Will Firebird Fly?

I had a brief discussion with an IT guy about Firebird, and what it might take to get his organization using it instead of IE. (The subject came up when he was giving advice about preventing popup ads and spyware installations.) It turns out he actually uses Firebird at home, but since it was still not quite done, and in beta, as it were, if they deployed Firebird, they would have to do it again when it became an official release. I mentioned that deployment of Firebird to a large number of machines should be pretty easily automated, to which he agreed. His next point was that Firebird was a nice browser, but besides tabbed browsing and blocking popups, what real improvements did it offer the users? Hmmm, what indeed… He also mentioned that changing a piece of software that a user uses can cause familiarity problems. This is true, but for most casual browser users, are the differences that dramatic? Knowing that he’s a big fan of Microsoft, I didn’t push the issue, but I am interested in what it will take for Firebird to get into large, often slow-moving organizations, taking the place of IE.