My division is going to switch!
* Cross-posted with my FF blog.
I emailed HITS which is in charge of IT in the Humanities Division of my uni (Curtin University, Perth, Australia) asking why we used IE instead of FF. In the email I said that it was really annoying getting stupid popups on IE, why not install FF. Plus its safer too.
The person who replied to my email said, "FireFox hadn't been requested for general installation by lecturers, however after consideration Humanities IT Services decided to see how it faired in the Blue Whale Lab 501.2, then review the decision for semester two. This was based on FireFox being only at version 1.0 with many updates likely in the future.
Admittedly updates for browsers are par for the course however we wanted a little more certainty with FireFox as to how it would perform in wider
use. The experience overall has been quite positive. As expected with a 1.0 release there were a flurry of updates however unless there's a showstopper the current version will be deployed to the labs for
semester 2.
You mentioned pop-up handling and security as points in favour of using FireFox and to an extent this is true. However we've had switch off Internet Explorer's pop-up blocker due lecturer requirements - which is a shame as it works quite well when its on. One of our concerns with FireFox were potential security vulnerabilities. Though developers have
been very responsive in fixing security problems it takes some time to update all of our labs leaving them vulnerable in the meantime.
So the bottom line is yes we will have FireFox available to you in Sem 2."
Yay! :) I can't wait! Go HITS! HITS is the only uni division that's emailed me back about my query. And it's MY division. *warm fuzzy feelings*
There are 4/5(?) divisions at Curtin. I've only emailed 2 of them (Humanities and Business) cos I don't know what goes on in Science, Engineering, Health Sciences, etc.
1 down. 3/4 to go.
