teach.beaustin.com

New versions of the most popular web browsers have recently been released. While it has been 5 years since the IE 6 was introduced, only 11 months have elapsed since Firefox 1.5 was released. How is it that the Firefox team can work so much faster than the Redmond behemoth? Open-source.

Not only is the development process faster, it produces a better product. Since there are so many eyes on the development process, problems are identified and remedied much faster than the closed approach necessary for proprietary software.

This begs the question as to why support from educational vendors for Firefox is so poor. Blackboard / WebCT is the most egregious example. How can they not have support for Firefox? Why is this acceptable. I don't think it is. Maybe it is time to consider open-source course management software like Moodle and others.

For more information on the new browser releases, see Michael Calore's article in Wired magazine.