suba

company might be considering firefox over ie. does anyone got any comments on using firefox against ie in a business environment? OS is XP.

(i am a firefox user at home)

Iain Young

For properly coded web sites it works just fine. There are sites out there however which still require ie, mainly because they haven't been coded with cross browser compatibility in mind.

Whether you can use it as your company standard really depends on what sites you access, but I suspect that in the majority of cases it would work very well for (I use it all the time both at home and at work)...

HHxx

Can only think of a few things, not sure if you can get round it though.
NTLM authentication
Active-X controls
GPO control

Also for patch deployment, you would still have to patch IE as it pretty much part of the os as well as patch Firefox.

I use Firefox at home, but from a business point of view I'm sticking with IE. Especially if there is over 30k machines to look after.

Iain Young

Firefox supports transparent NTLM authentication, so no problems there, and there is a plugin which allows you to run activex controls should you want to.

HHxx

Cool

Might use it at work then but Im not rolling it out to everyone though

NotoriousREV

I find it unstable at work on XP although it's fine on my home PC, although a lot of stuff I'm accessing at work is Java-based. It does crash at least once a day, though

Iain Young

I'm using it at work for Java / Web development (servlet driven web apps with java applets etc on the client), and I find that ie crashes at least twice as often as firefox. This is on XP Pro Sp2...

At least if firefox crashes it doesn't bring down the whole desktop / explorer interface with it (which I've had ie do on multiple occaisions recently)...

GaryK

Yes its still a problem with some sites that do browser detection and then just say 'unknown browser', bizarrely as well I find that now I am running 1.0 it has crashed albeit only a couple of times but 0.8 pre-release never crashed once.

Some sites don't seem to render properly but on the whole it's a superb browser.

Gary

Molds

Scoobynet doesnt work for me with FF? Just get a screen full of binary?!

stevencotton

This is because the person that designed/set up the site is a complete and utter moron.

Iain Young

Scoobynet works just fine with FF (at least it does on the 4 machines I've got it installed on)...

phelpsa

I use Firefox on my XP Pro laptop. It is way better than IE for normal browsing, with loads of plugins etc.

I run a forum (hillclimb.proboards43.com) and I find it better than IE for that.

The tabbed browsing is great as well!!

Adam

Chris L

Well said Steve I've been using Firefox for ages. It's miles better than IE, but as mentioned there are some sites that point blank refuse to use it for whatever reason (bignoisemusic.com comes to mind). As for displaying SN - no problem at all. Using it now!

I think you will still need IE for Windows Update though, so it is probably worth having both and setting FF as the default.

Chris

Soulgirl

Firefox rocks. The newest release doesn't crash at all - not that I have noticed and I use it alot.

No popups, unders, over, sidewinders... just rock solid. At work we have IE and I visted a medical site the otherday only to be struck by the dreaded 100 window assault... FireFox is the biz.

suba

i have been testing firefox access work intranet. will need further testing for web-based intranet apps.

so far so good

john_s

iTrader: (1)

Sounds like an excuse to surf at work to me :P

Need a hand?

John.

ps - best add that I've been using Firefox at work and at home for a while, and only occasionally find a site that it won't work with.

suba

yeah, when boss asked me why i am surfing the net all the time, i just said i am testing firefox