Gartner predicts that Firefox's share of the overall browser market will grow no higher than 30 percent by year's end and that its momentum will slow with the release of IE7. Valdes said IE7 likely will help IT managers who have considered adopting Firefox sleep better at night about their single-browser strategies.

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Early Users Push Firefox Toward Enterprise Adoption

The IT research group at Fidelity Investments began looking at Firefox more than a year ago. But Fidelity's Mike Askew said it's only in the past few months that he has seen the open-source browser pick up the types of features that start to make it "enterprise-ready."

For instance, Askew, senior vice president of the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology, said the company wanted a binary patching mechanism to avoid the expense of deploying an entire new release every time a security or bug fix was made available for Firefox.