NASA ditches IE in favor of Firefox

A little birdie told me today that NASA has given up entirely on Internet Explorer. Now, if you are an employee of NASA, every time you go to a page using IE, you get up to three prompts telling you how risky it is to run scripts. The official line is that the newest IE vulnerability was the proverbial straw, and now NASA's standard internal browser is Firefox.

That NASA has taken this step isn't all that surprising - NASA has been odd man out for many years, encouraging innovation instead of pushing for standardization in their IT systems. But this is interesting because I don't know of another government agency that has recently standardized (internally) on any browser besides IE for...well, it's been a long time. Years. Time was Mozilla (Netscape) was standard at NCI, but even that holdout has given up the ghost. Maybe this will give them precedent so they can move to a good browser.

Update 9:24 AM 12/5/05: Perhaps this rumor is just that - a rumor. See one of the comments below, from someone with a .ru address but who says they're coming from NASA.

Update 10:24 AM 12/5/05: And another, below, from (apparently) NASA software contractor.

Update 4:27 PM 12/5/05: And a couple more, below, from more apparent NASA employees.

I think it's time to put this rumor to rest. There are three options:

1. It's completely false and my NASA employee (aka "little birdie") was flat-out wrong.
2. It's true for his part of NASA.
3. It's true for all of NASA but a bunch of people haven't heard about the policy shift yet.

The only way to resolve it is for someone to corroborate my birdie's story, or for the furor to die down...

Comments

[Dave]

What startling news! If only we were privy to the internal discussions that drove this decision -- the Mozilla folks would probably love to know more about it.

[SmartITGuy]

No government, public service or financial entity should ever use a browser as dangerous as Internet Exploder!!! This should be a LAW!
And if they do, they should be held accountable and fined for any data loss or consumer privacy breach.

[digg user]

Awww! I think I speak for all digg users. Why couldn't it have been Opera?

Just kidding!

[Vikram]

No, no, no! This is _still_ all wron. Support standards and not any particular browser.

- Vikram, a longtime Firefox+Linux user.

[Adam]

"No, no, no! This is _still_ all wron. Support standards and not any particular browser."

How can this be accomplished when Internet Explorer itself does not support standards.

[dave]

One small step for man...

[rusty G]

i went to the nasa page (using "view in IE tab extesion) an nothing..

[miscblogger]

yay nasa! finally! some people recognizing firefox!

[Dustin]

I just opened IE6 to nasa.gov and saw no such prompts.

[Kye Lewis]

Adam: I think the point was that there are other browsers out there that are also very standards compliant- and NASA should be supporting standards-compliant browsers in general rather than just sticking to one browser.

However, for admin purposes, standarising to one browser is much easier on them.

[sleepyhead]

Not it will be interesting to see, what NASA does
when big holes are found in firefox.

[The Beast in Black]

Er, i just clicked through several pages on the nasa site at http://www.nasa.gov using Internet Exploder 6.0.28 and saw absolutely nothing as mentioned...maybe the nasa site is intelligent enough to detect that my primary browser is actually firefox, and disables the warnings... ;-)

[hemebond]

Oh cripes! They require Javascript just to view their pages. Idiots.

[yitz]

> Awww! I think I speak for all digg users.
> Why couldn't it have been Opera?

Because security track record is irrelevant to the topic of security - hype is what matters.

- y

[Alex Herrero]

Well, it seems that the script telling you that IE is not "secure enough" (it was never "secure" in the first place) is run only for the "inside" users. Nobody expect that the NASA implement such scripts for every internet user on every site they own, right?

[Greg]

Go ahead, switch if you want...in fact I use both Firefox and IE, but don't assume that because there haven't been many vulnerabities, that Firefox won't be next. It's tough to be on top, which I'm sure that Mozilla will learn once they get closer to it and line up in the cross hairs of all the script kiddies and black hatters out there.

[Peter Buck]

Doesn't anyone bother to check on this stuff? http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/browsers.htm lists suggested browsers. The list includes IE but not FF. NASA says they "make no endorsement", but the list still doesn't support this story. Nor did I see any warnings when using IE.

I'd like to see FF make it big but fantasy won't help.

[Dan]

Uh. INTERNALLY. According to the rumor, NASA has made Firefox their only legal browser INTERNALLY. That is, for employees of NASA. Externally may well be another story entirely.

[John Deeth]

So, DOES it take a rocket scientist to figure that out?

[MSR]

This is being posted from the NASA Johnson Space Center.

This machine is running IE version 6.0.2900.2180.xpsp_sp2_gdr.050301-1519.

No warnings have been displayed about scripts.

If FF is the new standard, it's taking some time to filter down to the worker bees.

[LT]

NASA just started using FF 6 months ago, and has yet to include any FF version higher than 1.0.6. NASA's official browser internally and externally is IE6 SP1 but does not prohibit the use of FF.
I know...I'm a SW Engineer for a contractor for NASA.

[Complexium]

Why Firefox?
Opera is such a better browser!

[Complexium]

Why Firefox?
Opera is such a better browser!

[Dither]

The "suggested browsers" link that Peter Buck posted hasnt been updated since 2000.. If they just made this policy change, that page wouldnt reflect it.

[Matt Ishida]

Just a reminder to read the fine entry...

"Now, if you are an employee of NASA, every time you go to a page using IE, you get up to three prompts telling you how risky it is to run scripts."

Note the, 'if you are an employee of NASA' portion of the sentence? This implies that NASA employees while at work and on the NASA network, while using Internet Explorer, will get the prompts, not people off their network as in everyone outside of NASA.

These people who work at NASA can go home, use IE there and they wont get the prompts unless, their home computer is tied to the internal NASA network.

As for the Opera comment made by Complexium, it shouldn't matter what browser is used as standards are a part of it.