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IBM Tells Employees 'Switch to Firefox'

by Terrence O'Brien on July 2, 2010 at 09:15 AM

IBM firefoxFirefox commands enough market share to make it the world's second most popular browser, but Internet Explorer has always kept a significant lead thanks to its presence in the enterprise market. Microsoft is very good at making things easy for large businesses, and Mozilla showed little interest in approaching that market until 2007. But Mozilla's efforts to improve deploying and managing Firefox on a large scale, and the increasing importance of being "standard compliant" might finally be swaying some businesses away from the in-built Windows browser.

IBM is the latest (and possibly largest) company yet to ditch IE for the little open source browser that could. The company plans to pre-load it and make it the default browser on all new computers issued to employees and is strongly encouraging staff to use it on systems already in circulation. IBM's vice president of Linux and open source software, Bob Sutor, called Firefox the "gold standard" for open source Web browsers and lauded Mozilla's commitment to open standards in a blog post announcing the change in IT policy at the company. He also credited Firefox with "reinvigorating" the browser market, something you only need to look to IE8, IE9, Chrome and Safari to see the evidence of. [From: Ars Technica]

Tags: enterprise, firefox, ibm, mozilla, mozilla firefox, MozillaFirefox, open source, OpenSource, top, web, web browser, WebBrowser

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