Gendarmes dump IE

Published on February 6th, 2006

Open Source supporters have been given a shot in the arm by news the French police are abandoning Microsoft’s Internet Explorer for Mozilla Firefox.

The gendarmerie’s 70,000 desktops were being converted to Firefox and its email client Thunderbird because of the navigator’s “reliability, security and inter-operability with other state services,” said General Christian Brachet, IT director of the police force.

The move should be complete by the end of the year, he said, as enthusiasts of open sourcing wrapped up an annual meeting in Paris at the Solution Linux 2006 exhibition.

Firefox had been chosen because it was based on the W3C standard, an international norm for the internet, and because it works equally well under Microsoft, Mac or Linux.

A decent set of reasons.

6 users responded in " Gendarmes dump IE "

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# 1 gquaglia said, on February 6th, 2006 at 8:52 am

Great, now you just have to get all the bone head webmasters to stop making their website hostile to anything other then IE.

# 2 Brady J. Frey said, on February 6th, 2006 at 9:13 am

If you’re not building for standards, you’ve lost your edge in our business, and you aren’t a web professional. Mine, and other industry designers, growing client redesign list from other firms is very telling of this.

Does this mean that dvorak.org will hire a professional to fix their lame bugs, and outdated use of the break tag:)? You’ve got 292 errors in this page alone — half of them because you need to properly use closed tags in xhtml or, if you’re not experienced enough, just start using html (for the love of god, code an ampersand properly):
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dvorak.org%2Fblog%2F%3Fp%3D4149

Until that time, i’m not so sure why you’re happy posting about firefox’s adoption? Your site is part of the problem.

And no crying that it’s near impossible to validate — there are many, more complex sites, that do it with ease.

# 3 C. Flowers said, on February 6th, 2006 at 9:14 am

It’s about time the “mainstream” world is figuring out how great FireFox is!

# 4 Gregory said, on February 6th, 2006 at 11:29 am

For the love of God…

I’m a standards advocate, and I strong believe in the whole “web professional” thing… but bitching about some minor validation errors (especially the & thing) is counter productive.

I agree that it is easy to validate, but every browser displays those little errors fine. Lets start with the big stuff that actually breaks browsers first? Both IE and FF (and Opera & Safari for that matter) still have bugs that make web design very annoying. IE7 seems to be heading the right way.. or at least catching up a bit.

Lets pick our battles and not come across as arrogant, irelevant, zealots huh?

# 5 gquaglia said, on February 6th, 2006 at 1:51 pm

Its one thing for a website to be slightly buggy on Firefox, Opera, ect, buts its quite another when the website is designed to work with IE and only IE leaving other users high and dry. Now this wouldn’t be so much a problem for Windows users, but for mac and linux users, there is no IE and no way to view the page. M$ is doing the same thing with Media Player, dropping suport for all except is Windows platform while at the same time forcing its WMV on everyone as the defacto web standard (Bill Gate’s vision anyway) that only plays well on Media Player.

# 6 Pat said, on February 7th, 2006 at 12:10 pm

Is this part of the back lash because M$ won’t share the source code for Windows?

Maybe the French Police don’t want to be held hostage to M$.

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