Firefox is Gaining Momentum in Enterprise IT Shops

A new survey from Forrester Research asked 50,000 large enterprise employees which browser they use on a daily basis. They found that over the course of 2007, Internet Explorer's overall market share in the enterprise decreased by 10%. During that same period they saw Firefox's share almost doubled from 9.8% to 18%.

The survey also showed that most companies are using the 6-year-old Internet Explorer 6. Only 23.4% of companies officially used IE7 as their standard browser.

IT shops aren't officially installing Firefox on employees PC, but as the study suggests, they are moving to support the browser in their enterprise Web apps.
It seems that employees rather than IT professionals are driving Firefox adoption.

IE downfall may be due to the fact that Microsoft wants to tightly couple their OS with this browser. Many of the security features won't work unless you're using a specific version Windows. Another fact is that Microsoft seems to want to set their own standards while firefox always adopts open standards. This has caused some web apps not to render properly on IE pushing them towards open standard based browsers.

To further the point, new versions of Firefox are easily installed on PCs. They don't depend on various patch levels of Microsoft to work properly. This has allowed Firefox to continue pushing out new versions of their software that include some really nice features. IE always seems to be a few steps behind when it come to adding these types of features and performance improvements.

This study shows that end users can drive new technologies into the enterprise IT shops. IT shops are notoriously slow to adopt new methods. Sometimes they need a little push from the user community to see the light.

You'll probably see a similar push of Apple's iPhone into the enterprise.

Vassilios
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http://outervillage.com

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Vassilios
Co-Founder
OuterVillage.com
http://outervillage.com

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