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IBM moving to Firefox

By | July 1, 2010, 11:20am PDT

Summary: Got that? For the shift to the cloud to work it needs open standards. Open source is your best insurance of open standards. Put that in your Explorer and run it.

IBM’s position on patents may upset open source advocates, but let it not be said IBM doesn’t like open source.

The whole company is switching to Firefox.

In a blog post set for release today Bob Sutor, the company’s vice president for open source and Linux (right), said out loud what many IBM’ers have been noting for some time.

The company is moving to Firefox as its default browser.

Why all the Firefox love? Take it away, Bob:

  • Firefox is stunningly standards compliant, and interoperability via open standards is key to IBM’s strategy.
  • Firefox is open source and its development schedule is managed by a development community not beholden to one commercial entity.
  • Firefox is secure and an international community of experts continues to develop and maintain it.
  • Firefox is extensible and can be customized for particular applications and organizations, like IBM.
  • Firefox is innovative and has forced the hand of browsers that came before and after it to add and improve speed and function.

No, this has nothing to do with the fact that the leading rival browsers are made by IBM competitors Microsoft, Google and Apple, respectively. Or that it’s nice to finally have a dog in the fight.

No one is being pushed to use Firefox, Sutor adds. They’re just being “strongly encouraged.” But there’s another, perhaps more interesting, section of this blog post which I would like to bring to everyone’s attention:

There’s another reason we want to get as many of our employees using Firefox as soon as possible, and that is Cloud Computing. For the shift to the cloud to be successful, open standards must be used in the infrastructure, in the applications, and in the way people exchange data.

Got that? For the shift to the cloud to work it needs open standards. Open source is your best insurance of open standards. Put that in your Explorer and run it.

Something to think about this holiday weekend.

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Mozilla Firefox, IBM Corp., Web Browsers, Open Source, Internet, Dana Blankenhorn

Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983.

Disclosure

Dana Blankenhorn

Dana Blankenhorn has been a journalist, writer and part-time futurist for over 30 years.

At the present moment I run only a personal blog in addition to my ZDNet open source blog.

DanaBlankenhorn.Com has the subtitle The War Against Oil. In the past I have used it to write about political history, e-commerce, personal matters, some ideas related to open source, and The World of Always On, which is the idea of using sensors, motes and RFID to turn WiFi links into platforms for applications which live in the air.

My IRA account at Schwab holds a few tech shares, most notably some Intel and Applied Materials, but there are no open source companies in it. I don’t even own any CBS stock.

Biography

Dana Blankenhorn

Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for nearly 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the Interactive Age Daily for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age's "NetMarketing" supplement, and dozens of other publications over the years.

Talkback Most Recent of 41 Talkback(s)

  • Smart move by IBM, just like Google dumping Windows.l
    NT.
    ZDNet Gravatar
    DonnieBoy
    1st Jul 2010
  • Facinating
    That you equate a business move between browsers as "dumping Windows".

    You are a most highly illogical human.
    plain
    ZDNet Gravatar
    Mister Spock
    1st Jul 2010
  • Logic...
    ...is a wreath of pretty flowers which smell bad.
    ZDNet Gravatar
    TriangleDoor
    2nd Jul 2010
    • Flagged
  • RE: IBM moving to Firefox
    @Mister Spock LOL love the response...and your right.
    ZDNet Gravatar
    ItsTheBottomLine
    2nd Jul 2010
    • Flagged
  • RE: IBM moving to Firefox
    @Mister Spock

    That you can't understand the logic is quite telling about your overall ability to craft an intelligent response.
    To wit:
    Both are large companies that for strategic reasons chose to cease using MS software components.

    Agree with it or not, the logic is IMMEDIATELY clear to anyone with even a cursory grounding in logic.

    One wonders how well you did on the analogies section of the S.A.T.

    This goes for the you too, ItsTheBottomLine. Additionally, you might want to take a class in basic English.
    ZDNet Gravatar
    DeusExMachina
    5th Jul 2010
  • RE: IBM moving to Firefox
    @Mister Spock

    While IBM may not have dumped Windows to the extent that Google has (i.e. completely), they are by far not Microsoft lovers and are far more inclined towards Linux. Hence the amount of work they do on the Linux kernel each year. So if you are under the impression that they use Windows and are just switching browsers you would be mistaken.
    ZDNet Gravatar
    hito_kiri
    3rd Jul 2010
  • Oh, next up, IBM will dump Windows like Google did. That will be within
    two years I imagine. At least they will dump Windows for the masses.
    ZDNet Gravatar
    DonnieBoy
    1st Jul 2010
  • RE: IBM moving to Firefox
    @DonnieBoy recorded and booked...we will see - oh and I doubt it.
    ZDNet Gravatar
    ItsTheBottomLine
    2nd Jul 2010
  • RE: IBM moving to Firefox
    @ItsTheBottomLine

    Well seeing as they are one of the biggest supporters of Linux and contributors to the Linux kernel you may want to rethink that.
    ZDNet Gravatar
    hito_kiri
    3rd Jul 2010
  • RE: IBM moving to Firefox
    Microsoft's browser compatibility with HTML5 is dismal to say the least.
    ZDNet Gravatar
    monkeyman1140@...
    1st Jul 2010
  • RE: IBM moving to Firefox
    @monkeyman1140@... : Duh. Last I checked it's because it won't be fully implemented until IE9. I don't think IBM cares about HTML 5 as much as other issues.
    ZDNet Gravatar
    Gis Bun
    2nd Jul 2010
  • RE: IBM moving to Firefox
    @Gis Bun
    What exactly is your point? What difference does it make what MS' roadmap is? The fact is that it does not, whereas other browsers CURRENTLY are far better in this regard.

    And seeing that HTML5 is a key aspect of the move to cloud services, I suspect your last statement has no grounding in fact. At all.
    ZDNet Gravatar
    DeusExMachina
    3rd Jul 2010
  • Mostly platitudes (on IBM's part)
    I use Firefox but there's really nothing of substance here. At this point IBM is largely a money sucking consulting organization and it stopped innovating in spaces that consumers have any interest in long ago (OS/2 anyone?).

    I suppose that's fine. There are companies that live in areas that don't touch the average consumer. I doubt injection molding equipment sees much talk at the local Starbucks (versus say the iPhone 4 - "Hey is that the new iPhone?").

    Talk of "cloud computing" by IBM fails to impress. IBM is not a vanguard in the cloud computing space. They may claim to have lots of machines in some data center(s) but sorry, cloud computing is most interesting when it allows an entrepreneur to defer capital investments by being able to provision and effectively use someone else's hardware (Amazon's EC2 being an excellent example). Looking at my email via a web browser is not an interesting "cloud computing" example.
    ZDNet Gravatar
    betelgeuse68
    1st Jul 2010
  • RE: IBM moving to Firefox
    @betelgeuse68 I'm sick and tired of this endless obsession with "consumers". There is the vast enterprise space and IBM is dominant there.
    ZDNet Gravatar
    MSFTWorshipper
    2nd Jul 2010
  • RE: IBM moving to Firefox
    @betelgeuse68
    ZDNet Gravatar
    pandemoniumctp
    2nd Jul 2010
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