Browser wars: Episode II
Published: 28 Feb 2005 17:10 GMT
Gartner says Firefox is the predominant browser in the IT department at one of the top five IT vendors, though the (unnamed) company in question doesn't have a formal policy supporting it. Recent data from Web analysis firm XitiMonitor shows a steady rise in Firefox usage during the workday, suggesting that many business users are installing the browser without official sanction. XitiMonitor's research puts Firefox's market share at above 10 percent, with other non-IE browsers together making up about 3 percent; other researchers put Firefox's share slightly lower.
Support from industry giants such as Google (which provides Firefox's download infrastructure), Amazon (Firefox support for the A9 search toolbar) and IBM is bolstering the browser's profile, and ISVs that have aggressively tied their products to IE are beginning to shift to a neutral stance. Nitot says Oracle, Business Objects and others have committed to delivering products compatible with Gecko, the HTML rendering engine that drives all Mozilla products.
A handful of businesses and large organisations have come out with significant Firefox deployments. Komatsu Canada Limited -- a leading distributor of heavy equipment for the mining, forestry and construction industries -- says most of its 1,300 Canadian employees use Firefox as their default browser, switching to IE for sites that only support that browser; Mozilla's Thunderbird is also the company's main email client. In a statement on the MozillaZine Web site, the company's CIO said improved security justified the deployment, despite the lack of enterprise management tools.
Several universities have large-scale rollouts of Firefox, according to the Mozilla Foundation, including Yale, MIT, Boston University, Western Kentucky University, Southern Oregon University, Pennsylvania State University, Duke University's business school and the UK's University of Bradford. The French Home Office is one of the major public-sector bodies evaluating the browser.
Security and features
The number one driver of Firefox's popularity is security, specifically a number of high-profile security scares around IE, according to analysts. Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, in announcing IE 7, acknowledged that "browsing is definitely a point of vulnerability". In the past, it was generally accepted that IE had more than its share of vulnerabilities per thousand lines of code, as a result of its architecture and Microsoft's corporate culture and development priorities, according to Gartner, although this has improved in the last two years.
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I'm not sure why the author says Firefox would be... Jan Bielawski -
I agree. I think the author is making a rathe... Gavin Fawcett
