There’s another piece about Firefox in this weeks Guardian Online. Once again it emphasises the fact that Firefox is only one of a number of pieces of open source software that organisations should be investigating.
The significance of these developments becomes clear from research published in August by the British Computer Society. Among those Britons who had used a computer, the top three applications were the web browser (73%), email (68%) and word processing (68%), well ahead of other categories. This means that the open source trinity of Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.org now meets the principal needs of general users, whether they run on a Windows PC, Macintosh or GNU/Linux. In fact, moving to the free operating system becomes much easier when the main applications are identical on all platforms – yet another reason for Microsoft to fear Firefox and its friends.
Firefox has had a lot of press this week – possibly more that any other piece of open source software. It’ll be interesting to see if all this coverage has much effect on browser usage stats over the next few weeks.
Hmm, can we have a URL within that link tag? :)
Er.. yeah. Sorry about that.
We’ll be lucky to see Firefox make any real impression at all. I gave a big spiel about the merits of Firefox to my Oxford MBA classmates (it was a tech-related business discussion about Microsoft bundling IE a few years ago). Despite my advice that Firefox has more features than IE, is more secure, and is incredibly simple to install, none of them would bother looking at it. And these people are the supposed creme de la creme, folks!I really can’t see how Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice will ever take off if you basically can’t even give the stuff away! The answer must be getting this software pre-installed onto systems at the time of purchase, otherwise nobody will ever bother to install it. But of course Dell etc are all pretty cosy with Microsoft, so that’s not going to happen.Although I did see that Dell is considering using AMD chips in some servers, so maybe it’s casting the net a bit wider these days. Unless the answer is to use China, India and the emerging markets to get all those people hooked on the open source software, and then eventually it becomes the dominant (or co-dominant) platform.