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Comment by chris_wot | Hacker News Reader

So use Firefox then. You don't have to run IE on Windows XP.

In most managed corporate environments, you do have to run IE. The freedom of installing your own software at will doesn't exist.

I understand, but it seems to me that if corporations change their standard to something like Chrome or Firefox, then they will have less maintenance costs in the long run. I think it's easier and more cost effective to deploy the latest version of Firefox than it is to:

a. purchase new hardware for the latest OS from Microsoft,

b. Get all the OS images ready to deploy,

c. Train staff to use all the new applications that have changed UIs due to older versions of the software not working well on the new OS.

Not only this, but as I've said ad nauseum, development costs should reduce when you use something that is updated as often to the latest standard as Chrome and Firefox.

Many companies use custom applications that simply don't work in other browsers. A browser like Chrome or Firefox is not appealing to companies who don't want to have to worry about a new version coming out every couple of months and having to constantly test their application to make sure it still works.

This argument is flawed. There are really only two types of custom apps that you are referring to: apps that rely on ActiveX controls, and apps that use nonstandard eventing and DOM APIs, as well as bugs built into Internet Explorer.

In each case you have a problem: those who use ActiveX will eventually find a total lack of support and updates for these apps, and those apps that rely on non-standard behaviour risk getting broken in even minor updates. Not to mention there will come a time when Microsoft will completely stop supporting the browser version the app is relying on, even for security updates.

As has been pointed out by someone else, Firefox has special long term updates for corporations in restricted environments, so it's not a huge concern in terms of lots of updates being applied every few months.

Does anything stop people from running Portable Firefox [1], the version built to run without installation, e.g. off USB drives and such?

[1] http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable

(edited to add forgotten link)

USB ports being disabled on corp PCs for one.

Plus the penalty for running unauthorised software being dismissal.

Yes - education! Your average desk jockey will know when the sites they use break, they won't know why and they won't know about the alternatives.

Group policies can be used to disable execution from any user-writeable directory.

So now we have minimum system requirements for Web pages? How is this any better or simpler than desktop apps? Moreover, what's the point of having an open spec if I need to update my browser every 6 weeks to run the latest version of site X? And what consumer is actually asking for this?

As a rule, you don't. However, Firefox is overall more feature complete, standards compliant and willing to correct bugs in an open fashion than Microsoft is with Internet Explorer.

The ROI isn't really on the end user, it's on those who develop apps and must maintain them.

Incidentally, for many web apps there are indeed minimal system requirements: must do CSS correctly, must follow DOM event model correctly, must render pages in a standards compliant manner, etc.

Assuming consumers lead to your revenue, you should be serving them, not telling them they're not supported. But I realize that's an unpopular opinion here.

The whole "standards compliant" is now just something Web devs tell each other. Browser vendor prefix usage is at an all-time high. Devs are routinely targeting features added by browsers from draft specifications (because that never turns out to be bad). And "standards compliant" seems to always mean the latest standard, which naturally precludes any device that predates that portion of the standard. CSS 1, 2, and 2.1 are all standards too.

Oh, and my question about the consumer is given the choice between having no access at all or geolocation and drop shadows, I'm guessing almost all would rather just be able to access the site. I can't see much coming out of all this browser innovation that normal people care about or would ever ask for.

Actually, it's usually the case that the customer is forced into using an ancient and unsupported environment which is forced on them, by the custom application. That's why organisations stay with old browsers, not the other way around.

One of the points of the post was that switching from IE to FireFox is not a straightforward option. There is a lot of code running that depends upon features, functionality (and perhaps the idiosyncrasies) of IE.

I'm really not sure you can have this both ways. Either you use a modern, up to date browser and code to standards (and thus reduce your coding workload and maintenance), or you can code to an old, out of date browser.

The fact is, the main reason that he wants people to upgrade to IE10 is to reduce the support and maintenance burdens of supporting old browsers with weird javascript and rendering bugs. The heading is, after all "Old technology is wasting everyone’s time and money". The solution I put to everyone is to stop supporting IE8 and install Firefox. You can even deploy it via Active Directory and update it via Group Policy, AFAIK.

So the simple solution is to switch to something like Firefox. Or you could continue to support IE8. It's really not ideal to do both, which you'll need to do if you have Windows 7 or above given you will almost certainly have IE9 or above on these installs.

The main problem is all the internal webapps that were written to support IE6, still works with IE8, and are very costly to rewrite, upgrade or replace.

So in many cases they have to _add_ Firefox, they can't simply replace IE. That means even more user training (what, they've installed a second internet with a fox on it? Which should I use??), so the more tempting option is to just sit it out and wait, because they know that they will have to upgrade to Win7 or Win8 next year anyway if they still want security fixes.

First, you don't need to switch. Installing Firefox does not make removing IE from the machine mandatory

Second, installing FF or Chrome is not viable only if you're an IT drone or similar.

(blah blah corporate policy blah blah)

But of course FF is to blame as well when they came with that upgrade plan of theirs (of several frequent versions)

Firefox now do 'Extended Support Releases' for controlled environments where the admins dont want constant updates http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/

Not quite.

There are many corporate environments that fully control their desktop and don't allow chrome or IE.

There are some major applications that work only in IE.

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