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Mozilla To Launch "Build Your Own Browser"
angry tapir sends in a piece from Down Under which begins "Mozilla is readying a program that will allow companies to build their own customized browsers based on the next version of Firefox, which will be out in a few weeks. ... Through the Build Your Own Browser program, which will start sometime soon after Firefox 3.5 is released at the end of June, companies can use a Web application provided by Mozilla to specify certain customizations for the browser, such as bookmarks to certain sites or corporate intranets or portals. ... The bulk of enterprises still use Internet Explorer if they mandate a browser for company use, because Microsoft provides provisioning and installation software for IE that makes it easy for enterprises to control browser settings and install across all corporate desktops, said Forrester analyst Sheri McLeish. Mozilla has not historically done this, but something like the Build Your Own Browser program is a good start to encourage enterprises to use Firefox over IE."
At least they used to. Starting with Opera 7 you could import a set of bookmarks, setup the home page, etc. and then distribute your own customized version of Opera. Good to see Firefox starting to consider this as well.
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I dunno, I work for a Fortune 100 company and we use IE because all the crappy "enterprise" software we run requires stupid ActiveX or JavaScript or whatever that only runs on IE6. Good luck to FireFox, but customizations ain't got nothing to do with it where I work.
There's even more to it than that. The WebBrowser COM/.NET control is the IE control. Even if you manage to supplant IE as the browser of choice, all code which embeds the COM or .NET wrapped COM control depends on it. So for example, the Windows Shell and the help system, and Windows Update, Windows Media Player, third party apps integrating the system WebBrowser such as WinAmp, etc.
The Internet Explorer browser itself is really just a light weight set of UIs wrapped around the standard WebBrowser COM/ActiveX control. It's actually pretty fun to write .NET code that interacts with the WebBrowser. You can add some interesting features like web page scrapers, etc.
Blaming enterprise software for your inability to install FireFox is nothing but a cop-out. The solution to this problem is so simple, I can't believe people even see it as a problem anymore.
Install Firefox, then install ieTab. ieTab can be set to do nothing until you browse to a any of a list of domains. Once you enter a domain, ieTab takes over and runs that tab inside a native IE browser. IE is seamlessly embedded inside the tab, and the user won't even notice.
The best part is that once a lot of companies do this, the enterprise software companies can start developing their software to standards, since most companies will already be using FireFox. Using IE for every website, just because of one domain (usually local network) requiring IE is just stupid
This whole "We can't use FireFox because of enterprise app X" is bullshit. People need to learn how to properly manage corporate computer systems without coming up with these pathetic excuses for not doing their jobs properly.
ieTab doesn't work in Linux because there's no IE to load in the tab in Linux. That's all ieTab does...