Chris's Rants

Sunday, January 30, 2005

The Firefox Explosion

(Via Bob) a really good Firefox article on Wired. Definitely a worthwhile read. In related news, there is this Groklaw post that stirred up a hornets nest of discussion. My personal take is that the ComputerWorld article isn't really anti-Firefox FUD as much as it is just poorly written (it doesn't make an effective case).

There is much truth in the fact that enterprises cannot just simply switch all their employees to Firefox... many, not all, have invested too much in deploying web-based intranet applications that only work with IE, for whatever reason (though IMO, any enterprise in this position should be taking their IT architects and managers that perpetrated such stupidity out to the woodshed for a severe thrashing with a cluestick!).

What an enterprise should be doing is assessing their inventory of deployed applications and instituting an architectural requirement that mandates standards-based, not product- (or, worse yet, version-) specific, solutions that are browser- and platform-agnostic and developing a transition plan that prioritizes targets for transition and sets a goal for achieving such browser and platform independence.