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Why IE will continue to win the enterprise browser wars

weblog.infoworld.com

11–20 of 24 posts

Re: Why IE will continue to win the enterprise browser wars

#11
Hmm. Here's a really stupid question.

Would it be possible to write a proxy which would convert IE-only (or IE6-only) webpages into equivalent standards-compliant webpages on the fly?

(I don't know CSS, and especially IE's mangling of it, well enough to know if this problem is AI-complete or not.)

Edit: In case it wasn't obvious, the point would be to make the app work just as before. Simply running an anti-htmltidy would be pointless.

Re: Why IE will continue to win the enterprise browser wars

#12
Put up your hand if you've successfully sold into an enterprise.

No one?

Then come back when you have.

The ability for the IT shop to have control over their users is a real reason that apps don't get deployed. Walk into the mouth of LDAP once and you'll understand. When you have 10k users, with 200 people worth of turnover or changes a day, you won't understand why they "won't just use our web interface!"

Until you believe it and understand it, you're going to keep writing off customers because their priorities in keeping their users happy and functional don't jibe with your new whizzy app.

Re: Why IE will continue to win the enterprise browser wars

#13
Notably, Moskowitz explained that Firefox -- which you would think would be designed to easily administrate with Group Policy -- cannot be controlled. The reason: "It uses JavaScript files," he says. "There's no Group Policy way, right now, to handle 'odd' file types like .JS or XML files."

So it's Mozilla's problem that Microsoft's Policy tools are ridiculously rigid and inflexible?

Actually, I don't know anybody who cares if IE wins or loses in the corporate browser world. It's nice to delineate your business/intranet and public/personal activity into other browsers. In fact, to me it's preferable that there's a "legacy" browser to fulfill the web application equivalent of fax-machine duty. I don't envy the work that the IE team has to do to maintain compatibility with ancient and awful applications kludged together for IE 5.5, and I _really_ don't want that stuff in the browser I visit public sites with.

As for the set of people that think the power goes from the wall into the "hard drive" and that the internet is a blue "e" icon on the desktop, I stand by a previous comment I made ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=302947 ), in that I think IE should be vehicle for modern web experience ActiveX controls.

Re: Why IE will continue to win the enterprise browser wars

#14
post #12

Put up your hand if you've successfully sold into an enterprise. No one? Then come back when you have. The ability for the IT shop to have control over their users is a real reason that apps don't get deployed. Walk into the mouth of LDAP once and you'll understand. When you have 10k users, with 200 people worth of turnover or changes a day, you won't understand why they "won't just use our web interface!" Until you…

My hand is up. (You said "No one?" too quickly.)

True, the enterprise is a different animal, but it can be sold and you can make a difference. Some of my most memorable successes have been turning an ocean liner by selling them my software and creating a win-win-win for everyone.

The ability for the IT shop to have control over their users is a real reason that apps don't get deployed.

Not my experience.

you're going to keep writing off customers

I have never "written off" a customer because they were hard to sell. I only "write them off" if I don't see a profit opportunity.

Re: Why IE will continue to win the enterprise browser wars

#15
post #11

Hmm. Here's a really stupid question. Would it be possible to write a proxy which would convert IE-only (or IE6-only) webpages into equivalent standards-compliant webpages on the fly? (I don't know CSS, and especially IE's mangling of it, well enough to know if this problem is AI-complete or not.) Edit: In case it wasn't obvious, the point would be to make the app work just as before. Simply running an anti-htmltidy…

Anything is possible but the end result would be a clean response stream thats' compliant but the application would be horribly broken.

My mind melts just thinking of the king of regex matching you would need to do to pull this off.

Re: Why IE will continue to win the enterprise browser wars

#18
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you point to at least one "established set of enterprise "web" applications" that supports this claim?

Every enterprise has their own. It's called their "intranet". Many written for ie only (they may not have even realized it at the time). No one wants to rewrite their intranet just to support a marginally better browser.

As far as I can tell - IBM have finally finished porting all of their intranet apps to support firefox.

So there 350,000 users or so..

Re: Why IE will continue to win the enterprise browser wars

#19

I agree with the conclusion, but not the logic. A much more likely cause for IE supremacy is an established set of enterprise "web" applications, where these (badly written) "web" applications are so broken outside IE that they might as well be Win32. If executives sank money into applications that now run the business, and find that IE keeps those applications running, they're more likely to establish an easy policy…

Can you point to at least one "established set of enterprise "web" applications" that supports this claim?

Sure, those written by Microsoft. You can use Exchange's web interface, or Sharepoint, in browsers other than IE, but the experience is significantly degraded.

Re: Why IE will continue to win the enterprise browser wars

#20

I'm not a network admin but I don't quite understand his logic... why can't you enforce group policy on a higher level (something like how OpenDNS can filter specific sets of sites)? Am I missing something?

IE's Group Policy encompasses a whole lot more than which particular sites the web browser is allowed to visit.

http://www.ie-vista.com/group_policy.html

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