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Comment by Herring | Hacker News Reader

Maybe that script should point out the browsers that don't require admin, eg chrome & portable firefox

It's not just about being physically able to install something (i.e. having admin privileges), we aren't allowed to install (or even write) anything that is "network aware" for security reasons.

Exactly right, due to "security concerns" you were not supposed to run anything other than IE6. In this case, "security concerns" are defined as: "the club by which a corporate IT department can beat down a reasonable request without being forced to have an intelligent discussion". All machines had monitoring software that phoned home regularly to tell IT what software you were running.

Most average employees just need to get their work done, so they are not going to risk a fight with the IT machine over a browser. To non-geeks, it's just an annoyance, not a major blocker. Better for them to save their energy for a fight that matters (like getting an exception to the 100 megabyte email quota).

I'm a corporate IT guy, we're on IE7 and chrome (for it's application style shortcuts) and my users get about a gig in their inbox, but only if they need it. We had to wait to upgrade to ie7 but eventually the webapps we needed to use decided to "certify" ie7. Before that point we upgraded a few people for testing and nothing seemed broken but we still needed most everybody to run a "supported" platform.

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