linux sucks ATM.
Also, IBM started testing Firefox for internal use for over 4 years now, when chrome didn't even exist.
That is why they went with Firefox.
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the chrome port for linux sucks ATM.
This is not true in the slightest. I'm posting this in Chrome on Ubuntu 9.10 and Chrome is excellent in every practical way. It's fast, stable, full-featured, well integrated... I'm not sure what else you want before you can say it doesn't "suck".
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The chrome linux port actually appears to be a focus for google thanks to their work on chromeos and android...
The firefox linux version on the other hand appears to be an afterthought, and tends to be considerably slower than the windows version on the same hardware (to the extent that running the linux version under wine can be faster than the native version).
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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?
Google has long been in competition with IBM in a variety of areas. Their appliances are direct competition for some of IBM's smaller offerings. and of course don't forget Google's cloud offerings, which more or less compete with owning your own cluster, which is one of the few places IBM is competitive on a price:performance basis.
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> though it is a faster and better browser for the moment.
It's not better if you happen to be blind or have other accessibility needs. Webkit's accessibility support, and therefore Chrome's is a long ways behind Gecko or Trident. Just one example of cases where Webkit's just incomplete compared to the competition (along with handling of CSS selectors and some other things along those lines).
Given the number of employees involved, I would be very surprised if at least some of them didn't need decent scr
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And yet they are and have been using windows, from a much longer standing and traditionally more dangerous competitor than google...
Mostly the choice to go with firefox will be down to maturity, firefox is a tried and tested platform at this point while chrome is relatively new.
Ok back down just a sec (Score:1)
I'm a strong supporter of web standards (a real one, unlike Steve). But this?
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).
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It also doesn't really take into account the fact that most of the companies that supply a company like IBM are not the type of companies that "end users" would be buying from directly. I mean, how many of us are in the market for chip fabrication equipment or something of that nature? There might be some spill-over effect, but just going by the statement in the summary, I fail to see how it would be of any benefit to us for IBM to take that stance.
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> I fail to see how it would be of any benefit to us for IBM to take that
> stance.
Most of IBM's suppliers probably contract out their Web site. The more often such contractors hear "Our site is broken. It doesn't work with Firefox. Fix it. Now." the better.
Better yet, of course, would be an IBM boycott of all-Flash sites.
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I fail to see how it would be of any benefit to us for IBM to take that stance.
Regardless of if end users have to use a site, other vendors will, and that affects what browsers are in use at those other vendors. It also determines what Web development skills, developers, and tools benefit most moving forward. Companies being pressured to spend money and comply with standards or lose deals will suddenly care about standards, which means their Web developers will and their tool providers will. So now you have more Web development tools and developers who make standards compliant sites a
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> The fact that a company employed wrong web designers/programmers doesn't
> mean it's not good in what *it* does
One of the things that a company does is support its products. These days that usually involves their Web site. If that's broken so is their support. Now, maybe your company's products and/or prices are so much better than those of your competition that you can afford to inconvenience your customers. Most companies, however, have competitors that are pretty damn close to them in all objec
Re:Ok back down just a sec (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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At the same time, you have to recognize that the major historical reason to use IE is that one needed it in order to navigate necessary sites. The more that pressure that large companies can bring to bear on vendors to make their sites work across multiple browsers, the better off we all are.
Tell the vendors. (Score:5, Insightful)
> 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 tell the vendor why he is losing the sale.
Buyer: "I tried to check on your Web site as you suggested but it doesn't seem to work with Firefox." Salesman: "Oh, yes. We only support IE." Buyer: "Get back to me when you've fixed your site."
I hope IBM listens to itself (Score:1)
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What a pipedream. (Score:4, Insightful)
What we are really seeing here IMHO is an internal political battle that has spilled outside the corporate structure. One exec has decided to stake his name on adopting Firefox and will blame the every development group that only supports IE when this fails.
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> 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.
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You have to consider the fact that internal IBMers are still required to use internal mainframe software for some accounts. Because they're ingrained in the process. A lot of the philosophy is "if it ain't broke [obviously], don't fix it"
IIRC, every internal system comes with Firefox on it, or has it pushed via the IBM Standard Software Installer [ISSI], so it's not like people don't have the browser. It's just a matter of whether or not you have the resources to retrofit older processes to be Firefox-compl
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You have to consider the fact that internal IBMers are still required to use internal mainframe software for some accounts. Because they're ingrained in the process. A lot of the philosophy is "if it ain't broke [obviously], don't fix it"
I don't know what it looks like now but when I was at Tivoli the official IBM way to access trouble tickets was with a screen-scraper than only ran on OS/2, but it always lagged behind RETAIN so you'd have to fire up tn3270 or whatever and access RETAIN manually to execute certain functions. I used to run a little cheat sheet intranet page to explain to Tivoli support how to use RETAIN when you had to mess with an APAR. Man, I hated all those stupid acronyms.
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Certainly Netflix should make their site compatible with FF; but this problem has pe
What tools do you use? (Score:2)
Education is a crusty old app that has way more problems than working only in IE, but what other products are you working with that won't work with FireFox? Surely there will be an exception for those who's customers require the use of non-FireFox compatible software.
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Also an IBM'er and you're probably right. They've been moving towards FF for years, but there are still some internal sites that have trouble with it. Microsoft Office is also slowly getting the boot in favor of Lotus Symphony.
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One exec has decided to stake his name on adopting Firefox and will blame the every development group that only supports IE when this fails.
I fail to see why this is a bad thing.
it was nice knowing you, Firefox (Score:1)
Just look at Notes, Unix, Java, Linux, Informix. They "reinvented them" into the IBM ecosystem, reengineered them with IBM parts and they all ended up being bloat ware versions needing IBM consultants to maintain them. Eclipse is useful, but still an over bloated "framework".
Just sayin.... Firefox has a good chance now of having the sa
Firefox in COBOL? (Score:4, Funny)
It would be bulletproof...
Company-wide (Score:2)
Firefox is our company-wide browser as well. Well, at least on the the Linux machines the programmers use.
However, it is only Firefox 2.0.
Some are able to run 3.0. Firefox 3.5 and 3.6 won't run on any Linux machine installed here. Programmers do not have sufficient access to install the necessary libraries (e.g. libpangocairo) required by newer versions.
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You don't need root to install libraries, put them in a dir and set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable to point to it...
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Will that work also for upgrading GTK+, glib, and dbus? And under Redhat 9?
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If you can get all those libs compiled under rh9 sure...
It's possible to build a whole userland from libc up within your own homedir without root, the only requirement is that the version of libc be compiled for your kernel version or earlier (which generally means you cant just tar up the libs from a newer distro).
make me wonder (Score:2)
if they will first remember to fix the various internal and third party sites that didn't work with Firefox (as late as mid 2009) this could be good. Even if they make firefox default, and install it in lots of places, it's moot if you still need to use IE for certain sites. My 'favorites' were ones which were actually just running javascript / java applets and nothing else which had absolutely no reason to be restricted to windows but had browser agent checks abound in them..
Yes you can change the browse
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search?="site:lotusnotes.ibm.com,query=?something"
KTHXBAI.
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There's your problem...