Comments on: Better Browsers update

By: Lockdown « Someday I Will Treat You Good

Lockdown « Someday I Will Treat You Good — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 07:17:24 +0000

[...] Posted on 14 June, 2008 by Andrew Brown Dave Briggs has written a post about browsers and other online tools in the public sector that set me thinking. [...]

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 19:29:18 +0000

Thanks both, interesting views. I wouldn’t mind tracking down a couple of public sector IT guys, or network admins, to see where they are coming from. Are they really risk-averse killjoys? Or are they working under other pressures that mean they have to keep their systems locked down?

I’ve raised this discussion over at Public Sector Forums and am getting some interesting feedback there. It’ll all go into the melting pot. What I am actually going to do with it all, I haven’t a clue I must say.

By: alex

alex — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 05:47:57 +0000

Come on Dave you know exactly why firefox is not used

Microsoft and government are one. firefox is not going to bother with EU procurement.

Until government can procure openly and for what is best for the business, not what is best for vested interests, firefox will stay away

By: Steph

Steph — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 21:45:53 +0000

I think corporate IT are often nervous about open source per se – where’s the support? How will people be trained? If anyone on the internet can access the source code, won’t the application be easier to exploit? It’s one of the reasons that other open source tools (operating systems, CMS etc) don’t get more traction in corporate environments – until a major vendor decides to offer a service around it. If IBM offered a flavour of Firefox, maybe it would seem more palatable…

It’s hard to explain just how much more productive I feel in Firefox plus the Web Developer Toolbar and my del.icio.us buttons installed, compared to a locked-down, vanilla IE6 install. But to IT ears, that just sounds like a whine – what’s wrong with the browser 75% of the world uses?