It appears that the large number of unnecessary updates, combined with the serious manageability gaps of Google’s browser Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox has determined most business owners to choose Internet Explorer as the preferred browser used for their networks.
Specialists in the industry have also agreed that it is much easier for a big enterprise to manage the two major browsers, Chrome and Firefox. In the case of Mozilla, it seems like one of the possible reasons is related to the lack of interest for creating a proper installation version (an .msi file, respectively). As a consequence, patching is a lot harder than with Internet Explorer, which installs its automatically, without any manual intervention.
Representatives of Mozilla have even suggested that enterprise has never been a focus of their project, Firefox, and it doesn’t even have to be. The fifth version of their browser was released the other day, after no less than three months since Firefox 4 was officially out.
On the other hand, the policy of Google is pretty similar to the one of Firefox, with major updates being constantly released. Furthermore, once a certain version reaches a level of stability, all the previous ones are not supported anymore, without any updates being released for them.
However, the way Microsoft handles these situations is different, with four major versions of Internet Explorer being currently supported. One possible reason for this is the fact that older versions are integrated into their famous operating system, Windows, and certain users cannot update to newer versions. However, it seems like this policy has brought them a major advantage when it comes to enterprise, with more and more business owners deciding to install copies of IE instead of using Firefox and Chrome.
