"Bottom line is that none of these [issues] are a big deal, and they can all be worked around, but I don't yet have enough demand to justify the effort of working through these," he said. "If Firefox continues to gain market share and my internal customers reach a critical mass of wanting an alternative, we would look at the possibility."

Ray Valdes, an analyst at Gartner Inc., said that wholesale replacements of IE aren't a realistic possibility, since most organizations are too dependent on it for their Web pages, internally developed applications, commercial software packages and even the tools they use to administer their infrastructures.

Nonetheless, for years Gartner has advised its clients to either strive for a browser-agnostic strategy or adopt a multibrowser environment. Those approaches give companies more flexibility to take advantage of innovations, make them less vulnerable to security exploits and help ensure that their Web pages and applications will run in browsers other than IE, Valdes said.

The latter reason is what drove Boeing to add Firefox to its list of corporate browser standards. Scott Vesey, the company's Web browser component manager, said Boeing placed a high priority on conformance to World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards and, during its evaluation, found that Firefox did a better job of supporting certain standards than IE did. So Boeing decided to make the open-source browser available by request to any employee, division or regional unit that has a need for it, although IE will remain the only browser installed by default on all of the company's Windows-based computers.

"We're trying to aim for browser-neutral Web applications, so having a Web browser that's more conformant with W3C specifications is a step in the right direction," Vesey said. "If you're creating Web applications that are interoperable between IE and Firefox, the chances of getting caught in a legacy trap are diminished."