SA Government punts Firefox

Rudolph Muller

Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...

Full Profile

E-mail

The South African Department of Communications (DoC) is actively punting the popular Firefox web browser. The SA Government has already embraced open source software, but it seems to be pushing the anti-Microsoft envelope even further.

The SA Department of Communications, which is using the popular open source content management system Joomla for its website, has a prominent ‘Get Firefox’ banner at the bottom of its site.

Firefox is gaining ground on the world’s most popular browser, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, and has firmly established itself as the browser of choice among tech-savvy Internet users.

According to W3Schools Firefox currently has around 34% market share, closing in on Internet Explorer’s 58.8%.

SA Government moves towards open source

The South African Government committed to open source implementation within its departments earlier this year. At a Cabinet media briefing in Parliament in February, Government said it had approved a policy and strategy for open source implementation.

It added that all new software developed for, or by government, will be based on open standards, and government will migrate current software to open source.