In addition to having to deal with the likes of Google and Apple, now Microsoft finds itself taking flak from another front: the French military. Specifically, the French Ministry of Defense made the executive decision to switch to Mozilla Thunderbird, an open-source email platform, over Microsoft Outlook. According to a Reuters article on the topic, the Mozilla's open-source design allowed the army to create security extensions, something it allegedly couldn't do with Microsoft's system. Thunderbird, along with a modified variant known as "Trustedbird," currently runs on some 80,000 French military computers, according to the article. Other French ministries are also apparently adopting open-source software for some of their own systems. When queried by moi, a Microsoft spokesperson offered a curt: "We are not commenting on this topic."
The newest version of Mozilla's email platform, Thunderbird 3, includes features such as filtered search and tabbed-email. Rated as compatible with Windows, Mac OS X and open-source platforms, Thunderbird 3 is built on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which gives it the same security enhancements and Web Standards support as the Firefox browser.
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