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Comment by raxxorrax | Hacker News Reader

Firefox would fit neatly in the corporate world in my opinion. You can have a centrally administered configuration file and Firefox is indeed able to just use certificated from your OS. It is just a small toggle. Still, a bit of effort and maybe advertising would do wonders, because there are companies critical of Chrome that think data protection is worth more than personal advertising. I think Edge is trying to fit in here.

Sure, Edge can be configured by domain policies and that is easy too. For example disallowing https exceptions is a popular recent policy (that gets reverted pretty quickly).

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It would be easier for companies (who aren't anti Google) to administer Chrome policy via their existing Google/Gmail accounts and Google Workspace. Profiles, sync, extensions, etc. can all be centrally administered. And also deployed to Chromebooks for certain users. All without having to manage the overhead of a minority browser with < 5% marketshare. The "I can't get this web app to work in Firefox, how do I install Chrome?" support calls probably outweigh any ideological preference for a libre browser.

Especially for any web shop... Firefox is even less relevant than Microsoft now and forcing it as a primary internal browser is a great way to alienate your company from end user experiences.

I couldn't name you a single webapp that requires Chrome and it wouldn't fit our quality p expectations and would get booted. Apps that require a certain browser will cause problems in the future or force Chrome to become IE. Can you centrally administrate Google accounts? Because employees certainly aren't allowed to use their privat ones.

> Apps that require a certain browser will cause problems in the future or force Chrome to become IE.

It already has, sadly.

> Can you centrally administrate Google accounts? Because employees certainly aren't allowed to use their privat ones.

Yes, definitely. For non Microsoft shops, Google is a very common option (eg academia).

Small business/government sites in the US sadly are very guilty of breaking. Esp. for payments, which makes me feel like I'm back in the late 90's with form submissions...

I use chrome for important stuff for that reason.

WhatsApp Web was Chrome only for quite some time.

From personal experience I know that Teams definitely has some Firefox-only bugs.

What large companies use GMail like that?

Outside of corps ideologically opposed to using Office, like IBM and Oracle, I've almost never seen anybody that didn't run on Outlook. At least since Notes became abandonware anyway.

People still use Microsoft? My experience is largely in small medium biz and academia, both of which use a lot of Google. I haven't seen a Microsoft shop in decades. But that's just my own limited spheres of work.

(edit: to be clear, wasn't trying to be snarky. Genuinely surprised. Thought Microsoft intranets were a thing of legacy dinosaur companies, didn't know that modern enterprises still did that. But I don't work in enterprise, only in small biz, where nobody can afford dedicated sys admins and everything is in the cloud. From what I hear though, the UX of Outlook these days is better than Gmail and gcal (which isn't saying much, I know). Might be worth trying again someday...)

It depends heavily on the industry, but in my experience the vast majority of the business world runs on Microsoft products. For a lot of businesses (think more accountants or law firms than devs), Outlook, Excel and Word are must-haves. That means Windows is a must-have. That means if you don't have the supporting infrastructure (Azure or Active Directory) then administration becomes a nightmare, so those are a must-have. And at that point, since everything else is Microsoft, Teams gets used for comms and OneDrive gets used for filesharing.

That makes sense.

In the small dev world it's kinda the opposite. Linuxy servers beget Mac dev machines, so AD is mostly out, leaving Apple enterprise stuff (shitty) or Google (OK, but nowhere near as powerful as Microsoft).

GDocs becomes the lowest common denominator and many people don't have Word anymore. Data is either cloud native (json, csv) or else imported into Gsheets.

I suspect some of this is due to the modern educational pipeline too, with gsuite (or Google Workspace, or whatever it's called these days) producing a generation of young workers who grew up on that stuff. It's caused quite a generation gap at my current workplace, where the older workers use Microsoft and the younger ones use Google and stuff keeps getting converted back and forth. And once in a while someone sends a PDF and both sides go nooooo...

I know several security professionals who do incident response and therefore see a lot of IT setup across multiple domains since ransomwares are endemic nowadays, and according to them 99% of the shops they intervene run Office or Outlook(365) in some capacity.

Probably a self-selecting sample?

Also, I'd be willing to believe your average Google Workspace, preconfigured by Google, is more secure out of the box than your average Microsoft LAN administered by somebody who once took a certification course twenty years ago.

But when something breaks on self-hosted Microsoft stuff, at least you can hire someone to fix it. When something breaks on Google Workspace, hey, it's a free vacation day for the whole staff!

Could you name any major websites/apps that break in Firefox but not in Chrome?

Not, not any big ones, but I've seen a lot of Firefox specific bugs for smaller sites in the last 2 or 3 years. I've had to debug Firefox issues for my coworkers more than anything else. Sometimes Safari breaks too but that's important because of iOS. Firefox is only used by the ideologues and we don't bother officially supporting it anymore...

I found Amazon unstable on FF for a while a few years ago, it would randomly go off and spin the CPU or eat a pile of RAM, sometimes recovering and sometimes needing to be killed. It was one of the things that pushed me towards using Chrome more. Chrome has since started to have a few issues (occasionally dying and not remembering a chunk of my open tabs being the big recent one) so I'm starting to move back the other way ATM.

M$ teams web doesn't work in Firefox. I was forced to install Chromium under Kubuntu just to use teams at work, as I avoid to install the crappy full teams application like the plague, given it is proprietary, resource heavy and tries to auto-launch whenever it can.

> crappy full teams application like the plague, given it is proprietary, resource heavy and tries to auto-launch whenever it can.

Sounds like they ported over all the best features from Skype! ;)

> Firefox would fit neatly in the corporate world in my opinion.

Lack of corp support is one of the things that harmed FF from what I saw. Until a few years ago it was not as easy to control FF via group policy¹ as it was Chrome, so FF didn't get a look in. Telling infrastructure managers “but you can do X instead and it is just as easy or easier” would fall on deaf ears because while as convenient in isolation it is still something different instead of integrating with what they did for everything else they permitted on their user machine builds.

¹ This has changed since, but too late.

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