Comments on: US State Dept. workers beg Clinton for Firefox

By: Gerard Gallucci

Gerard Gallucci — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 13:12:19 +0000

I served in the State Department’s eDiplomacy office on and off from 2002 to 2005 and heard all the excuses from our IT and security people for not using Firefox. Some of them are repeated above. But what it really came down to, I came to believe, is the tremendous resistance to change on the part of folks invested in the reward and benefit system used by Microsoft to maintain support for continued use of MS product by large organizations. MS provides “certificates” and trainings plus freebies that hook the systems people in. And frankly, lots of folks have been doing MS for so long that that is all they know. Microsoft is a monopoly that has been broken in the free market, in the free world. But inside State it might as well still be 1984.

By: IceArdor

IceArdor — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 02:51:14 +0000

Even though Firefox is free, its total cost of ownership isn’t. For every additional supported browser, testing websites takes longer, more security vulnerabilities open up, and the sysadmins lose power that they enjoy over everyone in a company. Of course, no webpage should have ever been designed for IE alone. The only way to ensure security and minimize costs is to design based on the W3C specifications–but even that costs more money than just slapping a few lines of HTML and ECMAScript together. At this point, Firefox isn’t a free solution, but nor is any other solution like Opera, Safari, or Chrome.

By: Chip

Chip — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 10:58:41 +0000

Haha he has a good sense of humor though.

By: Michael Kaply

Michael Kaply — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 00:15:14 +0000

You misrepresented the response by cutting off the article too soon.

“Nothing is free,” Kennedy responded. “It’s a question of the resources to manage multiple systems. It is something we’re looking at…It has to be administered. The patches have to be loaded. It may seem small, but when you’re running a worldwide operation and trying to push, as the Secretary rightly said, out FOBs [for remote log-ins] and other devices, you’re caught in the terrible bind of triage of trying to get the most out that you can, but knowing you can’t do everything at once.”