Switching from Explorer to Firefox in the enterprise

Switching from Explorer to Firefox in the enterprise

If my company dropped IE for Mozilla Firefox and kept Windows in part of our organization, what problems could we run into in the enterprise with things like central control? Are there Windows features that we might lose by losing IE? Could we run IE and Firefox in different departments?

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In summary, a browser is not a very stateful application, and there's not a lot to lock down. It's like a TV. So it's possible to take a relaxed attitude. If you do want to lock Firefox down, then there are a variety of ways to do it. You can put user profiles on a server, for example.

On deinstalling Internet Explorer, a tool like LitePC goes a long way to helping you do that in a rational manner. Most enterprises will want to remove the "big blue E" from the desktop, but leave the underlying libraries in place (since they're used by InfoPath and other tools).

This was first published in December 2004