Firefox - making the switch?

[groovin]

I posted a thread a few months ago asking who's switched to FF.

Well, now I was wondering if anyone migrated their organizations users to FF and if they could share their experience.

Personally, I've been using FF now for over 6 months and I love it. When I do an ad aware or spybot scan, the only objects I pick up are cookies (which i can cure by tweaking how I accept cookies). Since my company has tons of adware problems, I was tempted to move everyone to FF.

thanks

 

[KoolDrew]

FF is a great browser but I personally prefer Opera over FF. One of my favorite feutures of Opera is that you can start where you left off the last time you were browsing. This way I could have a bunch of sites open and next time I open Opera it would remain the same. Opera has many other great feutures too.

 

[Nothinman]

We can't because we have internal sites that only work in IE, otherwise I would push for it. But really it doen't affect me much any more since I've moved from the helpdesk to the network security team.

 

[FinalFantasy]

I've tried to get my office to convert to FF awhile ago, but it is incompatible with too many of the sites that the employees use for research/info/that type of stuff...hehe, which is a lot of em.

 

[Nothinman]

If they're public sites why don't you email them and ask them to fix some of the problems?

 

[drag]

Were I work we installed firefox on all the machines.

You just resort to IE when you find a site that doesn't work. Although in my experiance that is pretty rare.

If somebody runs a website and it's not standards complient, they should fix it. If they depend on ActiveX controls and such they are telling that their clients need to subject themselves to unnessicary risk, disabling activex and javascripting is the only way to protect IE against certain exploits, even fully updated and patched versions.

So if you have to deal with bad websites, or worse, pay for access to badly programmed websites tell them that's it's the year 2004 and it's time to get with the program and do things correctly. Otherwise there is always somebody else that does. And that's the truth.

 

[dgseik]

ie -> ff
some site won't work on ff
but still love it.....

 

[imported_Phil]

I'd love to be able to switch people over to Firefox; we're in the process of (finally) migrating from NT4 servers & workstations to XP workstations and 2003 servers- I just know that spyware is going to be a nightmare.

However, I might look into Firefox with the "View in Internet Explorer" (IEView, IIRC) plugin. Best of both worlds

 

[Sunner]

I don't understand where all of these non-FF/Mozilla compatible sites are.
Until Mozilla 1.7 showed up, there was one online shop whose menusystem wouldn't work for me, but that worked itself out with Mozilla 1.7, since then, I haven't come across one single site that doesn't work, including my bank which officially supports Mozilla under Win32 or Linux environments.

 

[HKSturboKID]

I remember I saw on the news tech report this past weekend that people like firefox for the tab browsing and spyware protection.

 

[groovin]

we have some internal sites that werent working too well with FF, but a a few minutes of digging around fixed those problems. Mozilla.org has a nice migration guide that I'll need to read again.

 

[groovin]

one thing i was wondering about was how to update FF on all these machines across a network? im not a supersavy windows admin so im not sure if theres a tool to do this through windows nt/2k/2k3 server. i dont suspect that id have to update it too often, but any software will have flaws in it.

 

[exodus454]

I must say, i love the tabbed browsing in firefox. Every time i have to use IE for something, the lack of tabs is just plain annoying.

 

[spyordie007]

While we do have some users running Mozilla/FF (a fair amount of our IT department as well as a number of our more savvy users) I have no plans of making it a corporate standard.

I've got a couple of major reasons for doing this:
1. Manageability - Right now I can do all kind of management of IE via. Group Policy. While I could probably gain much of the functionality with scripting it would take a lot more time/work to setup and manage; the gains (very little) are not nearly enough to justify the time.
2. User confusion - Our users have a tough enough time using IE, I'm not going to try and force them into learning something new unless I have to.
3. Website support - While most sites work fine with Mozilla there are still a number of sites that don?t work with Mozilla.

I'd also like to add that I would tend to disagree with those who think Mozilla is more secure. When you compare up-to-date IE (post XP SP2) with up-to-date Mozilla there really isn?t a significant gap. I think as more sites are built catered to Mozilla they are going to be just as bad in Mozilla as they are in IE (pop-up, spyware, adware, etc.). With either IE or Mozilla user education is still just as important as the browser?s architecture (as well as a user?s privileges) to keeping machines ?safe?.

one thing i was wondering about was how to update FF on all these machines across a network? im not a supersavy windows admin so im not sure if theres a tool to do this through windows nt/2k/2k3 server. i dont suspect that id have to update it too often, but any software will have flaws in it.

Best way I can think of using Microsoft products is with SMS. Again you could probably come up with some custom scripting specifically for pushing out Mozilla updates if that's the route you wanted to take.

YRMV

-Erik

 

[groovin]

"I'd also like to add that I would tend to disagree with those who think Mozilla is more secure. When you compare up-to-date IE (post XP SP2) with up-to-date Mozilla there really isn?t a significant gap. "

That might be true, but most of my network is still NT/2k (as you know, most of the installed userbase of windows is not XP yet). So until I get everyone on XP (not anytime soon unfortunately) I think using FF would be a better option, even with the headache of finding a mozilla update method.