Tech Shout!

A day or two back the news was that NASA had formally dumped IE in favour of Firefox. This was confirmed when a reader working within the agency stated that a year ago he was told to literally remove IE icons from the desktop in his department.

However, according to Tony Facca, Project Manager, NASA Desktop Standards Group, Firefox’s conquest of the space agency is far from complete. Facca said that while it wouldn’t surprise him that someone somewhere is encouraging users to dump IE, NASA standard (NASA-STD-2804) requires both browsers.

Facca said, “The standard is referenced as a requirement by NASA’s application developers and service providers. If someone is directing NASA employees to remove IE from their desktops, they are doing so against the direction of the Agency CIO and this could cause interoperability issues for these users.”

He added that any move to Firefox, if it was occurring, was happening “under the radar”. No official requests have been issued to his group to alter the standard or evaluate the impact to interoperability of dropping IE from the standard.