The biggest obstacle facing widespread adoption of the Firefox browser is lazy programming – not from the Mozilla Foundation but from corporates that have not tested their applications with anything but IE.
Peter Tippett, chief technologist at security risk management firm Cybertrust, said Firefox will probably gain market share with home and small business users but will struggle in the enterprise because corporate applications have not been built to work with anything but IE. "An individual can easily switch to Firefox. But doing that on a corporate level is a disaster. All kinds of internal applications are dependent on IE. They never tested them against Firefox or Mozilla because they never thought about it and now they are kind of hooked – that was Microsoft"s plan," said Tippett.
Peter Menadue, national business manager for application integration at Dimension Data, agreed. He said that corporations have only just woken up to the fact that there is more than one browser on the market. "Up until reasonably recently the main question was "which versions of IE shall we test against?" That is about as deep as the discussion went. Any thoughts of testing against Netscape went away a long time ago," said Menadue.