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."

about:mozilla

[Petskull]

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

Re:What's the big deal...?

[spauldo]

Mozilla and Firefox are not standards compliant. They're just a lot closer than IE, and standards compliance is a priority for them.

I'm still waiting for them to fix a bug I filed five years ago reguarding forms, which happens to be a compliance issue in HTML.

There's other browsers that say they're more compliant than gecko, although I haven't tried any of them (or, in the case of Opera, I haven't tried it in many years).

Still, IE doesn't even come close, at least as far as standards compliance goes. It is free, however, on every platform that it is available on, and who knows what vulnerabilities lie beneath that behemoth that firefox is?

Why is Windows 100%?

[olddotter]

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.

Keeping Firefox up to date on Windows

[Sits]

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.

Re:Missed Advertising Opportunities

[glitch23]

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.

Remember, the campus book store is the same place that gives you $10 for a $150 calculus book after the semester is over, and the campus itself is a money-making scheme to keep you going there for 4 years (to take the same classes you had the previous 12 years) while you wait for that piece of paper that says you know something (in reference to the US collegiate system).

Track changes in LaTeX

[Noksagt]

Myself (and a number of my fellow students) love the 'track changes' features in Word.

In collaborating with many authors, I've found that this is often accidentally left off, so it is really of marginal benefit.

When writing academic papers in LaTeX, I had a tough time understanding how the edits my advisors made improved the paper.

Not only can you use 'diff' on .tex files, but you can store them in version control repositories (such as cvs or subversion). This kind of change control really can't be matched in Word documents. (I currently keep revisions of Word docs in subversion too, but it is less optimal than working with a text format.)

The visual nature of track changes

Try latexdiff [ctan.org]. The visual markup works quite well.

However, I do agree that I wish this could track multiple revisions & color based on the commiter (a'la Word) & that there was a more formal mechanism for "human-readable comments."

Re:What's the big deal...?

[ATMD]

...but most people don't *know* about the better software.

They don't distinguish between "Internet Explorer" and "Internet". They don't realise that IE is a discrete thing that can have an alternative, let alone that an alternative exists. I put Firefox on my aunt's machine a while ago, and she carried on using IE, thinking that I'd just installed something to make the Internet work better.

The majority of end-users are phenomenally clueless, and as long as Microsoft keeps bundling IE as the default browser, it *will* remain on top. Sad but true.