Well if customers would start saying build this site for HTML 4.01 with CSS 2, instead of IE 6 or else I am not interested, then this would change.
No one demands standards. They demand a particular version of IE 95% of the time. So these intranet companies think IE only and make sure it emulates its quirks.
My hope is with IE 9/10 this will change greatly just like Chrome 4 renders HTML identically to Chrome 12. Only difference is additional tags, javascript, and api stuff. Microsoft is expressing an interest in constiency now but we will see. That is how it should run.
It is funny that these same IT executives who make these decisions then say... what now I have 5 apps that only work with IE 6??? How did that happen? Sigh
"And who was the asshole who told Enterprise users (paraphrasing) "We don't give a shit about you.""
That would be Asa. A little FYI he is not part of the PR department, nor is he authorised to speak for Mozilla in any way. If Mozilla has any sense they would fire this guy ASAP. He even posted on slashdot and... paraphrased "Please go back to IE 8. I beg you too!..." to someone whining how he convinced management to side with him to upgrade to Firefox, and Asa just put his job on the line.
Well F*** you too. To me the biggest blow is not the shoddy releases nor the promise to say corporate America you are shit out of the creek, but his attitude. It is one thing to question privately whether to support corporate users. It is another to bash them when many of its I.T. professionals are swinging their bat out of their way to get your product in.
I no longer use Firefox as a result of all of this and they are turning into irrevelence. They can't change the web for open standards unless corporate users use something besides IE. Well, there solution is to say fuck them. There reply will say screw you too. The webmasters will notice an increase in IE usage and ignore html 5.... not very bright Asa.
Now if they fire Asa and apologize and offer an acitive directory tool and maybe an enteprise edition of Firefox that is updated every 6 months all would be forgiven. But, a lot of damage has been going on from this and Firefox itself is in trouble. Quality is very low and it is the bottom since Firefox 3.6.
We want Firefox to succeed so we can stop using IE at work. However, many of us we switched to Firefox in the office are no longer supported. Mozilla is making us look like asses and proving the paper MCSE's right in choosing IE 7 instead. Sigh
IE is manageable but reaks. Those who support it at work want to keep our jobs. IE just works and is very administratable as group policies have become popular since Firefox 1.0 came out. IE ties in with sharepoint and exchange nicely at work. Firefox of old is gone and is being replaced by... god knows what. It is not stable nor reliable as those of us screaming to use Firefox 5 years ago find IE 9 stable and more reliable than the flaky Firefox which has plugins that break every 3 months.
PHB's always ask these large intranet companies to support IE rather than html 4. So these companies never even considered open standards as it is not what customers requested. Our job is to make sure things do not break so we don't get fired. Times were different 5 years ago as we had a bigger staff and a larger pre-great recession budget where we did more than just try not to get fired everyday. Now it is about automation with software updates so we can hire less people to do the same job.
If you check sites like this, that monitor web browser usage you will see that Firefox has been on decline for quite some time. I think with the very recent history of Firefox 4, 5, and now this FUD, you will see a great insurgence of IE.
This all started with the bloat of Firefox 3.5 and the introduction of Chrome. When I see the writing on the wall I tend to change and be an early adopter of the next trend so I do not get left behind. I played with IE 9 last March and loved it and started taking Chrome more seriously after everyone started using it. With the latest news I will leave Mozilla behind. The sole reason to support it was because it supported change and open standards and frankly was a much better browser. It was what IE should have been from day 1.
These days it is helping people stick with proprietary standards and is low quality if you ask anyone who does QA testing. Chrome and IE are frankly better. Chrome has great GPO's and MSI's. In addition, you do not have to worry about your users being infected with Flash (#1 cause of infections today) as it updates automatically unless you stop it with the Google admin toolkit. IE 9 is a very good browser too and is standards compliant now and no longer quirky.
Innovation with HTML 5 is going forward without Firefox. May it rest in piece as it is turning more into Netscape.
"Overwriting the MBR requires a handle to "\\.\PhysicalDriveX". That requires Admin rights [microsoft.com], so malware trying to do this would fail on my machine."
Not necessarily, that security is only enforced by the kernel if an app requests to access something thru itvia an API. A buffer overflow or vector go around the kernel and write it directly using assembly and not using the win32 API.
Flash malware is the worse and can do this just by an ad popping up at a website. It will use a vector attack with an image to launch assembly code and install itself without the kernel even knowing what is going on. If you have WindowsXP the problem is worse as the CPU has no way to tell the difference between data and executable bytes. Flash uses images but Windows considers it an executable and will simply let it run full access.
Well most Mom and Pops just throw out their perfectly working computers and get new ones. Now the OEMs can make even more MONEY!!
I think the throw away mentality is part of the reasoning and not to save $3 per unit. Appliance makers love people repurchasing their cheap crap every few years.
I would mod you up if I didn't contribute to this thread!
Unix is written in C just like Windows and therefore has the same buffer overlow problems. When people bitch about Windows they always quote WindowsXP, IE 6, ActiveX, and 10 year old exploits, etc.
Infact, Windows 7 rescrambles all the ram addresses constantly to prevent vector attacks etc. Linux boxen are targeted because they are servers that hold insecure mysql databases with customer credit cards and other niceties that hackers look for.
The biggest threat is not IE exploits but Adobe Flash. Linux users use it too and have the same problems. Difference, is antivirus software for Windows has active protection and monitoring. Linux you have no clue if you were hit. Real professionals uninstall it or use chrome that always has updated flash in it.
The fact that people think it is more secure is dangerous.
"IF you even find you have a rootkit, the only real solution is to throw out the whole machinel."
That is a little extreme isn't it? Infact, so many just throw out a 2 year old computer and get a new one that entire landfills are being dumped with perfectly working computers... excluding their OS installations.
I have always been able to just reinstall Windows and buy them off of people as low cost computers for my not so rich friends. Very rare do virii flash your BOIS or VGA. Reason being, like a biological virus, it is ineffective if it kills the host. A common cold rarely kills a host and therefore has ample opportunity to spread. Bluepill... or was it redpill? That concept has been around for years, but no real implementation to run a whole OS under a bios level VM ever came to pass. Too many bioses and running an OS in a VM is very difficult. I use virtualbox and it still has issues with reliability.
Most rootkits make it impossible to find and a simple wipe always gets rid of them. With the large amount of hardware out there it is too difficult and not practical to make a BIOS or firmware level malware that will work and spread through all hosts. Now Mac users will be in trouble because the hardware is the same. I find this odd, as pc's are too varied with different bios, cards, and other peripherals to do this effectively.
"I can't say that I remember being faced with an infection where the only solution is to nuke it, so that's new.
" I have.
The problem is even after the infection, the system can be so damaged that it can take over 5 minutes just to boot. The user would love to be able to just turn on the computer and have it work fast like it did when it was fresh out of the box. My exgf had a laptop infected and nothing could be found with any anti virus product. Malware bytes could not even load properly.
I just hit F9 and did a full system recovery. It was easier to get it done and over with, as even if I did remove some infections the system was too damaged to be usable afterwards.
The problem with system restore is that it is a great way to hide malware. Since the metadata or shadow volume is copied sporadically, it means it will never be scanned by an anti virus scanner. Worse it means after the infection is cleaned it can reinstall itself later when you use the system restore. A recovery is the only tried too method unfortunately.
The only good news is that starting with Windows XP most data files are stored in my pics, my documents, etc so they are easy to backup and put back on.
Every new pc will ask you to make one or will have one in a hidden partition. With my Asus it is F9 to rewipe the sytem back to factory defaults.
That responsibility is up to the user. I do miss the days when I had an actual copy of NT 4 or Windows 2000 that I could do whatever I want with a new workstation, but those days are over. Everyone pirated it.
If the user chose to be irresponsible they could always take them to geeksquad and wait a week or order a pair of restore cd's from the manufacture and wait a week or two. You can't expect Microsoft to give everyone a real copy of Windows do you? The agreement in the EULA is between Microsoft and the manufacturer... not you.
Two words Adobe Flash. All you need to do is open your browser. Vector attacks and buffer overflows get ahold that way. Second is Java. When I do a complete wipe and restore the first thing I do is uninstall flash 9. Use chrpme if possible make sure flash is disabled or has later version. Adobe pdf reader is very bad too. Foxit is a good replacement.
I have not run citrix in 10 years. When I used it it was a gdi terminal service running nt 4 on beefy server and was slow unresponsive as 30 users were logged in as dumb terminals. I thought thats what you were doing. Bad memories
I find the fact that you have to run a bulky emulator or worse a whole range of expensive bulky servers running Citrix over a sluggish LAN just to run some html the proper way is ludicrous and insane! I can see running old IBM 370 apps from 30 years ago, but it is silly for a web browser and you running this expensive equipment to imitate old bugs.
Chrome on the otherhand does not have this problem with many updates as it simple renders the same html exactly the same with each revision. It only adds support for more additional tags. Hopefully IE 9 on to 10 and beyond will do this as well. It is just astounding to me that people would go to these lengths.
"If the plugin will work anyway, disable add-on version checking and bob's your uncle."
Yeah, try doing this when you serve 50 customers all at once whining how that better browser you choice is fucking up. Or how the VP of logistics is wondeirng why his teams CRM plugin failed this morning, etc. Oh just tell every single one to disable addon checking....
That sir, wont fly and it makes you look like an ass to them.
I tried to convince a friend to try out a Mac a long time ago after he told me he liked the improvements and the reliability of them compared to DOS/Widows 3.1. He told no way. The world run's on IBM's and to pick a non MS platform is idiotic. He is now management and guess which platform he prefers at work? If you said it is what the world runs IE you are probably right.
You may hate government intervention, but classic physcology dictates people will stick to inferior things because it is what they are used too. A change is needed that would make their current choice inferior and cause dissatisfaction.
I think IE is going to have a major comeback. Many corporate executives are frustrated that their Apple IPADs can't connect to their corporate sites. But wait Windows 8 can!!! It will run on tablets too and guess which browser it will use? IE 10.
"Most senior management has seen the mistake of "recommended" software or hardware changes over the years. This is the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality."
True. If management was around during 1999 when companies spent billions being Y2K compliant, they were told that productivity would go through the roof!!!
Well, they upgraded and many saw no increase in productivity. If there was some it was minor and not worth the HUGE cost. After spending billions upgrading 10 years ago why upgrade? Didn't we do that 10 years ago?
In this economic cycle, many businesses half much less employees and are doing more with less. They can not afford to willy nilly to cool features, and risk breaking the productivity of their already overworked workforce. They are in survival mode still and the pressure is on more than ever for people to do as many things as humanly possible without being fired. A computer outage would be very bad indeed.
Yes, but the reason IT departments seem to act irregular, is because the regular users will scream when they log into their intranet app and it doesn't work! We have a deadline to get this done by 5pm today!!! FIX IT! etc.
So I would agree IE 6/7 are regular users. Regular users stick to things like Windows and Oracle even if they suck or expensive just because it was what they know and where their data is. You can't just not use it and still plan to keep your job.
Many want change, most do not give a shit and just do what they normally do without some browser company getting in the way. So moral of the story is change slowly, but frequently, in a way where people can do what they normally do.
Certain activeX controls are not compatible with IE7 because of security patches to activeX disabled their functionality. Not to mention there are many stupid designed ones with scripts that say if IE 6 then x, else print "App only compatible with IE 6" or something retarded. Early versions of Sharepoint would create IE 6 specific controls if you were not careful, because the way permissions had changed. I am not an activeX hacker by any sense of the means, but I would assume the break from GDi+ for visual elements due to huge security holes is one of the largest breakages. Obviously the html and css support was so horrible under IE 6 that these intranet programmers used GDI hacks and pretended to be win32 applets just to get around it. Shudder...
"Are corporations websites *that* badly coded that a minor change in browser *version* would cause it to not work?"
Yes. Case in point the VMWare plugin used in their workstation line. It is not compatible with Firefox 5 and would cause havoc. There are many other examples, but html differences are not the only concern. If you could (you can't) control Firefox auto update withe very desktop, now Firefox 4.01 does not get security updates making it more insecure. At least IE gets security updates all the way back to IE 7.
Many activeX controls in sharepoint are finicky too and require IE. Most shops have Visual Studio licences so Sharepoint will just be picked up. IE 9 is a good browser and now there is no reason to run anything but IE if you are a large enterprise.
"Businesses need ActiveX for legacy junk. But a good browser would never run something as insecure as ActiveX."... but more importantly, businesses need something that wont update and break shit every 3 months and bring productivity to a crawl. It doesn't matter if its HTML or a critical 3rd party internet reporting app plugin. There is no way to do this other than disabling updates on every single desktop manually on Firefox.... oh and then you do not get security updates as an added bonus. Now you have support costs with infected clients. Just great!
Business needs manageability too as as a top feature. Chrome is starting with managed group templates and objects at least, but IE is already there. Might as well switch back so the PHB's wont fire you.
Chrome has enterprise tools and group policy objects. Its addons wont break and many are built inside. Use Chrome instead. I find superior to Firefox on Linux with hardware acceleration anyway.
I would advise your workplace to just upgrade IE to 8 or 9. IE 9 is a surprisingly very good release I would rank between Firefox and Chrome. Infact, I like IE 9 best as it is smooth on the eyes when scrolling graphical websites. IE 8 is ok, and unlike IE 6 or IE 7 is more standards compliant and is about where Firefox 3.0 is. If your workplace is planning on moving to Windows 7 use IE 9. It really doesn't suck and is a nice compromise over using IE 7 or earlier which are horrible.
One good thing is Microsoft's browsers are getting competitive again thanks to Firefox and Chrome.
Slashdot Mirror
Well if customers would start saying build this site for HTML 4.01 with CSS 2, instead of IE 6 or else I am not interested, then this would change.
No one demands standards. They demand a particular version of IE 95% of the time. So these intranet companies think IE only and make sure it emulates its quirks.
My hope is with IE 9/10 this will change greatly just like Chrome 4 renders HTML identically to Chrome 12. Only difference is additional tags, javascript, and api stuff. Microsoft is expressing an interest in constiency now but we will see. That is how it should run.
It is funny that these same IT executives who make these decisions then say ... what now I have 5 apps that only work with IE 6??? How did that happen? Sigh
"And who was the asshole who told Enterprise users (paraphrasing) "We don't give a shit about you.""
That would be Asa. A little FYI he is not part of the PR department, nor is he authorised to speak for Mozilla in any way. If Mozilla has any sense they would fire this guy ASAP. He even posted on slashdot and ... paraphrased "Please go back to IE 8. I beg you too! ..." to someone whining how he convinced management to side with him to upgrade to Firefox, and Asa just put his job on the line.
Well F*** you too. To me the biggest blow is not the shoddy releases nor the promise to say corporate America you are shit out of the creek, but his attitude. It is one thing to question privately whether to support corporate users. It is another to bash them when many of its I.T. professionals are swinging their bat out of their way to get your product in.
I no longer use Firefox as a result of all of this and they are turning into irrevelence. They can't change the web for open standards unless corporate users use something besides IE. Well, there solution is to say fuck them. There reply will say screw you too. The webmasters will notice an increase in IE usage and ignore html 5. ... not very bright Asa.
Now if they fire Asa and apologize and offer an acitive directory tool and maybe an enteprise edition of Firefox that is updated every 6 months all would be forgiven. But, a lot of damage has been going on from this and Firefox itself is in trouble. Quality is very low and it is the bottom since Firefox 3.6.
Wow, that really convinced us to implement Firefox at work, by saying we are all wrong. NOT!
It is a love/hate thing with IE.
We want Firefox to succeed so we can stop using IE at work. However, many of us we switched to Firefox in the office are no longer supported. Mozilla is making us look like asses and proving the paper MCSE's right in choosing IE 7 instead. Sigh
IE is manageable but reaks. Those who support it at work want to keep our jobs. IE just works and is very administratable as group policies have become popular since Firefox 1.0 came out. IE ties in with sharepoint and exchange nicely at work. Firefox of old is gone and is being replaced by ... god knows what. It is not stable nor reliable as those of us screaming to use Firefox 5 years ago find IE 9 stable and more reliable than the flaky Firefox which has plugins that break every 3 months.
PHB's always ask these large intranet companies to support IE rather than html 4. So these companies never even considered open standards as it is not what customers requested. Our job is to make sure things do not break so we don't get fired. Times were different 5 years ago as we had a bigger staff and a larger pre-great recession budget where we did more than just try not to get fired everyday. Now it is about automation with software updates so we can hire less people to do the same job.
That explains the change.
If you check sites like this, that monitor web browser usage you will see that Firefox has been on decline for quite some time. I think with the very recent history of Firefox 4, 5, and now this FUD, you will see a great insurgence of IE.
This all started with the bloat of Firefox 3.5 and the introduction of Chrome. When I see the writing on the wall I tend to change and be an early adopter of the next trend so I do not get left behind. I played with IE 9 last March and loved it and started taking Chrome more seriously after everyone started using it. With the latest news I will leave Mozilla behind. The sole reason to support it was because it supported change and open standards and frankly was a much better browser. It was what IE should have been from day 1.
These days it is helping people stick with proprietary standards and is low quality if you ask anyone who does QA testing. Chrome and IE are frankly better. Chrome has great GPO's and MSI's. In addition, you do not have to worry about your users being infected with Flash (#1 cause of infections today) as it updates automatically unless you stop it with the Google admin toolkit. IE 9 is a very good browser too and is standards compliant now and no longer quirky.
Innovation with HTML 5 is going forward without Firefox. May it rest in piece as it is turning more into Netscape.
Download the ultimate bootCD. It includes FreeDOS and TestDisk and many many other utilities. It was a life saver on my system
"Overwriting the MBR requires a handle to "\\.\PhysicalDriveX". That requires Admin rights [microsoft.com], so malware trying to do this would fail on my machine."
Not necessarily, that security is only enforced by the kernel if an app requests to access something thru itvia an API. A buffer overflow or vector go around the kernel and write it directly using assembly and not using the win32 API.
Flash malware is the worse and can do this just by an ad popping up at a website. It will use a vector attack with an image to launch assembly code and install itself without the kernel even knowing what is going on. If you have WindowsXP the problem is worse as the CPU has no way to tell the difference between data and executable bytes. Flash uses images but Windows considers it an executable and will simply let it run full access.
Well most Mom and Pops just throw out their perfectly working computers and get new ones. Now the OEMs can make even more MONEY!!
I think the throw away mentality is part of the reasoning and not to save $3 per unit. Appliance makers love people repurchasing their cheap crap every few years.
I would mod you up if I didn't contribute to this thread!
Unix is written in C just like Windows and therefore has the same buffer overlow problems. When people bitch about Windows they always quote WindowsXP, IE 6, ActiveX, and 10 year old exploits, etc.
Infact, Windows 7 rescrambles all the ram addresses constantly to prevent vector attacks etc. Linux boxen are targeted because they are servers that hold insecure mysql databases with customer credit cards and other niceties that hackers look for.
The biggest threat is not IE exploits but Adobe Flash. Linux users use it too and have the same problems. Difference, is antivirus software for Windows has active protection and monitoring. Linux you have no clue if you were hit. Real professionals uninstall it or use chrome that always has updated flash in it.
The fact that people think it is more secure is dangerous.
"IF you even find you have a rootkit, the only real solution is to throw out the whole machinel."
That is a little extreme isn't it? Infact, so many just throw out a 2 year old computer and get a new one that entire landfills are being dumped with perfectly working computers ... excluding their OS installations.
I have always been able to just reinstall Windows and buy them off of people as low cost computers for my not so rich friends. Very rare do virii flash your BOIS or VGA. Reason being, like a biological virus, it is ineffective if it kills the host. A common cold rarely kills a host and therefore has ample opportunity to spread. Bluepill ... or was it redpill? That concept has been around for years, but no real implementation to run a whole OS under a bios level VM ever came to pass. Too many bioses and running an OS in a VM is very difficult. I use virtualbox and it still has issues with reliability.
Most rootkits make it impossible to find and a simple wipe always gets rid of them. With the large amount of hardware out there it is too difficult and not practical to make a BIOS or firmware level malware that will work and spread through all hosts. Now Mac users will be in trouble because the hardware is the same. I find this odd, as pc's are too varied with different bios, cards, and other peripherals to do this effectively.
"I can't say that I remember being faced with an infection where the only solution is to nuke it, so that's new.
"
I have.
The problem is even after the infection, the system can be so damaged that it can take over 5 minutes just to boot. The user would love to be able to just turn on the computer and have it work fast like it did when it was fresh out of the box. My exgf had a laptop infected and nothing could be found with any anti virus product. Malware bytes could not even load properly.
I just hit F9 and did a full system recovery. It was easier to get it done and over with, as even if I did remove some infections the system was too damaged to be usable afterwards.
The problem with system restore is that it is a great way to hide malware. Since the metadata or shadow volume is copied sporadically, it means it will never be scanned by an anti virus scanner. Worse it means after the infection is cleaned it can reinstall itself later when you use the system restore. A recovery is the only tried too method unfortunately.
The only good news is that starting with Windows XP most data files are stored in my pics, my documents, etc so they are easy to backup and put back on.
Every new pc will ask you to make one or will have one in a hidden partition. With my Asus it is F9 to rewipe the sytem back to factory defaults.
That responsibility is up to the user. I do miss the days when I had an actual copy of NT 4 or Windows 2000 that I could do whatever I want with a new workstation, but those days are over. Everyone pirated it.
If the user chose to be irresponsible they could always take them to geeksquad and wait a week or order a pair of restore cd's from the manufacture and wait a week or two. You can't expect Microsoft to give everyone a real copy of Windows do you? The agreement in the EULA is between Microsoft and the manufacturer ... not you.
Two words Adobe Flash. All you need to do is open your browser. Vector attacks and buffer overflows get ahold that way. Second is Java. When I do a complete wipe and restore the first thing I do is uninstall flash 9. Use chrpme if possible make sure flash is disabled or has later version. Adobe pdf reader is very bad too. Foxit is a good replacement.
Ahh
I have not run citrix in 10 years. When I used it it was a gdi terminal service running nt 4 on beefy server and was slow unresponsive as 30 users were logged in as dumb terminals. I thought thats what you were doing. Bad memories
I find the fact that you have to run a bulky emulator or worse a whole range of expensive bulky servers running Citrix over a sluggish LAN just to run some html the proper way is ludicrous and insane! I can see running old IBM 370 apps from 30 years ago, but it is silly for a web browser and you running this expensive equipment to imitate old bugs.
Chrome on the otherhand does not have this problem with many updates as it simple renders the same html exactly the same with each revision. It only adds support for more additional tags. Hopefully IE 9 on to 10 and beyond will do this as well. It is just astounding to me that people would go to these lengths.
"If the plugin will work anyway, disable add-on version checking and bob's your uncle."
Yeah, try doing this when you serve 50 customers all at once whining how that better browser you choice is fucking up. Or how the VP of logistics is wondeirng why his teams CRM plugin failed this morning, etc. Oh just tell every single one to disable addon checking ....
That sir, wont fly and it makes you look like an ass to them.
It is true.
I tried to convince a friend to try out a Mac a long time ago after he told me he liked the improvements and the reliability of them compared to DOS/Widows 3.1. He told no way. The world run's on IBM's and to pick a non MS platform is idiotic. He is now management and guess which platform he prefers at work? If you said it is what the world runs IE you are probably right.
You may hate government intervention, but classic physcology dictates people will stick to inferior things because it is what they are used too. A change is needed that would make their current choice inferior and cause dissatisfaction.
I think IE is going to have a major comeback. Many corporate executives are frustrated that their Apple IPADs can't connect to their corporate sites. But wait Windows 8 can!!! It will run on tablets too and guess which browser it will use? IE 10.
"Most senior management has seen the mistake of "recommended" software or hardware changes over the years. This is the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality."
True. If management was around during 1999 when companies spent billions being Y2K compliant, they were told that productivity would go through the roof!!!
Well, they upgraded and many saw no increase in productivity. If there was some it was minor and not worth the HUGE cost. After spending billions upgrading 10 years ago why upgrade? Didn't we do that 10 years ago?
In this economic cycle, many businesses half much less employees and are doing more with less. They can not afford to willy nilly to cool features, and risk breaking the productivity of their already overworked workforce. They are in survival mode still and the pressure is on more than ever for people to do as many things as humanly possible without being fired. A computer outage would be very bad indeed.
Yes, but the reason IT departments seem to act irregular, is because the regular users will scream when they log into their intranet app and it doesn't work! We have a deadline to get this done by 5pm today!!! FIX IT! etc.
So I would agree IE 6/7 are regular users. Regular users stick to things like Windows and Oracle even if they suck or expensive just because it was what they know and where their data is. You can't just not use it and still plan to keep your job.
Many want change, most do not give a shit and just do what they normally do without some browser company getting in the way. So moral of the story is change slowly, but frequently, in a way where people can do what they normally do.
Certain activeX controls are not compatible with IE7 because of security patches to activeX disabled their functionality. Not to mention there are many stupid designed ones with scripts that say if IE 6 then x, else print "App only compatible with IE 6" or something retarded. Early versions of Sharepoint would create IE 6 specific controls if you were not careful, because the way permissions had changed. I am not an activeX hacker by any sense of the means, but I would assume the break from GDi+ for visual elements due to huge security holes is one of the largest breakages. Obviously the html and css support was so horrible under IE 6 that these intranet programmers used GDI hacks and pretended to be win32 applets just to get around it. Shudder ...
"Are corporations websites *that* badly coded that a minor change in browser *version* would cause it to not work?"
Yes. Case in point the VMWare plugin used in their workstation line. It is not compatible with Firefox 5 and would cause havoc. There are many other examples, but html differences are not the only concern. If you could (you can't) control Firefox auto update withe very desktop, now Firefox 4.01 does not get security updates making it more insecure. At least IE gets security updates all the way back to IE 7.
Many activeX controls in sharepoint are finicky too and require IE. Most shops have Visual Studio licences so Sharepoint will just be picked up. IE 9 is a good browser and now there is no reason to run anything but IE if you are a large enterprise.
Mozilla fucked up bigtime.
"Businesses need ActiveX for legacy junk. But a good browser would never run something as insecure as ActiveX." ... but more importantly, businesses need something that wont update and break shit every 3 months and bring productivity to a crawl. It doesn't matter if its HTML or a critical 3rd party internet reporting app plugin. There is no way to do this other than disabling updates on every single desktop manually on Firefox .... oh and then you do not get security updates as an added bonus. Now you have support costs with infected clients. Just great!
Business needs manageability too as as a top feature. Chrome is starting with managed group templates and objects at least, but IE is already there. Might as well switch back so the PHB's wont fire you.
Chrome has enterprise tools and group policy objects. Its addons wont break and many are built inside. Use Chrome instead. I find superior to Firefox on Linux with hardware acceleration anyway.
I would advise your workplace to just upgrade IE to 8 or 9. IE 9 is a surprisingly very good release I would rank between Firefox and Chrome. Infact, I like IE 9 best as it is smooth on the eyes when scrolling graphical websites. IE 8 is ok, and unlike IE 6 or IE 7 is more standards compliant and is about where Firefox 3.0 is. If your workplace is planning on moving to Windows 7 use IE 9. It really doesn't suck and is a nice compromise over using IE 7 or earlier which are horrible.
One good thing is Microsoft's browsers are getting competitive again thanks to Firefox and Chrome.