68% of UK Universities and Colleges Use Firefox

An anonymous reader writes "mozillaZine is reporting that over two-thirds of British universities and colleges have installed Mozilla or Firefox on their campus computers. They cite an open source survey by OSS Watch that also shows rising support for Mozilla Thunderbird, Moodle and Octave, though a decline for OpenOffice and LaTeX. Predictably, all open source offerings are blown away by Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office's 100% deployment rates."

What's the big deal...?

Mozilla/Camino/Firefox is standards compliant, free and safe. I don't think IE7 can touch that.

If OSS can conquer Universities...

...then the rest of the world shall follow! These numbers are deceiving though, because although more than two thirds of UK universities and colleges have it installed, it is only installed on "some" of their hardware. It is depressing that the open source model and philosophy hasn't caught on with more force in universities, especially since it fits so well with many universities mission statements, to bring education and enlightenment to the masses.

Re:If OSS can conquer Universities...

And that's the problem right there. You have to learn, and read, the syntax yourself.

There are "WYSIWYM" editors for LaTeX, as well as programs which help you write it. I agree that the learning curve is what prevents adoption, but it isn't an insurmountable barrier. Another barrier is the added time of processing the document

That's a lot of work for just marking up documents, especially since Word or WordPerfect can do a decent job with a lot less of a learning curve.

WYSIWYG line optimization doesn't look as good as page optimization. These formats are quite fragile & don't look the same when rendered by other installations of the software & sometimes other installations won't even be able to open them. Furthermore, there is a learning curve involved in using these "properly" (with styles & contents generation). This might be fine for short documents, but these don't scale well.

LaTeX makes some sense if you are doing lots of documents professionally

Or even a single, complex document (such as a thesis).

but for someone who's likely to only write a handful of papers it's overkill.

Depends on what is happening with those papers. Many journals now strip away all formatting & so it doesn't matter if you give them a Word Doc or a LaTeX article--the two should look nearly the same in print. Sometimes, the author is burdened with making sure everything looks fantastic & a minimal amount of time can be spent to make a document that DOES look better. Some journals will only take DOC or only take LaTeX, which decides the format you should use. LaTeX still has a place in academia.

Same here

At the Junior College I go to all, the computers in the labs have Firefox installed on them, and that includes the Macs. Though most people who use the Macs just use Safari instead.

about:mozilla

about:mozilla "And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror." --Mozilla, 7:15

disappointing numbers

Concidering we are talking school owned computers and the academic community is supposed to be all about GPL, Open Source, etc...68% sounds to me like something isnt quite working out the way it should.

Re:disappointing numbers

We defiantly have a long way to go to catch up to their European counterparts.

Indeed...

Installed != Used

We have Firefox on all PCs where i study (not on the Macs though, for some reason (Art academy...)).
But alot of people probably don't know what Firefox is, and if they do, some of them probably don't want to change old habbits.
So, Installed != Used.

Re:Installed != Used

but: installed = usable = choice = better

Missed Advertising Opportunities

It's good to hear Firefox use is increasing, but it has always frustrated me how many people have never even heard of OpenOffice.org. While I was working at a university last year a few times I had to pick up some cables from the bookstore, and on two occasions the person behind me in line was planning to buy MS Office. In both cases I suggested OO.o -- something the person had never heard of -- and in both cases the person decided to post pone purchasing MS Office until after they try Open Office. Since it's free, I've found most people are willing to at least give it a shot; however it amazed me that I've never seen OO.o advertised in a campus bookstore. You would think that a university campus, full of students who could use that extra hundreds of dollars saved from not buying MSO more than most people, would be a perfect place to push Open Office.

Re:Missed Advertising Opportunities

The university book store is a business just like any other. Their only interest is in making money. Most of the time it isn't run by the school, or the student union, but rather by some company who has been given an exclusive contract to sell books on campus. Where I went to school the student union had opened their own book store, because students were tired of high priced books, and no competition. However, the books were usually only 1 or 2 dollars cheaper, and they didn't carry all the books. This may be something you want to have your student union pushing to inform the students.

Say what you will about Microsoft, but...

I can say this pretty emphatically that MS Office is exponentially better than the OSS equivalent, OpenOffice.

I migrated to OpenOffice in an attempt to make my PC software more legit, and man is it horrible. The interface is like the MS Office of 1994. They made the most innocuous things, like printing a standard A4 envelop, an effort in futility. After days of futzing with the built-in envelope template, altering my printer paper settings, and manually adjusting margins, I just gave up and googled for an answer. To my dismay, this was apparently a very common problem in OpenOffice. So I hunted, downloaded a template someone else had the patience that I didn't have made, and used it instead. I have it saved just in case.

This same task in MS Office? File > New > Envelope. Enter the addresses and print.

I'm a huge advocate of OSS, but in this case, OSS is light years behind.

In other news...

In other news... widespread use of communist software [mithgol.ru] leads students to piracy, joblessness, and anti-Americanism.

WTH? Moodle and Octave?

Am I the only one that feels like he's reading a website from another time or aprallel universe? I mean, OO.o and Firefox have sufficient market penetration and recongizability (hmm, is that a word?) to reference them without any background, but WTH are Moodle and Octave? And seriously, Moodle? Software names are getting worse and worse...

Re:WTH? Moodle and Octave?

Octave [gnu.org] is an Open Source program for maths and mathematical graphics. It is comparable to Matlab or Mathematica. It has been out for almost two decades. I wouldn't be surprised if early versions were scrawled on the walls of caves by stone-age cultures. As a result, it has a very strong following, albeit of mathematicians in strange flowing robes. The programming language is a mix of C, LISP and medieval Latin. Having said that, it is very, very good.

Moodle [moodle.org] is a course management system. What a University would want with one of those, I don't know. Half of my lecturers never turned up on time and one simply photocopied the course textbook as notes and read from it during lectures. Even those I had some respect for (one was a Dr. Who fan) were hopelessly disorganized and seemed to prefer it that way.

Now, I am a little surprised they said more about LaTeX (which is in decline because the friggin' developers aren't developing! I've never seen people drag their feet so much) than they did about Open Groupware (an Open Source Exchange replacement that is very respectable), Beowulf/Mosix/OpenMosix/Kerrighn (which turns a barely-used lab into a giant supercomputer wihout stupid license modifications), or ReLaTe (an Open Source videoconferencing + whiteboard suite developed by the University College of London for remote teaching).

There is a LOT of aspects to Open Source I would love to know if/how the Universities are aware of. I happen to think LaTeX is superb and wish Firefox would parse the markup, but I don't think it's an area of Open Source that schools, colleges or Universities need to focus on. What I do want to know is what they ARE focussing on and what they DAMN WELL SHOULD focus on.

Remaining tech chic

What?! Firefox is becoming popular? Oh man now I am going to have to use Opera in order to sneer down my superior nose at what browser people are using.

Non-news

Come on now...really. So at least one computer at each of these universities has Firefox installed on it. Look, there's little doubt that Firefox usage is up. But, isn't this really non-news?

100%?

What's wrong with those Brits? Why, at MY college, NONE of the lab computers had Internet Explorer OR Office installed on them! They all ran Unix (still do, AFAIK, this was ~5 years ago), and we LIKED it!

Man nice FUD

There's a big difference between "have" and "use". For example, I have Firefox installed but I don't use it, at least not as my primary browser.

100% deployment rates?

Predictably, all open source offerings are blown away by Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office's 100% deployment rates.

Okay, it was back in the 90s, but when I was at uni, there were plenty of UNIX workstations that didn't have either of those installed. I can't imagine things have changed so drastically in the last few years or that I went to the only university that used UNIX.

100% deployment for MS Office?

I doubt that. Unless you mean "100% of those polled have at least one license deployed". That would make sense, what with MSO being the accepted standard world wide and OOo / StarOffice not being 100% compatible with it.

Most schools I am familiar with (quite a few, as I work for one) use far more free office software--we use Star Office 8--than they use MSO. But everyone has to have MSO to communicate with other organizations that have MSO.

Why is Windows 100%?

I think that at engineering schools, at least half the PC's would be running Linux or other x86 Unix varient. At my old school that was the case the last time I walked through a lab.

When I was in school there was near 0 support for anything PC related. Everything was Unix or Mac. Last time I went back (2 years ago) it was pretty much all Linux as far as I could see.

Ours does.

I just really wish that our University would use Firefox instead of Mozilla. And allow customizations on your account like PDF openers and such things.

The 32%

My university is part of the 32%. Sucks. It means that I have to keep PortableFirefox [portableapps.com] on USB stick.

not always

The UK universities that I've known have firefox installed, but often it's not the default.

What is usually the case is that general machines (and library machines) use internet explorer, and specific departmental lab boxes have a choice of several browsers, but again internet explorer is the default. At least this is the case in the uni's I've studied/worked at or visited, in so far as I've noticed.

A saving grace is that I've never seen one that uses outlook or outlook express as a default email client. Oddly at my last uni the default mail client was pine.

I prefer Mutt, because I'm some kind of retro wierdo who still goes on about Elite on the BBC model B.

My university uses Linux

on pretty much all the computers. Does that mean we are cooler than these places?

Ray Of Hope

The anonymous reader wrote:

"Predictably, all open source offerings are blown away by Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office's 100% deployment rates."

But that isn't quite what the survey said. The OSS survery reads

"Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer are deployed by all institutions on most desktops."

One notable exception to this would be Internet Explorer deployment on any Macs. Internet Explorer was insecure and underdeveloped after the Puma version in Mac OS X v 10.1 went live. It was no longer bundled on new Macs or OS X install discs when Tiger shipped.

• Sept 2001 - IE 5.1 bundled with Mac OS X v 10.1 was first non-preview OS X version.
• June 2002 - IE 5.2 dropped support for non-OS X users.
• Jan 2003 - Safari released (for Macs OS X v 10.2+)
• June 2003 - IE 5 new feature development ceased.
• April 2005 - IE dropped from the OS X Tiger bundle.
• Dec 2005 - All "IE 5 for Mac" development ceased.

While a number of Microsoft products are obscenely widespread despite its quality and security flaws, it isn't 100% in use out there. I know it's not a really big deal, but perhaps a small ray of hope may keep some developers and users from pulling the trigger on a dark an lonely night.

Keeping Firefox up to date on Windows

I happen to be an admin at a UK university and the thing that bugs me is how to keep Firefox up to date on Windows (on Linux this is a non issue). Because of this sole point, I am unlikely to roll it out across our Windows labs. What are folks doing when the people using the machines don't have the rights to install software globally? More explicitly, what are people doing when they don't have Zenworks or Active Directory for software distribution? Do you just reimage/ghost all your machines?

The answer is doubtless obvious but I'm more than happy to be clued in.

Wow

How disheartening it is that MSOffice is 100%. That piece of crap. Even more disheartening is that LaTeX is declining. I'd understand why openoffice is down, I abandoned it, but LaTeX? Lyx is easier to use than MSOffice.

The local high school doesn't have it

I teach out of town usually, but am in my local high school to teach summer school. They do not have Firefox anywhere on their computers. Bummer. On our school computers we use nothing but. That's mostly because I get to choose which way we go at my school.

No, Really What is the Big Deal?

I have Firefox installed also, but I use IE (yes by choice, because it works for me, and I like the way sites look in it)
That being said, it said 68% of Universities have Firefox installed, but how many of the students ACTUALLY are using it?

Just not seeing how this is news thats all.

Regards,

MBC1977,
(US Marine, College Student, and Good Guy!)

Thats fine and dandy... but Stateside...

The university I go to has Firefox installed on all the computers, but I can count on one hand the number of people that actualy use it. Most people use Internet Explorer because the big blue E has not been removed. A good follow up study would be to see how many students at that 68% of UK universities actualy use Firefox.

Sure, 68% can install Firefox on some PCs, but....

the real question is how many can uninstall IE?

Nothing special

Hell, go to my College. Every single PC and Mac I've ever came in contact with in any of our labs has Firefox as the default browser.

I'm quite certain you'd be laughed out of a lab room if you were caught using IE other than testing HTML/CSS.

Mine's in the other 32%

...despite several promises throughout the whole of last year that we'd at least get to use Firefox.

You don't realise how painful MS software is until you're forced to actually use it. For an entire year. MSVC 6 doesn't even have line numbers.

How reliable is this survey

I would very much doubt if most of the people who were asked to respond to the survey are really aware of the use of software within their institution.
Before I retired I was a senior member of computer services within a UK University. A survey like this would be considered low priority by the typical director and it would be passed-on to a (typically) random (almost certainly) low-level member of staff to complete.
Now some of these will have quite a good "grapevine" knowledge of what is going-on within their institution; but many will only know what is "policy" or installed on centrally-provided systems.
Departments tend to be fiercely independent in what they do - typically more so if there are strict central policies to the contrary.
To get reliable results, the questions would have to be (actually) answered by someone who had authority, respect, and time - all of which are likely to be in short supply in the computing services of a UK University nowadays.

Why even mention IE?

If the campus contains even a single PC running a relatively modern version of Windows, then it'll have IE installed and will count towards that 100% installation base figure. When I was last at Imperial College (about 8 years ago), it had at least 1000 NT workstations (as well as a large number of VAX machines, alphas, sparcs, etc).

Might as well report that 100% of campuses featured running water and indoor toilets.

Re:ie modzilla

You make me want to puke. the end. Flash works on Mozilla Firefox, and almost all browsers and operating system combinations and Adobe can successfully report I believe a 97.7% installation of all computers connected to the internet. You can find that statistic here. http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashp layer/ [adobe.com]. Thanks - now go kill yourself.

Re:I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but...

"and the United Kingdom = Great Britain"

What on earth gave you that idea? United Kingdom != Great Britain

There's a reason why it's called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Great Britain = England, Wales, Scotland + outlying islands. United Kingdom = Great Britain + Northern Ireland. And the British Islands = United Kingdom + Crown Dependences (e.g Channel Islands, Isle of Man).

Re:Pedophiles? In the "Free Software" movement?

I love it. The site is down, but the article is google cached. ^ ^