Perhaps Mozilla is finally seeing the light. There is a story circulating around that Mozilla will be providing better tools to deploy and manage Firefox within the enterprise. According to a PC World article that sources Mike Beltzner, director of Firefox at Mozilla Corp:

Through the program, which will start sometime soon after Firefox 3.5 is released at the end of June, companies can use a Web application provided by Mozilla to specify certain customizations for the browser -- such as bookmarks to certain sites or corporate intranets or portals, he said.

Companies also can brand the browser through technology called Personas that allows them to code a skin across the top of the browser with a company's logo on it, Beltzner said.

Once the custom browser is developed, the application then will send it to the company and give it an installation program that makes it possible to install the browser across all desktops in the company, Beltzner added.

As one who has deployed Firefox and Thunderbird in an enterprise environment, one of my biggest criticisms with Mozilla has been that Firefox and Thunderbird is not enterprise-ready software. It's not that there hasn't been a push by some in the Mozilla community to provide enterprises with the tools they need to deploy Firefox and Thunderbird. It's just without official backing by Mozilla Corp, those tools never really seem to fully materialize in a way that is needed in large organizations. Hopefully, this time will be different.

Story found via Matt Assay.

I found a great list on the blog/news section for the ocPortal CMS, 10 IE compatibility problems that you might not have realised. While the post is related to ocPortal, the Internet Explorer compatibility issues likely will apply to any CMS viewed by the browser.

Over the year's ocProducts has maintained a private list of issues in different web browsers, and if there's one thing that is consistent it is that Internet Explorer has the majority of the problems. Sometimes they are bugs, but as you'll see from this list sometimes other browsers just do things better. I am writing this blog post not to bash Microsoft, but hopefully to provide some useful information to other web developers. Thankfully IE8 fixed a ton of problems, and I can't wait until we can ditch IE6 and IE7, but unfortunately this will inevitably be years away; never-the-less, as far as I am aware every problem here applies to IE8 as well as older versions.

I wouldn't be surprised if IE8 fixes some of the incompatibility issues that the author lists. I've been using IE8 at both home and work and have found the browser to be an improvement over IE6 and IE7. Nevertheless, I still prefer Firefox over Internet Explorer.

Now, the following rant isn't directed toward ocPortal but something that has hit a sore spot with me.

Although Firefox is my choice for Internet browsers, I do use Microsoft's Internet Explorer from time to time.  Yesterday, I installed the release candidate of Internet Explorer 8.

I can't say I'm a big fan of their "Web slice" approach as it feels like I'm ramming Google Desktop via RSS feeds down the browser's favorites bar.  Who know though, perhaps the slice approach will grow on me.  However, I am a big fan of Microsoft creating a more compliant and less buggy browser and IE8 seems to fit the bill.  If IE7 was a good step in the right direction then IE8 gets Microsoft's users pretty close to the destination.

Meanwhile, my rant to all the IE6 users.  I can't believe that about a third of Microsoft Windows users are still using IE6.  Shame on you if you are still using that insecure, buggy, and non-compliant browser.  Microsoft doesn't even want you to use that browser...and yet you're still stuck in the stone ages.  I have a theory that IE6 is symbolic of the problems of complacency at Microsoft and those companies/users that are still on that browser.  IE8 arriving on a modern Windows desktop near you and you're still on IE6?  Give me a break!