Firefox 3 Boasts Improved IE-blocking
by John Paczkowski
Posted on March 31, 2008 at 11:51 AM PT
Enterprise is finally realizing that Mozilla’s Firefox doesn’t bite. Behaves well in the office, too.
On the 10-year anniversary of the Mozilla source code release comes word that Firefox is catching on in enterprise space. According to a Forrester Research study, use of the open source browser among enterprise users has almost doubled in the past year alone. “Mozilla’s share of the browser market rose steadily throughout 2007, only slowing for the quarter directly following the release of Internet Explorer 7 (IE 7) in late 2006,” the research outfit explains. “Adoption in the enterprise nearly doubled to 18% by the end of 2007.”
Impressive. That said, large-scale, companywide Firefox deployments are still the exception, not the rule. But then, according to Forrester, the same can be said of Internet Explorer 7 deployments as well. Says Forrester:
Not only has IE 7 — Microsoft’s five-year IE revision with tabs and candy — done little to squash Mozilla’s uprising, but the vendor is having trouble retiring IE 6. By the end of 2007 — 15 months after IE 7’s public release and three months before the IE 8 Beta — only 30% of enterprise IE users had switched to the new browser. Even with Microsoft (MSFT) spoon-feeding users high-priority automatic updates, enterprise apathy is proving extremely difficult to overcome.
