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Comment by furstenheim | Hacker News Reader

We got a huge company using IE11, they could not update to Chrome because "it was not secure" according to their IT department

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They probably had to rotate their password three times while writing that memo.

That's odd. Both Chrome and Firefox have strong "enterprise" controls now, well integrated with Windows/Active Directory/etc.

The biggest issue with newer browsers is actually probably the feature cycle. Every couple months browsers introduce at least one horrible feature I need to update our policies to disable.

Firefox does ESR - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/choosing-firefox-update...

It might not be IE6 stable, but better than running nightly.

I generally do the normal Firefox release and just put up with it, but I can understand why larger organizations might be frustrated with keeping modern browsers secure. They're worried about info leaks while browser vendors are interested in figuring out how to hook websites up to USB devices and VR headsets, and figuring out how to ad new advertising experiences to the new tab page.

Technically that's true since none of the browsers are. But not a very good justification obviously.

I mean, considering the surface area of a browser.... they seem pretty damn solid to me. Am I missing something?

Yes, considering the surface area they are relatively secure. But the surface area is absolutely massive and I have no doubt in my mind that there are multiple full remote code execution zero-days in all major browsers.

Treating security as an absolute is rarely useful because very few things are completely secure. No browser will be completely secure for the foreseeable future.

It's a great justification if you see just how much Google's spyware browser phones home...

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