Seems as if some of IBM’s Firefox hiring is paying off, as Big Blue has today donated a significant piece of code to the Mozilla Foundation as covered by Jim Wagner here – back to that in a moment. The move was somewhat foreshadowed by IBM’s official internal ok for the browser here, and more recently with official support for Firefox within its Workplace client. It also comes as great news to us, given that we’ve been agitating on behalf of Firefox within IBM for better than a year now.
That IBM should be so gung-ho in its support for Firefox should surprise precisely no one. It’s no secret that as much as IBM’s making decent money off the Windows platform and is happy to continue doing so, they have concerns about the single platform approach that is the status quo, at least domestically. Firefox in that respect is more than just a simple browser; it is increasingly the de facto foundation for cross-platform thin client approaches. While many rich client vendors have tended to roll their eyes at the possibility that browser based clients pose a legitimate threat, Salesforce.com and now SugarCRM have at least gotten some of them to sit up and pay attention. Throw in the really compelling user experiences being delivered by a reinvigorated population of web developers pushing the boundaries of design with Ajax, and it’s clear that Firefox is a platform worth investing in for any vendor with interests in seeing platform heterogeneity.
So invest IBM has, in many senses of the word, but today that investment comes in the form of a code donation allowing Firefox to meet the needs of disabled and motor impaired users. Take it for what its worth given that they are clients of ours, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that donating code to one of the most popular open source projects going (80M downloads and counting, despite a setback marketshare-wise) is a great community move for IBM. Mozilla also wins here as they gain the ability to sell into new markets where accessibility is a fundamental, must-have requirement – governments for example. One thing I discussed briefly w/ IBM last week when they briefed me on this, and I look forward to discussing with the folks building next generation applications, is whether or not the distillation of complex Javascript menus into keyboard commands can be extended to regular users in addition to the target audience of disabled/non-mobile surfers. I’ll wait and see on that score, but I do believe that the addition of these 50 thousand lines of code or so will be an important milestone in making Firefox a more realistic option to ISVs and others wishing to push Firefox into new markets with stricter requirements.
So kudos to IBM on the donation, and congrats to Mozilla on the new functionality. Now both of you, please get back to making my browser better 🙂
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