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Comment by plorg | Hacker News Reader

My organization (which uses Teams) forcibly migrated all Firefox users to Edge a couple of weeks ago and uninstalled FF. They were citing incompatibility with some software and I assumed that meant the new ERP system being adopted by one of the larger departments.

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Microsoft is very heavily lobbying organizations to use edge as a standard browser right now. They're doing the same to us. It's really annoying. They're hell-bent on increasing marketshare no matter what.

In the last months I have heard everything from MS including "Firefox is the #1 source of security bugs in enterprise" and the like.

Since that's verifiably false, why hasn't Mozilla filed a defamation lawsuit over it?

It would be interesting if Google tweaked their Chromium licensing so that Edge couldn't use it. Then Microsoft wouldn't have a browser at all.

Microsoft could just keep an independent fork—just match features at a slower pace. Google can't change the license of Blink, their renderer, since it's a fork of KDE's LGPL renderer.

gnu license is working as intended - helping… microsoft? I guess

edit: but honestly, Google could go Apple open source way, making code changes in huge dumps that are impossible to integrate back. But I an not sure it’s worth the trouble.

That's the weird thing about Microsoft expanding marketshare.

If they'd actually succeed in capturing the majority of the market, there's a big chance Google would throw in the towel and then what??

Then they stop all development. It already happened with IE6. Took a decade to decrown it even though for all intents and purposes it was a dead browser.

And they wouldn't even need to stoop so low as to make it non-FOSS. Just making it GPLv3+ would probably do it.

Or “we like open source software and ‘freedom’ as long as it is used by the right people in a way that I agree with”

trying to get rid of a nother IM client at my place. everyone hates it because the one they are replacing is very simple and quick

Lobbying? Please describe

Constantly hanging out with the senior management praising Edge. As they say "Microsoft is better at talking to your boss than you do".

Also their consultants are trained to be shills. Every time we have a call with them they will remark about it if we use another browser, even though their area of expertise has nothing to do with it.

> forcibly migrated all Firefox users to Edge

Man, I can understand doing that for regular users who don't care, but as a developer?

Just a few weeks ago an integrator for an ERP system our customer had bought was trying to show some details in a Teams call when his PC suddenly rebooted. He came back and apologized, turns out it was a company policy forced reboot. In the middle of the day because what are timezones?

If my company tried anything like forcing which browser is installed or when my machine reboots, I'd hand in my resignation promptly.

From a security perspective, I feel like my employer can do what they need to. I wouldn’t accept 24/7 active monitoring, but ensuring programs are up-to-date and trusted seems like basic steps in preventing a security incident.

The two programs I’ve used that auto-update your machine give you plenty of a heads-up that you should do it yourself.

> From a security perspective, I feel like my employer can do what they need to

I've always felt that this kind of attitude from IT departments is counter productive. It gives people a false sense of security at best, and baby mentality at worst (where they assume no responsibility because it's apparently someone else's).

This sounds remarkably familiar. A certain ERP I've been dealing with sent out dire warnings about installing and updating Edge, else something nebulously defined would break. This understandably caused a lot of confusion and frustration with users (the ERP spammed so many with this warning...) and pissed off IT teams. It turns out that the Edge they were talking about was the ERP's own software named Edge (amusingly named and released long after Edge the browser showed up), which they leave for the end user to optionally install, and actively refused to clearly document why, where, and how to install it.

The fun part is all of this was to update an expired certificate.

The above link is for home Teams.

Your company should be using teams.microsoft.com ! :)

So your comment makes no sense.

We as IT admins may just want to keep track of Edge updates and extensions and not want someone running months old Firefox all sneaky like.

I'm sure there's a distinction, but this is an anecdote, and the above link is specifically another person's anecdote. My comment makes fine sense, if you want to say they are completely separate products, it's probably unrelated just do that, don't be an ass.

Our IT department doesn't treat us like idiots, FF was an officially supported browser until a month ago, we were on the most recent version. I believe them if they say it's about webapp compatibility, even if this does help them manage the browser under group policy or whatever. They could make this decision for whatever reason they want and wouldn't have a problem getting people to go along with it.

Because teams.microsoft.com works in Firefox

teams.live.com does not

So they are different and it is relevant.

Which organization? At least they can get derided publicly for doing this...

I work for a small manufacturing company. I'm not going to blow up my company or my job over a decision I have next to no insight into that affects my job in such a small way.

I wonder why they don't just allow both

At least Edge is now Chrome...

"At least" makes it sound like that's a silver lining, but that makes it worse. It's exacerbating the Blink monoculture problem.

You are right; it is more defeatism than optimism really

This is 100% down to the poor manageability of Firefox on corporate networks. Edge has all the same ADMX templates plus more than Chrome. Corporate management of software is important.

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