Cheesy Quintessence

I read an interesting article about a corporate transition from Internet Explorer to Firefox. In moderate detail, it goes over the tremendous benefits the employees have seen for prevailing over a few hurdles encountered in the company’s case. As statistics have shown that corporate users aren’t Firefox’s audience, it’s quite pleasing to read about such a successful transition.

To quote the article:

In some cases, Firefox helped us to discover code that worked in IE even though it was not standards-compliant. Switching to Firefox led to improved code quality and understanding of the standards.

That–nonstandard web appliances that work only in Internet Explorer–is the main reason why corporate users are not going to be Firefox’s–or any other non-IE browser’s–primary following. Of course, the very reason why these applications don’t work in standards-compliant browsers is the same reason for Internet Explorer’s undoing:

“It’s hazardous to your corporate health,” said Gallaher. “You have to turn off everything that makes Internet Explorer interesting just to avoid the impact of the viruses. Even Microsoft employees have told us, ‘You should turn off ActiveX controls.’”

Perhaps for now, while a corporate application utilizes nonstandard IE-only code, the solution is to provide employees with mutliple browsers. Unless I’m entirely mistaken, it’s possible to deny Internet Explorer access to any web content outside of the LAN. Under such a configuration, Internet Explorer could be used to operate the nonstandard applications while the company computers are protected by a mandated use of Firefox, Opera, or some other safe browser.