IBM moving to Firefox
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.