French police abandon Internet Explorer (IE)

France's 70,000 gendarmerie computers will switch to using Firefox and Mozilla's Thunderbird email browser. Gendarmerie director of technology, General Christian Brachet, said that the friendliness, security and ability to interact with other industry systems are the reason Firefox is chosen.

Conversion time is expected to end at the end of this year.

According to a survey by Xiti, Firefox currently accounts for about 18% of the browser market in France. Compared to 20% of Europe and 38% of Finland alone, this is an impressive number. The French gendarmerie using Firefox promises to create a new trend for open source software, especially the browser in France in particular and in Europe in general. French police also dream of a future where every French citizen can report theft through the Internet (Firefox is a free browser).

The movement of open source software is not just starting from here. At the end of 2005, all police computers switched to OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Offices, now version 1.4 and March 2.0 will be version 2.0. This change saves the police 2 million euros per year.

Many other French ministries are also about to switch to using open source software this year. It is expected that in the second quarter of 2006, about 80,000 more computers will be converted, a large number of which belong to the tax industry.

However, there has not been a decision to switch from using Windows to Linux. There is still a big gap for Linux in the way to reach the end user market.

TRAN HUY