{mosgoogle}5. Many applications are dependent on the IE

There are many desktop applications which use the rendering engine of IE to display HTML files. There also server-based applications which need an IE and won't work with just another browser. With the success of Firefox at least the latter's argument doesn't hold much anymore since many webmasters don't want to lock out this large clientele.

However, there are still many desktop apps which are IE dependent. Some of them aren't dependent on the rendering engine of IE, but integrate themselves in the user interface of IE. Adobe Arcobat is such an application for example. Even if you don't have one of them in your company now, you'll never know if this might not change in the future. The point is that if you need IE anyway, why you should deploy and support another browser in your network?

Conclusion

The advantages of the IE are mainly founded in its tight integration with Windows. Firefox has to run on other operating systems, too. Hence, all features should work on all systems not only on Windows boxes. That's why I'm not expecting too many improvements in this field in the near future. Although projects like Firefox ADM show that better integration is doable and that some Open Source programmers recognized this problem.

All in all, I'm still a Firefox fan, but wouldn't recommend it for corporate use in larger networks. There are exceptions of course: If all your desktops use Linux or Mac OS. But if you have Windows desktops, the only reason I could think of, is that you really need a certain feature of Firefox which you is not available in IE.

Michael Pietroforte is working as a system administrator for more than 15 years. For several years he is now leading an IT department. Check out his blog for system adninistrators here.