IBM's employees worldwide will use the the Mozilla Firefox browser on their business desktop and laptop software environments.

The announcement was made by Bob Sutor, Vice President Open Source and Linux, IBM Software Group.

Sutor said that the decision to use the Firefox web browser inside IBM was made after considering the following:

- Firefox is stunningly standards compliant, and interoperability via open standards is key to IBM?s strategy.
- Firefox is open source and its development schedule is managed by a development community not beholden to one commercial entity.
- Firefox is secure and an international community of experts continues to develop and maintain it.
- Firefox is extensible and can be customized for particular applications and organizations, like IBM.
- Firefox is innovative and has forced the hand of browsers that came before and after it to add and improve speed and function.

"While other browsers have come and gone, Firefox is now the gold standard for what an open, secure, and standards-compliant browser should be. We?ll continue to see this or that browser be faster or introduce new features, but then another will come along and be better still, including Firefox." Sutor wrote on his blog.

"There?s another reason we want to get as many of our employees using Firefox as soon as possible, and that is Cloud Computing. For the shift to the cloud to be successful, open standards must be used in the infrastructure, in the applications, and in the way people exchange data," he added.

He also added that it was Firefox and its growth that reinvigorated the browser market as well as the web and praised the browser's support for HTML5.

IBM encourages any employees to use Firefox as their default browser.