Browser·1,292 discussions

Does your IT department support IE and/or Firefox?

Locked

Does your IT department officially support IE or Firefox, or both? What kinds of user behavior and preferences have you seen recently with Web browsers? Are users typically using both browsers? Are there certain tasks for which they prefer to use Firefox, or certain tasks for IE?

Topic

IE.

In reply to Does your IT department support IE and/or Firefox?

Because of applications developed in Cold Fusion and SharePoint, we are strictly an IE shop. Some of in the IT dept. run other browsers (mostly FF), and our webmaster runs five or six.

Users? We’re in South Carolina. My users don’t know what the word “browser” means, think Internet Explorer -is- the Internet, and if they’ve heard of Firefox probably think it is a method of food preparation.

ISP

In reply to Does your IT department support IE and/or Firefox?

We, an ISP in Barbados, have found that most people do use IE as it comes with their computer and most are not computer literate enough to install anything else, even the OS updates, sadly enough. There are those who call in with Netscape issues, even those really old versions (4.x) and we try to get them to upgrade. Most of the tech support department has switched to either Opera or Firefox. Myself, I have been a Firefox man for a few months now and will continue to do so, even with IE 7 looming.

For web development, I make sure that a site looks good in both Firefox as well as IE.

Re: IE & FireFox

In reply to Does your IT department support IE and/or Firefox?

With our SLA in place we only support IE as we only offer training on IE. I have had some questions concering FireFox and used in an Educational Technology Class, however it has generally been my experience that the only people who use FireFox on Windows are those that are in the “know.” The average user here uses whatever is on the desktop and comes with the computer.

Eventually both

In reply to Does your IT department support IE and/or Firefox?

Right now I am the only person in the organization that uses Firefox; and probably the only one that knows about it.

I’ve only been using Firefox for the last month or so; and learning the ends and outs. I plan to eventually give the option for users to use either browser.

IE so far

In reply to Does your IT department support IE and/or Firefox?

A majority of my organization uses IE. A few of us IT folks play around with the various other browsers floating around.

The trouble I find with the “other” browsers is that they don’t format webpages correctly 100% of the time.

We tried firefox with some users but we found with all the virus, adware, and spyware protection we built into our network – IE works good enough for us at this time.

browser compatibility

In reply to IE so far

“The trouble I find with the “other” browsers is that they don’t format webpages correctly 100% of the time.”

Really? That’s usually a problem with the design of the site, rather than how the browser renders it. It’s a problem that usually occurs when someone builds a site with no idea what “browser compatibility” means.

Generally, if I stumble upon a site that I cannot view in Firefox, I leave it and never come back. If that site’s publisher doesn’t know enough about the Internet to offer either compatibility or an all-text alternative, then I probably don’t need to see the product of their adventure in Internet publishing.

So unless the poeple of your organization tend look at Web sites made for entertainment and visual stimulation rather than the informational content, I’d have to say the few formatting quirks “other” browsers may or may not have are of marginal importance.

This is all just an opinion I’ve found for myself after managing a relatively popular Web site for years. Browser compatibility is a common courtesy these days, though it has a pretty long way to go yet among amateur publishers. In any case, I believe it’s something that needs work at the site design level rather than the browser rendering level, and has everything to do with the competency of the site’s publisher.

Abby

Firefox

In reply to Does your IT department support IE and/or Firefox?

At our school, I have removed IE from all of the lab computers and have replaced them with Firefox. I have had no problems with it and find it to be more secure. We have 150 students who try to download everything under the sun, which gives me a severe headache at times. The only draw back is in the basic computing class and trying to teach proper computer maintenance and not being able to get windows updates from Firefox. Microsoft requires IE for its installs.

[Author]

Replies