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Platinax Internet >> Platinax Internet News
« Nanotechnology firms unite | Main | Redhat reports profit » December 23, 2004FireFox: wrong for ITChris Jablonski at ZDnet makes a rather astonishing observation in his report, Enterprise IT to Firefox: "Your resume looks great, but sorry; we don t see a fit ". Simply put, IT departments seem unwilling to work with Mozilla Firefox in a corporate enviornment. Why? The answer is simply that they are unused to working with it, and because of close integration between Microsoft products, means that changing any aspect of that relationship needs to justify itself in terms of immediate costs. As the MetaGroup explain in more detail in What Will Drive Firefox Adoption in the Enterprise? Despite all the media noise around the Firefox browser, we do not believe the majority of IT organizations will decide to support it for a number of key reasons. These include the lack of subcomponent administration (for desktop lockdown), compatibility, and integration with other desktop applications. Compatibility is an interesting one. While IE has been criticized by purists for its poor adherence to standards, it is also the browser most sites have customized their development for. Many of the features talked about with Firefox are red herrings (e.g., tabbed browsing, ad blocking, extension architecture). However, some IT organizations have noticed stunning performance benefits in using Firefox with specific applications and will therefore likely support it in limited release - but only where performance is a more important consideration than the combination of all other factors. If consumer take-up of Firefox reaches the vast majority of users, then IE in the corporate environment will be reconsidered, but for now, the benefits of migration do not stack up. Which is a situation I personally find pretty ridiculous. Internet Explorer is build upon inherent security vulnerabilities, and in a coporate environment where a large number of employees can be sharing this same flawed software, then you have a situation of mass liability. Whilst this naturally should be factored into a corporate IT framework anyway - after all, you never known what any single employee may try to do willingly with any single software tool - resistance to offering a more secure browsing software tool is nothing more than resistance to necessary change. The fact that Internet Explorer can much more easily coaxed into executing malicious code, surely means that encouraging its continuing use is effectively an invitation to suffer expensive damage at some later date. After all, so many companies have suffered so badly at the hands of malicious scripts, especially in the form of mass mailing worms. And although it can certainly be appreciated that a complete change of Operating system is an extremely major undertaking in any develop IT infrastructure, the fact that where simpler software alternatives are offered that will work within existing operating enviroments - but are spurned - is simply an invitation to maintain an expensive status quo of repeated security attacks that cost UK companies millions in lost revenue every year. If UK companies have no interest in tackling their larger security liabilities, then they invite such problems on themeselves. In which case, it becomes harder and harder to be sympathetic to their losses. Posted by brian_turner at December 23, 2004 01:19 PM | Discuss this in the Business, Marketing & Search forumsTrackback PingsTrackBack URL for this entry: |
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