Monday, December 05, 2005

NASA ditches IE in favor of Firefox

TCG reports A little birdie told me today that NASA has given up entirely on Internet Explorer. Now, if you are an employee of NASA, every time you go to a page using IE, you get up to three prompts telling you how risky it is to run scripts. The official line is that the newest IE vulnerability was the proverbial straw, and now NASA's standard internal browser is Firefox.

Why did they wait this long? Firefox is clearly better.
That NASA has taken this step isn't all that surprising - NASA has been odd man out for many years, encouraging innovation instead of pushing for standardization in their IT systems. But this is interesting because I don't know of another government agency that has recently standardized (internally) on any browser besides IE for...well, it's been a long time. Years. Time was Mozilla (Netscape) was standard at NCI, but even that holdout has given up the ghost. Maybe this will give them precedent so they can move to a good browser.

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