IBM's Decision to Adopt Firefox as its Default Internal Browser

If you read my recent post about corporate IT policy (and my employers refusal to allow Chrome) you'll know that I'm not a big fan of Microsoft Internet Explorer. I find it to be slow and somewhat prone to security holes. I found it interesting that back in July IBM made the decision to use Mozilla's Firefox as its default web browser for employee computer. In the announcement Bob Suter, IBM's vice president of Linux and open source software, called out five key reasons for the move:

                        

1. Firefox is stunningly standards compliant, and interoperability via open standards is key to IBM’s strategy.
2. Firefox is open source and its development schedule is managed by a development community not beholden to one commercial entity.
3. Firefox is secure and an international community of experts continues to develop and maintain it.
4. Firefox is extensible and can be customized for particular applications and organizations, like IBM.
5. Firefox is innovative and has forced the hand of browsers that came before and after it to add and improve speed and function.

The move seems to make sense for IBM, but what does it mean to the larger business community? In other words, why is this important?

First, it means approximately 400,000 employees of IBM will now automatically have Firefox installed on their machines. This is a fairly significant number of users and demonstrates that Firefox can be an appropriate enterprise-wide solution for web browsing (and that there are alternatives to IE).

Secondly, it is a big win for open source standards. Mozilla has kept Firefox steadfastly open-sourced with excellent documentation and wonderful security. As more and more applications move to the cloud we are all going to come to rely on open source standards both for security as well as interoperability and ease of use. IBM's adoption of Firefox is a big step in that direction.

Ultimately this move should benefit IBM employees with faster browsing and a better online experience. But, I think the move benefits all of us as this "endorsement" should spur interest and faith in open source solutions for other enterprise tools.

Good Talk,
Tom

Source: http://www.sutor.com/c/2010/07/ibm-moving-to-firefox-as-default-browser/
Image: http://www.livbit.com/article/2010/07/01/ibm-decides-firefox-as-its-default-web-browser/