Firefox Finds Cracking the Corporate Market to Be a Challenge

Computerworld - The Boeing Co. has been discreetly providing feedback to the Mozilla Foundation for the past year or so on features that might encourage enterprise adoption of the open-source Firefox browser. At the top of the list has been a tool kit to help IT departments distribute Firefox with custom configurations to end users.

The Chicago-based aerospace company had good reason to express interest in such a tool. Last August, Boeing made Firefox one of its corporate Web browser standards alongside Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer (IE) and a version of Netscape Navigator that is being sunsetted. Although Boeing hasn't deployed Firefox wide-scale and couldn't provide an estimate of the browser's usage within the company, the corporate standard decision sets it apart from most of its peers.

An ongoing pilot project at Fidelity Investments sets the financial services firm apart as well. The Fidelity Center for Applied Technology has spent more than a year exploring the enterprise readiness of Firefox and working behind the scenes with Mozilla to improve the browser's patching mechanism. Fidelity is now rolling out Firefox 1.5 to 1,900 users, primarily in IT, to kick off the project's third phase.

Supported Browsers HOW MANY BROWSERS DOES YOUR IT DEPARTMENT SUPPORT? BASE: 105 IT managers polled by Computerworld via e-mail

Such a formal pilot puts Fidelity in rare company. Statistics show that Firefox has chipped away at IE's dominance¿for example, the open-source browser is nearing a 10% share among visitors to thousands of Web sites monitored by WebSideStory Inc. But there is scant evidence that Firefox is gaining broad acceptance at the corporate level.

In an e-mail poll conducted by Computerworld over the past two months, 86% of the 105 IT managers who responded listed IE as the sole browser standard at their companies. Only seven of the respondents reported having a multibrowser or non-Microsoft standard, and among those who did, the purpose generally was to support non-Windows desktop systems.

Mozilla officials, at least publicly, have been hard-pressed to point to any corporation that has broadly adopted Firefox¿except IBM, a technical and financial contributor to the open-source project. IBM announced last year that it would offer Firefox as an option to its 330,000 users. So far, 18% have added the browser or its Mozilla predecessor to their systems, IBM said.

Despite the dearth of usage, there are signs that many IT managers welcome the challenge that Firefox is posing to Microsoft's ironclad grip on the browser market. In the Computerworld poll, 70% of the respondents said that Firefox