Why doesnt the department have firefox installed on the machines. By all accounts it is a superior browser to IE and for those still wanting to use IE it will always be installed by default.
Andrew, how about it?
I am a big fan of FireFox (http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-1.0.4&os=win&lang=en-US) myself (I use it on my desk at school). However, one (or now two) fans of some software are not sufficient to warrant the time it takes to add a major piece of software to the images. Before you start arguing that FireFox is not a major piece of software remember that millions of people (http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/) use it and so it is a prime target for exploits just like Internet Explorer is. Unfortunately, Firefox does not have a system for automatically patching itself between lab re-images* and so we would have to develop our own system for keeping it up-to-date.
This is not to say that we cannot add FireFox to the lab images, but we would need a great number of users to request it before we could justify the time/administrative expense of rolling it out.
For now, you can do like Dr. Dooly (http://www.cs.siue.edu/faculty/index.html) and put Firefox on your Z-drive.
Or you can try a portable version of Firefox (http://johnhaller.com/jh/mozilla/portable_firefox/) on your thumb-drive.
R. Andrew Lamonica
Dept. of Computer Science
* We use Microsoft S.U.S. (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/updateservices/evaluation/previous/default.mspx) for the real-time patching of Windows & IE
I'd sign the petition for firefox
Fair enough, i didnt realize it would take a great deal of effort to get it on the system.
I suppose i can run it from my Z Drive.
Thanks.
I am a big firefox supporter. I even paid $20 bucks this last year to get my name in the advertisement they took out in the New York Times.
This being said, I still don't think Firefox is ready as the primary browser of computer labs around the world. More correctly, I don't think web based applications around the world are ready for Firefox.
They are quite a few sites I find that just don't work right with Firefox. Quite a few sites rely on Active X controllers. Whether this is right or not is another debate, but reality is that they do. Until web developers stop developing apps strictly for ie (which is finally starting to become the case), the world will not be ready for firefox.