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Getting Your Company to Migrate from IE?
RunningFerreT asks: "With all the recent warnings and recommendations on migrating from MSIE, I have come across a serious problem. The company for which I work doesn't want to, even after being informed of all the exploits and problems with Internet Explorer. Having the boss 'try out' Firefox isn't working: a single site looks bad, so IE must be better. Has anyone had success in convincing management types to switch from IE, to another more secure, standards compliant browser? If so, how did you get the job done?"
This is one thing that allways got to me. Why isnt there a theme that mimics IE's gui perfectly? My parents were resistant to switching to firefox but I pressed them and basicly said it was IE's once removed cousin before they adopted it.
Never could figure out why my girl liked my bitch tits, then I found out she was a lesbian.
Don't pull it, create a GPO to prevent running it and apply it to that group of users I guess.
OK, as a rule, when someone is asking a question about workplaces and bosses and corporate policies -- answers regarding "Here's what I did for my mom / my sister / my grandma..." tend not to be super helpful.
Are you kidding? When I was switching my mom to Firefox and Thunderbird last week I got into an argument with her about why security is important. Eventually she just gave up and said "obviously Microsoft's stuff is better because Bill Gates is rich." At that point my head hit the desk and I just gave up.
Oooh the internet was invented by the W3C!
Seriously, it is a wonder to me why people are so in love with the W3C. Their standards are contorted and difficult to implement, driven by a dream of the web that has not yet, and probably will never be realized (perhaps because it is only shared by the W3C and their coterie, rather than by content publishers and consumers), their licensing restrictions are incompatible with open source (like the GPL), and their reference implementations are ridiculously sub-par. I'm all for standards, but most good internet standards arise from de facto means, not from lofty deliberation.
MSDN doesn't look as good. Some of us just aren't going to switch.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
How I did it
1. Bought him a PowerBook
2. Deleted 'Internet Explorer.app'
3. Showed him all the cool Mac stuff, etc. exposé.
4. Showed him Keynote. Almost sold on just the alignment guides. (Boss only uses presentation software as a fancy fixed slide to slide projector)
5. Showed him he still had Word and Excel, and could read all his old files.
6. Showed him Preview's PDF features.... SOLD.
Switching this Boss was important cause this boss once called us about his computer when the problem turn out that it was off.
A lot of large companies use a webapp called Siebel for customer relationship management (CRM). Not only is siebel the worst application that I've ever seen in 10 years of computer use (and I mean it's really, profoundly bad in every possible way), but Siebel itself uses some weird combination of ActiveX controls and Java applets that manages to ONLY work with a very specific version of IE running on a very specific version of Windows.
I know this because the place I work has been "upgrading" all the Win2K boxes to WinXP so that we can use siebel on them. They spent boatloads of money to both MS & Siebel on the upgrade, so yeah, they're probably not very eager to switch to a browser that will prevent them from using the most important part of their job (Siebel is the main system we use, there are a dozen or so peripheral systems that we use from time to time that may or may not work in FireFox as well).
Consumer's looking to spend money on linux-friendly businesses should probably be avoiding AT&T Wireless... Verizon and General Electric also use Siebel...
Find somebody decent in the Legal Dept. Quietly express concern that, expecially now that the U.S. Goverment has gone on record against using security-swiss-cheese IE, you might face professional liability - similar to an electrician who'd been pressured into doing something clearly dangerous that caused a fire.
Played right, this approach probably has a better chance than any other of getting a no-appeal "IE is banned" rule from on high.
It's easy to make up & spread cool- and credible-sounding stuff. Finding & checking hard facts is hard work.
OK, the whole reason folks want to switch from IE is because Microsoft isn't providing timely patches. However, I'm not sure if Mozilla is either -- Mozilla seems to be a "work in progress", which means that potential security problems are fixed in the development branch, but that does not affect the release schedule. And Firefox is still in beta stages and probably isn't being patched at all.
I read somewhere there's a remote hole in Moz 1.6 and FireFox 0.8. However, the advisory page doesn't list them, and hasn't been updated since November, so I don't know what to believe.
Furthermore, some milestone releases aren't totally stable or may behave differently. It would be very difficult for a corporate deployment to follow Mozilla's release schedule, especially if they had to test intranet apps etc.
I know that Mozilla security is not a huge real world problem yet, but maybe someone can clarify what exactly Mozilla's security patch policy really is.
(Also, you'll have to prepare to uninstall and reinstall the whole browser because there isn't a patch procedure, but that probably could be scripted.)
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
As a power user, I use Firefox as my sole browser on every machine I own and use daily. That being said, as a network admin my network still uses IE as the primary browser for one reason, group policy. I work at a school, so managing Internet settings centrally and locking them down is a requirement. Until I can easily manage Firefox centrally and deploy custom pacakges, I will continue to use IE on my network.
We've never had a problem with IE, and we run an application-level firewall, so filtering the latest IE exploits is quite easy. Popup blocking is provided by the Google Toolbar. Spyware isn't a problem because my users don't run under a privledged account, and McAfee VirusScan 7 corporate picks up browser hijackers as viruses.
> By the way, if you aren't feeling quite as sneaky (I think I actually :).
> took this less-sneaky route myself), rename your new icon to "Internet", not
> "Internet Explorer". That way you're not just lying
Yeah, it's often just a matter of people not recognizing alternative browsers. I tried a similar approach at work, which is a small library setting. On our public computers I made a new shortcut to Firefox on the desktop, gave it a generic globe icon, and called it simply "Internet." Now I never see anyone digging in the Applications folder to look for Explorer.
Our place (hence anon post, sorry to all the "you're anon therefore you've nothing to say" people) keeps making noises about de-Microsofting the organisation, and ok development is moving wholesale over to Linux this year (although that's from Solaris, not Windows, so I'm not sure how that counts), but there's a constant stream of emails with hyperlinks that say "Best viewed in IE" or that just don't work in anything else. Some sites even pay lip service to the anti-MS stuff with "Best viewed with Mozilla", but then only work in IE! FFS, given who we are (one of the five largest software companies in the world), if we can't do a proper job of it there's something wrong. Some internal sites work with other browsers, but it's unfortunately a minority. It's time our CEO stopped spouting all the anti-MS crap - either doing an about turn and admitting that 99% of the company runs on Windows, or making it a sackable offence to make a website that only works on IE.
The next time there's an IE security hole with no patch I'll repeat the process. Of course I'll recommend IE over Mozilla in a similar way if there's ever some big unpatched Mozilla security hole. Since both browsers are now installed on all PCs, it's no big thing.