State Department Thinks Firefox Is Too Expensive

In more proof that government is full of garbage decision making, we got a real gem from the U.S. State Department. At a townhall meeting conducted by Hillary Clinton, an employee asked a seemingly simple question: Why aren’t we allowed to use Firefox?

Like many other dinosaur-era enterprises, where Internet Explorer is forced down your throat because of fright of something different, the State Department mandates that everybody use Internet Explorer. Clinton was asked about using Firefox. She couldn’t answer the question, so deferred it the under-secretary. The response from him…

It is too expensive.

Several in the audience then said “It’s free!”. The response was, essentially, that it would cost money for the IT staff to begin supporting it. Strewn through the answer were things like “resources to manage multiple systems”, “patches”, etc.

How does the government turn a free thing into a major expense? How can supporting Firefox be any more expensive than Internet Explorer? In fact, seems to me it would be cheaper.

You can check the video out at Switched.com.

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http://www.nathanhunstad.com Doctor Gonzo
Although I agree that it is pretty stupid, I’m not so sure it’s all that strange. Especially considering that it is the State Department. They may have internal regulations that require full security audits or similar steps whenever software is approved for use in the department, considering that State is a very sensitive area (like Defense). Such an audit wouldn’t be free.
The exact same reason is given for not allowing Firefox in corporate environments, believe me; this line of thinking is not limited to the government.
David
Well, it is a support issue. Not just the Firefox running on the PC, but also the corporate software such as intranets, Sharepoint, etc.
I worked at a company where the policy was IE only. As a developer, it saves quite a bit of time. Any internal use company website, I didn’t have to bother whether it worked in any other browser. Get it working in IE, done!
Lespaul20
It most definitely is a support issue. Like David said, not necessarily a desktop support issue but compatibility support. I’ve had experience in a civilian agency and IE was the only browser that was supportrd for the online apps. However, what I’ve seen is the Gov’t is not on the edge of technology with much. With the civilian agencies at-least.
http://none David M
Where are all these compatibility problems with Firefox that I have never experienced?

lespaul20
It’s custom apps written internally that you would never use.
David
As Lespaul says, custom corporate apps. Big difference between browsing pcmech.com and running a custom financial report online.
Any developer can tell you there are differences with the way every browser interprets a webpage. Maybe it’s as simple as a text alignment, and maybe you would never notice. Most of them you can code around, but that takes time (=money) to code and test. It’s a big savings to develop for one browser only when you can.

Marcel
The only reason a corporate app would need IE is if it uses sharepoint or some other bloatware from Microsoft that requires it. The fact is that developing to standards will work in all browsers except IE, so to say it is easier to develop for IE only is in fact quite the opposite. I develop for IE only in my organisation and it amazes me how much time we waste trying to do things to work in IE6 that would be very simple in any other browser. The end user ultimately suffers with the slow Javascript support which ultimately costs the company substantial lost productivity waiting for such an antiquated, out of date, slow as death browser, to perform the simple functions required.
The sooner IT admins stop being lazy and do the research they will most likely find the company would make significantly more gains in productivity than it would cost to support the new platform.