IBM declares undying love for Mozilla's Firefox

Definitely too much coffee there

You missed the part where they said they wouldn't force people to use it as their default browsers.

standards != implementation

There's an important distinction between standards - particularly in representation, filing and API - and an implementation of those standards.

IBM is saying that open standards are good and that they'll use the best implementation of those standards. Firefox just happens to be the best implementation at the moment. The benefit of focusing on open standards rather than implementation as that one can always switch to a better tool/program if one comes along. There's a reason why MS has always dragged its feet about making their API and filing "standards" open...

Or maybe web explorer?

... or perhaps Web Explorer - no prizes for guessing what that ran on.

@ Citizen Kaned

I used to "prefer" the features of Firefox despite its lack of reliability and its tedious slowness. Then I pared down my list of plug-ins to those I actually *require*, and showed the door to all the rest. No half-hearted "oh but I might, one day...".

The result was magical. My eeePC (no swap file, 1Gb onboard) rarely runs out of memory browsing in more than five tabs (got twelve open as I write this!). No random crashes. No unexplained freezes. Firefox is now reliable, and is capable of being open and coexisting with other applications. In fact, I know I can plug into the NAS and watch a movie and leave Firefox in the background, and when I come back, nothing will have changed!

I suggest if Firefox is acting like a pain in the ass, get rid of ALL of the plugins and extensions and clear your cache/cookies and install things one by one.

For what it is worth, here's my selection: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collection/heyrick [I also have FreeDownloadManager helper plugin, but that comes with FDM, not from Mozilla]

they still do

I don't know which part of IBM it is that has ditched IE6, but as their support (ticket/change) management application still only works properly on IE6. If you use Firefox or Safari, it tells you to download a modern browser. Safari on Mac works OK, but it does crash the application more often that it does on IE6. Firefox works in view only mode, but try and make updates and it crashes. IE7 and up is only not fully supported.

@Silverwave

I don't have the whole story but there are Group Policy templates available on the web (I appear to have temporarily mislaid the address. . ahem) which we are using here. Installation can be managed by AD.

"we have all been told"

Not here we haven't.

I've used FF since I joined in 2008 and only had to drop to IE6 for a particular internal app that has a dependency on the MSJVM,

Of course, that app still has that dependency, so using Win7 as I do now, I have to have XP Mode available to get to it.

BTW Chrome works fine for pretty much everything, same as FF as long as you run the browser as an Admin.