The Open Source Census is collaborative project that attempts to collect and share quantitative data relating to the use of open source software in the enterprise.

The Open Source Census has a tool called OSS Discovery that scans individual machines and generate anonymous reports regarding what open source software that machine has installed. It is completely voluntary and any individual or company can participate in The Open Source Census.

A new survey from Forrester Research asked 50,000 large enterprise employees which browser they use on a daily basis. They found that over the course of 2007, Internet Explorer's overall market share in the enterprise decreased by 10%. During that same period they saw Firefox's share almost doubled from 9.8% to 18%.

The survey also showed that most companies are using the 6-year-old Internet Explorer 6. Only 23.4% of companies officially used IE7 as their standard browser.

CNET has rated the most current beta versions of IE8, Opera, and Safari and has rated Firefox the best.

Some of the characteristics giving it its top rating include performance in memory handling (also reported in this village post), the amount and quality of plugins, their new bookmarking system, and the ease of use.

Firefox has many new plugins and features which make it a very worthwhile upgrade. Among one of my favorite additions is all of the improvements made to the way it handles memory consumption.

Much work has been put into optimizing memory usage for Firefox 3. Initial results show that Firefox 3 may be one of the leanest and meanest web browser out there today in terms of memory consumption.

The Update Scanner Firefox extension monitors web sites and alerts you whenever the site updates its content. This tool is useful for sites that don't have RSS feeds. For example, many company job pages or pages on sites you'd like to know have changed for whatever reason (competitor's site, make sure no one is changing your site, etc...)

You can adjust scanning intervals and "change thresholds" so insignificant changes are ignored.

A free plug in from Firefox.

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