Why IE will continue to win the enterprise browser wars

A much more likely cause for IE supremacy is an established set of enterprise "web" applications, where these (badly written) "web" applications are so broken outside IE that they might as well be Win32.

If executives sank money into applications that now run the business, and find that IE keeps those applications running, they're more likely to establish an easy policy like "IE only". They are not likely to spend money to "fix" the "problem" that non-IE users "created".

As ideal as it would be to inform executives that it is Microsoft's broken code that actually created the problem of bringing in new browsers, I guarantee they won't see it that way.

That right there is why business IT changes at such a snail's pace. There's a tremendous difference in mindset between tech businesses, and businesses that use tech to save money, streamline processes, etc.

A lot of people in the startup community proclaim that businesses will be switching en masse from Windows and Blackberries and Office to Apples and iPhones and Google Docs, and it's exactly that sentence that they don't get. Even if newer products would be better for them (and they might) it would have to be a lot better to justify the expense.

All Microsoft has to do is remain good enough.

So it's Mozilla's problem that Microsoft's Policy tools are ridiculously rigid and inflexible?

Actually, I don't know anybody who cares if IE wins or loses in the corporate browser world. It's nice to delineate your business/intranet and public/personal activity into other browsers. In fact, to me it's preferable that there's a "legacy" browser to fulfill the web application equivalent of fax-machine duty. I don't envy the work that the IE team has to do to maintain compatibility with ancient and awful applications kludged together for IE 5.5, and I _really_ don't want that stuff in the browser I visit public sites with.

As for the set of people that think the power goes from the wall into the "hard drive" and that the internet is a blue "e" icon on the desktop, I stand by a previous comment I made ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=302947 ), in that I think IE should be vehicle for modern web experience ActiveX controls.

Would it be possible to write a proxy which would convert IE-only (or IE6-only) webpages into equivalent standards-compliant webpages on the fly?

(I don't know CSS, and especially IE's mangling of it, well enough to know if this problem is AI-complete or not.)

Edit: In case it wasn't obvious, the point would be to make the app work just as before. Simply running an anti-htmltidy would be pointless.

No one?

Then come back when you have.

The ability for the IT shop to have control over their users is a real reason that apps don't get deployed. Walk into the mouth of LDAP once and you'll understand. When you have 10k users, with 200 people worth of turnover or changes a day, you won't understand why they "won't just use our web interface!"

Until you believe it and understand it, you're going to keep writing off customers because their priorities in keeping their users happy and functional don't jibe with your new whizzy app.

I'd always prefer to just try a new idea, then to get permission from my manager and my manager's manager to try that same idea.