Comment by eckyptang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eckyptang | Hacker News Reader

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No not at all. Most of the LOB applications you see these days work very well in most browsers. Ours works in Firefox, Chrome, IE, Safari perfectly and is entirely plugin free. I've not seen an ActiveX for about 5 years and that was a file upload control. All our fugly desktop integration is done with a broker application which runs on the user's machine and talks to local COM objects via web services. You see an occasional fugy J2EE page or a WebForms page but mostly, it's pretty spankingly good looking and works well. This is financial sector stuff as well which is the worst market for heel-dragging.

Corporations fear things breaking. Retraining is rarely an issue for a browser upgrade. However, if someone pushes out a crap Chrome update like this and an LOB application goes pop then heads roll. Chrome is entirely out of band from their normal operations and skill sets so it just doesn't even get considered. It also has dubious unpredictable support lifecycles and a rate of change which would scare anyone. To use a car analogy: they want a 3 year old Volvo, not a 6 month old Tesla.

I think being able to differentiate in the browser market is a great thing. Chrome can offer tools for enterprise use, but I seriously doubt that they are ever going to offer long term support for old versions. Meanwhile that's Microsoft's bread and butter, but that means that if you want a larger portion of experimental or recently finalized web features, you have to go somewhere besides IE.

What's bad is when you have to cater to old, broken IE behavior because you have to support that part of the market. We're seeing much less of that and more just "IE doesn't support new feature X". That does hold back some of the newest stuff, but not having typed arrays is not at all comparable to having to support IE6, for instance.

Personally, I would be ecstatic if we can maintain for as long as possible this nearly even split of marketshare over three (desktop) browsers.

What is your experience based on?

I've been working with some large enterprises in the past (50k+ employees), all of them only use IE and all of them are full with some crappy ActiveX software, some by HP, some homegrown, it's really full of that crap. :( Even software that would support multi-platform is crippled in a way that only Windows+IE works, because in the projects noone cares if some other browser or (god forbid) another OS is supported.

European finance, insurance, banking, news agencies, e-commerce and market research companies. We're talking large companies on the same scale.

In my experience those kind of companies are heavily involved with big players like MS, HP, etc. who all push their own proprietary crap. Bundle this with a "we don't allow employees to install other browers so why should we care/test/develop for other technologies? We can even assume every PC has ActiveX installed and ready, so hell yeah let's use that!"

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