{mosgoogle}3. Central Management

Probably the most significant advantage of IE is that you can centrally manage it using Group Policies. You always want to configure all applications as homogenous as possible in a big network. Sometimes it is necessary to change the settings of all web browsers in your company. For example you might want to change the start page of all browsers or enable/disable certain functions or add new bookmarks, etc.

There is an Open Source Project called Firefox ADM working on this feature for Firefox. They started a year ago and reached version 0.4 now. As long as there is no version 1.0, I would be cautious in using this feature in a productive environment. I had a quick look at the ADM files. It has fewer possibilities in comparison to IE, that's my first impression. I plan to have a closer look at Firefox ADM again in the near future and will post my findings in my weblog.

4. Patch Management

I have already mentioned the security issue before. We all know that not only Microsoft programmers but also Open Source coders make mistakes. No web browser will ever exist without security holes. Some Firefox advocates say that security patches are supplied at faster pace than in IE. It is a difficult question to answer, and I don't want to discuss this topic here.

However, when it comes to security in a corporate network, the main question should be how fast and how easy you can patch all your computers. The larger your network is, the more important this point gets. Firefox has an integrated update mechanism which is quite useful for private users, but doesn't help much in a corporate environment. Because of security issues, normal users are usually not allowed to install software on their computers which also means that they can't install patches.

If you are a Windows administrator, you probably know that Microsoft offers a free patch management solution. WSUS (Windows Software Update Services) certainly is a great tool. Of course, you can patch IE using WSUS. There are third party patch management solutions which also support Firefox though. If you are already using such a program, patch management might not be something that troubles you too much when you have to decide which web browser to use in your network. However, if you are also using WSUS, patching IE might be less time consuming than patching Firefox with a third party solution. At least, this is true for patch management solutions I've seen.