[SpamCop-List] Re: This site best viewed with anything but IE?!?!

[Tom]

On Sat, 03 Jul 2004 08:59:45 -0400, C. S. <notgiven at nodomain.net>
wrote:

>With the recent feds' denouncement of IE, there might
>finally be an awakening of the corporate-types to the
>fact that there *are* viable alternatives worth looking
>into, and that they now probably SHOULD be
>exploring alternatives for the sake of fundamental
>network health.

Maybe, but only if the MS OS itself is dropped. The problem is that IE
and the OS, especially in the later iterations, are inseparable and it
makes no sense, at a corporate level, to dump IE in favor of, say,
Mozilla or it's browser-only Firefox.

But for me at home, where I run XP Pro, I use Forte Agent as my mail
program and therefore, could easily drop Firefox into place. I did
that only after considering other options and frankly, I didn't like
what I saw.

But at work? I don't do enough browsing to warrant switching browsers.
Even discussing this with our security manager, it isn't a practical
approach to the problem. There really isn't a good one and since I
work for a company with over 400,000 employees, updating away from IE
on a MS operating system just does not make sense. There are far too
many users who would find a way around that one and I'm not about to
go through testing 1,000 or more apps, just to make sure pulling IE
wouldn't break one.

Then again, you also have the problem (and Julian pointed this out)
that some sites are IE friendly to the point where not using IE causes
problems. That's especially true for many businesses who do not have
the resources to hire programmers who are sticklers for standards.
I've seen far too many programs with illegal (for the program) code. 

Damn, but programmers are a dense lot!

Tom