Call IT Quick–Mr. Palmisano Needs Help Exporting His Bookmarks

Sure, Internet Explorer is gaining market share–but not at IBM. There, Microsoft’s (MSFT) once ubiquitous browser is suffering an abrupt and precipitous decline in share.

IBM (IBM) has chosen a default browser for its nearly 400,000 employees and it’s not IE.

“We’re officially adding a new piece of software to the list of default common applications we expect employees to use, and that’s the Mozilla Firefox browser,” Bob Sutor, IBM’s vice president of open source and Linux, said in a blog post Thursday. “Firefox has been around for years, of course. Today we already have thousands of employees using it on Linux, Mac, and Windows laptops and desktops, but we’re going to be adding thousands more users to the rolls.”

So what does standardization on Firefox mean for IBM workers?

Says Sutor, “Any employee who is not now using Firefox will be strongly encouraged to use it as their default browser. All new computers will be provisioned with it. We will continue to strongly encourage our vendors who have browser-based software to fully support Firefox.”

A nice endorsement for Firefox, though not entirely unexpected, given IBM’s code contributions.