Sidebar: Early Users Push Firefox Toward Enterprise Adoption

Computerworld - The IT research group at Fidelity Investments began looking at Firefox more than a year ago. But Fidelity's Mike Askew said it's only in the past few months that he has seen the open-source browser pick up the types of features that start to make it "enterprise-ready."
For instance, Askew, senior vice president of the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology, said the company wanted a binary patching mechanism to avoid the expense of deploying an entire new release every time a security or bug fix was made available for Firefox.
With Firefox 1.5, which became available in late November, Fidelity finally got its wish, culminating months of discussions and collaboration between the company and the Mozilla Foundation. Askew said employees from his group met with Mozilla representatives several times in Boston and California to work on the binary patching feature.
"They weren't an organization that was used to working with enterprises, so it was very much a learning experience on both sides," he said. "We're the enterprise standards systems organization [within Fidelity]. They're a foundation. But we came together and really worked well with each other."
Mozilla typically focuses on consumer features, figuring that partners such as IBM, Novell Inc. and Red Hat Inc. are its "best route to enterprise success" because they're more attuned to corporate needs, said Mike Shaver, a technology strategist at Mozilla Corp., the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation's wholly owned development and distribution subsidiary.
IBM, for instance, has been leading the development of a Client Customization Kit (CCK) in an effort to help its own IT organization and IT shops at other large companies that want to deploy Firefox on a widespread basis. David Boloker, CTO for emerging Internet technology at IBM, said that some of the features in the CCK were the result of feedback from five or six companies that are already using a Version 0.8 beta release of the tool to produce custom configurations of Firefox.
"This is a big deal for anybody that is going to deploy [Firefox] in numbers," said Scott Vesey, Web browser component manager at Boeing. "Prior to this, if you wanted to do any customization, it was basically 'roll your own.' And the roll-your-own techniques would only get you partway there, so you had to jump through hoops if you were doing a robust corporate deployment."
Vesey said he wrote his own C++ code in the absence of the CCK and warned Mozilla that most IT departments wouldn't go to the trouble of creating custom tools to deploy Firefox.But the CCK won't be helpful to Boeing just yet. Although Vesey said the tool is usable in its present form, it's available only with Firefox 1.5. Boeing's current corporate standard for Firefox is Version 1.07, he noted.