IE-only, no Firefox
November 5, 2004
Vanessa Tan laments the no Firefox, IE-only policy in her organization. How many of you work in organizations like hers? (Mine happens to practice freedom of choice.)
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Not only do I use Firefox at work, I get to use an Apple G4 cube. I feel quite fortunate.
I would seriously consider quitting…
…if I was faced with the same ignorant IT staff as Vanessa Tan was. The least I would do would be to question their qualifications and demand their immediate replacement. Next, I was asked to uninstall Firefox from my computer. I kind of expected tha…
at my uni you are not allowed to install any software in your roaming account / profile. this is backed up by blocking privs on your account.
it is possible however, to use a zipped build of firefox in your sever space (100mb) and it will will retain all your setting etc as the application data travels around with you
just have to make sure no one looks too closely at your screen.
that said they gave me a laptop so i can do what i want, but when i looked in the sys admin data (left over from when they set it up) i found a firebird profile folder!
Sometimes the problem aren’t company policies that prevent you from using your browser of choice, but the way IE is so tightly integrated into the OS itself (in a bad way), and every Microsoft application by extension.
Case in point is the Outlook/Exchange combination. If the default browser isn’t set to IE you can forget about using the exchange group calendar. I don’t know if this still holds true today, but it was certainly the case a year ago or so.
Personally I never worked with any IT team that insisted you didn’t install any other browser, but certainly there are ones who will gently guide you in IE’s direction should they make heavy use of Microsoft products.
I use Firefox at work but I have been asked to remove it by our IT Department because it isn’t an approved browser. The honour for that goes to Internet Explorer.
I am thinking of running one of those “Portable Firefox on a USB Key” that I hear about - at least, until Firefox is effectively blocked at the company firewall.
I run the IT dept in my company, and I REQUIRE everyone to use Firefox, Thunderbird, and Open Office…That’s my company policy =D
I will have to use IE, instead of the Firefox I use.
We’re going from a Novell net, with Windows 98 to a full Microsoft network (Windows 2000). We are 300 in my organization.
Apparently, our proxy won’t support anything else than IE to go outside. Mozilla and Opera installed, but only for intranet.
What do they think they are doing?
*sigh*
My company supports only IE, but I am allowed to use Firefox if I want.
I get to use whatever browser I want, as long as I can set up the proxy configuration correctly. There’s no hard and fast rules at my company about which browser to use, but internally the techies use Firefox while other departments tend to go with IE6 (IE5 is nowhere to be found thankfully). I also run the public website and am moving it to XHTML as we speak (right now it’s HTML 4.01 Transitional with some XHTML-style syntax that I inherited, but that will soon be changing with the redesign coming early next year).
Earlier this week my employer published a new (we never had one before) “browser policy.” MSIE and Netscape Navigator are the only browsers permitted, and NN only if you have a website that you need for your work which requires it.
Mozilla Firefox was specifically named as an “other” browser which is verboten (no other browsers were named). Reason given? There are too many browsers with different security issues for the company to track & protect. So we’re going to force everyone to use the most insecure browser out there.
I use Firefox about 80% of the time at work lately, and will continue to do so. I work on websites that go out in front of the public, and I will not put my name on anything that only works in IE. I build things like that to the standards first, then work from there to beat IE’s rendering into submission (internal web apps, where we have standardized on IE-only, I’m more lax about. Project managers won’t listen to “look, IE’s broken and doesn’t support that”).
Even my main contact in our local IT security department thinks this policy is a waste - there are far more important things we need to be working on (like hundreds of spyware-infected PCs - guess how most of them get their spyware. It isn’t Firefox or Navigator), and he’s trying to figure out who came up with this stupid thing. He also doesn’t expect it’ll be enforced or enforceable.
No firefox, poor thing !
I do understand that there are some companies has the policy , which not allow employees install software by themselves.
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At the company I work for (about 100 employees), you can choose between Firefox, the Mozilla Suite or IE but Firefox/Mozilla is recommended and widely used (at about 85-90% of all workplaces).
The funny thing is, non IT people had much less problems to do the switch than many of the (windows) programmers… but most of them switched too :)
Posted by: Sascha on November 5, 2004 1pm