Firefox

A description on how Onfolio decided to support the Firefox browser in the 2.0 version of their RSS reader.

At the beginning of the development process for Onfolio 2.0, Firefox wasn’t really on the radar screen. Support for browsers other than internet explorer was high on the list of customer requests, but the requests were spread out over a large number of browsers, making it hard to address them without a huge amount of work. Our theory was that doing the work to fully integrate into these browsers would dilute the effort to add to the core value of Onfolio in the areas of shared collections, modeless/advanced capture, advanced searching, structured report publishing, integration with EndNote, RSS reading and so on. Then, two things happened. The first was that we got the results back from our customer survey in June and saw that 25% of people who were using Onfolio on a daily basis were also using browsers other than Internet Explorer. This was surprising because it was a lot higher than the 5%-6% market share that alternate browsers were purported to have at the time, and it was surprising because we did not work very well with those browsers. I think that most of these people used Internet Explorer when they wanted to use Onfolio, or used the Onfolio Deskbar to capture items to Onfolio or access items stored in Onfolio. We knew these people would be a lot better off with the kind of integration Onfolio has with Internet Explorer, but we still had too many other browsers that we would need to work with to make integration cost-effective. The next thing that happened pretty much solved that problem. I was listening to the radio on July 5th while driving and heard NPR’s Larry Abramson telling me that I should think about using a different browser. His story was in response to an announcement by US-CERT and some follow-up newspaper articles that came out in late June recommending browsers other than Internet Explorer as a way of avoiding internet attacks based on known holes in IE. When the initial CERT announcement and newspaper articles came out, we thought that we might need to rethink our initial decision to not support Firefox. When the NPR story hit, we were sure we were going to have to support it. That marked a level of mainstream attention that most computer issues never get.