For the past year I have been pushing people at my company to use Mozilla 1.x. The free version of the Netscape Gecko browser engine. I have come full circle with this browser since I originally liked and used netscape 1.x and 2.x but dropped it by version 4.x for IE.
Our customer service reps have been complaining of slow computers for as long as I can remember. At first we thought it was all sorts of issues. We realized it was the reps after we bought brand new Compaq computers early last year.
It turns out that these reps have 10-20 windows open at any time. 80-90% of them are IE windows. A desktop with 256megs or ram ends up needing 300-500 megs of memory. For what these people are doing it is not cost effective to buy more memory, and don’t even think of asking them to close some windows. I won’t go on and on about that, but I am a power user and only have 5-8 windows open at a time. How hard is it to close something you are not using and open it again several hours later when you need it again for 5 minutes??? Answer is people are lazy.
The solution we have is use Mozilla. I found that mozilla with tabbed browsing only costs 18-25 megs of memory for the first browser instance, and 1-2 megs per tabbed window. IE on the other hand uses 18-25 megs per IE window. By using mozilla you could save hundreds of megs of memory on a computer.
The problem we have had with adopting Mozilla is administrative. We needed a way to push out the bookmarks file to every user when we make changes. My company controls our Rep’s bookmarks so they have the most up to date list of sites to use while searching for stuff. I finally found how to create a users.js file in everyone’s mozilla profile that points to a bookmark file outside of the mozilla profile directory. Now we can add a line to our login script that will refresh the bookmarks every time a user logs in. With the users.js file we can also customize any other mozilla security or UI feature, but we have to manually copy the file every time we need to make an update so that becomes problematic. The issue is that mozilla creates a GUID for each profile and uses that as the profile directory name. We cannot script an update to copy files if the directory is different for each user.
The bookmark issue thankfully was the major problem with mozilla. We are now waiting to finish up other profile and desktop changes to begin rolling it out to everyone sometime in April or May
With adoption of Mozilla as our browser my company moves closer to the open source community. We still use Windows XP on the desktop. We have to. Our call center software requires it and that probably wont’ change in the foreseeable future. But we use Open office.org 1.1 for our reps. It saves us almost $400 per computer. We also use Jabber as our chat system. Granted the jabber system we use was purchased and it is a shrink wrapped windows application, but it is based off of the open source jabber standard. The desktop clients are all free.
Because of the reliance on the free open source software, besides the OS (comes with the new computers we get anyway) our call center software, and MSFT CAL’s to access the file server, we have virtually no desktop licenses to buy when we add new computers. Norton AV and Ghost are the only other things that I can think of we purchase and that is only $20-30 per computer. Someone explain to me why a phone rep needs a $400 version of office for email and typing quick text and spread sheets? The new math can’t even explain away that kind of costs.