Saturday, August 26, 2006

Making Firefox default browser

Make Firefox your default browser


In Firefox, click Tools, then Options. Click General at the top of the dialog box. In the section labeled "Default Browser," select "Firefox should check to see if it is the default browser when starting." Click Check Now. Firefox will give you the option of making it the default. Do so and click OK, then OK. Now your links will open in Firefox.

Sunday, August 13, 2006

Mozilla/Firefox Used by 68 Percent of UK Universities and Colleges

Mozilla-based programs and open source software in general are becoming increasingly accepted by UK universities and colleges, according to OSS Watch, a group that provides advice and guidance on free and open source software to UK educational institutions. The OSS Watch Survey 2006 reveals that 68% of the 114 institutions who responded to the survey have deployed Mozilla Firefox or the Mozilla Application Suite on at least some of their campus desktops (the exact term used by the survey was "Mozilla/Firefox browser", which most institutions would presumably infer to mean either Firefox or the Mozilla Application Suite).

The report notes that the 77% of higher education (degree and postgraduate) institutions and 64% of further education (post-16 secondary education) institutions that have deployed Mozilla/Firefox is a significant rise on the last survey in 2003, where these figures were just 44% and 32% respectively. Despite the rise in deployment, the report does note that very few institutions have installed Mozilla/Firefox on all desktops.

Nevertheless, other Mozilla-based products also fared well. 22% of institutions have Mozilla Thunderbird on their systems and 27% use Netscape (though some may be using versions that predate the first Mozilla-based release, Netscape 6). It appears, however, that Mozilla products are generally offered as alternatives rather than the default: every single university and college surveyed have Microsoft Internet Explorer installed on their systems. Microsoft Office also registered a 100% deployment rate.