firefox an eye opener for fidelity investments inc.
Firefox was apparently a real "eye opener" for Fidelity Investments Inc. which has now made open source software an "anchor" of Fidelity's software strategies.
The Mozilla Firefox browser was an eye-opener, added Mike Askew, who also works in the technology center. A head-to-head comparison of Firefox and Internet Explorer showed that both had about the same level of security vulnerability, but ''the time needed to fix vulnerabilities in Firefox was much less,'' Askew said. That experience led Fidelity to look at open source more intently.I've been saying it for a while: Firefox is the "gateway drug of open source."
reactions, thoughts, comments, etc.
I agree with that - though having people tell me all this stuff even existed helped.
Posted by: ant | January 3, 2006 7:11 PM
Where is that quote from?
Posted by: toby | January 3, 2006 7:25 PM
Here is the info.
http://searchopensource.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid39_gci1155599,00.html
Posted by: Alberto | January 3, 2006 8:10 PM
http://www.betanews.com/article/5198_Linux_Windows_OS_Flaws_in_2005/1136328858
Posted by: Humpty Dumpty | January 3, 2006 9:38 PM
Asa: I've mentioned my history before, but it bears repeating ;)
IE on Windows -> FF on Windows -> FF on Linux
Humpty Dumpty: M$ has a horrible time-to-patch record and open source projects are more open (shall we say ;) to inspection, so you're more likely to find things :) Also, if there's one thing that I've learned from secunia.com its that not all flaws are equally dangerous... Basically, Linux stubbed its toe and scraped its elbow; Windows broke one of its arms: as you can see, Linux is twice as dangerous ;) Same thing with FF vs IE.
Posted by: Limulus | January 4, 2006 3:39 AM
They found Firefox has about the same level of security vulnerability as IE? You mean if I use IE and Firefox on otherwise identical machines and go to the same sites on both, I'll get about as much malware on the one running Firefox as I do on the one running IE? I wonder if anyone can duplicate those results. I'd be shocked if they could!
Posted by: Steve Chapel | January 4, 2006 8:20 AM
Steve, I suspect they're comparing reported vulnerabilities not actual exploits in the wild. There's a lot of that going on -- attempts at trying to equate theoretical problems with real world problems.
- A
Posted by: Asa Dotzler | January 4, 2006 8:33 AM
I also blogged about this news story at http://opensourceculture.blogspot.com/
It is great to see companies like Fidelity embracing Firefox and other open source software.
Posted by: GeekyGirl | January 4, 2006 1:17 PM
Nice turnaround. Several years ago I worked on a project where we had to provide a single sign-on link frmo my employer's website to one hosted by Fidelity or a subsidiary thereof. At the time, we were fortunate to get support for anything other than IE5+, and that "anything" was Netscape 4.7. I argued w/ the technical people at Fidelity for 6 months over supporting other browsers; it was a requirement for my clients/customers, Fidelity refused to acknowledge that it was important.
After implementation, our customers were upset that we weren't giving them a site they could use with their browser of choice, but we had no choice but to take what Fidelity was giving us. At the time, the current Netscape release was 6.2 IIRC.
I could be wrong and that particular site still doesn't work right on a modern browser, but I think ties were severed a few years later for other reasons (corporate shuffling).
Posted by: andy | January 12, 2006 9:17 AM