Clinton would permit the employees to use firefox. Firefox is always fast and easy to use. Buy Acai

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Firefox is certainly wonderful - I haven't used Microsoft's IE at home in years - but as a government IT guy at another agency, I know the barriers to rolling out firefox are pretty high:

1) All our existing web applications would need to be tested and modified to work on both IE and Firefox. Right now, we only test against IE, so this would double the work for our developers.

2) Firefox is harder to patch - you can't allow the web based autopatch most people use at home in an office. The traffic from, say, 1000 pc's all downloading the new version of firefox on the same day would slow our internet connection to a crawl. Even if you could use other methods (which do exist) to patch, it would involve managing, testing and deploying a whole new set of patches - not something taken on lightly.

3) Firefox doesn't integrate as closely with Microsoft's Group Policy Objects - meaning it is much harder, if not impossible, to lock down and standardize across hundreds or thousands of PC's. FISMA and the FDCC require that browsers be locked down and disable many otherwise handy features (password saving, as just one example), which we don't have any way to enforce in Firefox. An open source project called FrontMotion is working on an offshoot of Firefox that has GPO hooks in it, but it is still far from ready for deployment in a government environment, especially one with the security concerns that State has.

So I know it's tempting to bash State brass for seeming to give the idea the blow off, but they're 100% right in this case, and it seems like they've been listening to their IT folks, which is nice for a change.

Wow can't believe they wasn't able to use Firefox before. No wonder all the virus problems the government is having etc.

Wouldn't be the case with Firefox, but yeah good point about the cost of managing two systems. Though I doubt there are a lot of web based applications that they are using.

When they were developing them, it should of been cross compatible anyways.

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Quang Van
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Oh my god. Reading the "Government IT Guy" response sent chills down my spine. His complaints go from foolish to worse.

1. Just use Firefox - no need to test against IE then. That's what the innovative firms have been doing since 2002.

2. Can't handle patch traffic? Please. More bandwidth used by everyone updating Microsoft and IE virus/vulnerability patches than Firefox.

3. I don't even know to answer this, the very proposition that IT department's role is to lock down the user experience is so repulsive to me that I shudder with disgust.

The IT department, like all support groups, is to make the front line staff's job easier and more productive. To increase their efficiency, even if that means the IT department has to work harder. Reducing functionality, and disabling handy features is the converse, and totally illogical. In fact, its responses like this that have crippled State & AID productivity.

My favorite - USAID funds contractors to develop solutions in Google Earth, but thanks to overzealous Government IT Guys, USAID can't view their own solutions at their offices. They have to come to ours to see what they bought.

1) A lot of the web apps many agencies use are old, flaky and weren't well designed - no argument there - which means many of them won't work with Firefox. The web based time clock system my agency is an easy example - it's nearly 10 year old cold fusion and javascript code, and it would require a major rewrite to run in firefox. But it works just fine in IE. Hopefully someday, we'll have functionality requirements that justify a rewrite, and you'd better believe we'll be pushing for a browser independent implementation. But until then, and in this economy, the old system still works fine, and it's got a lot of other old web app company.

2) Firefox, prior to 3.5 doesn't patch - it does full, in place upgrades. Meaning each download is very large (7mb), instead of a small patch with IE. Firefox 3.5 changes this, but there is still no go way to ensure that users don't disable the autopatch function. So you're stuck pushing out new the entire installer pack for each new version via MSI's and GPO's at 7.5mb a pop, and with Firefox updates coming out every couple of weeks - that's a lot of testing and a lot of updates.

3) Agreed - ask your USAID IT friends about FISMA, I'm sure it's as much a pain in their ass as it is mine. But it's the law, and until congress or the administration changes it, it means my jobs is more about locking things down than opening things up. Hopefully this new tech savvy administrtion will start making some changes.

Wouldn't be the case with Firefox, but yeah good point about the cost of managing two systems. Though I doubt there are a lot of web based applications that they are using.

Resveratrol

I saw a small company struggle over the switch from Word to Open Office (just have a look at this article) and although I use OpenOffice myself, I wouldn't say they saved money -at least short term.

So probably this is the meaning of "nothing is free" -just think about the time to retrain users in a large gov agency. It has its weight, and switching browser is not going to be cheaper (while going OO would probably mean long term savings).

Firefox is the best these days. I can't see the reason why not allow people to use it. It seems IE has to do something i order to be in the top position. online bookmarking site