I’ve been tasked with saying something nice about Internet Explorer “because people use it.” The ridiculousness of my work environment means that this is actually true. Sadly, I don’t see that changing in the next few months while I’m teaching the class I am.
So, I’m crowd-sourcing. I can’t say much more than “well, I haven’t gotten viruses through it” but I don’t think that’s really going to cut the mustard. The IE Add-ons Gallery looks like list of mainstream companies that can afford to hire someone to make some sort IE Add-On. Not a lot of useful stuff…well, unless you don’t know how to use an RSS reader…
Filed under: Microsoft | Tagged: Internet Explorer, technical education |
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It’s widely supported by websites. If it isn’t a demo of some sort (html5rocks, etc) it will at least be viewable in IE.
Ok, I’m now convinced it’s a browser.
Got anything else?
By “widely supported” I mean “no webmaster in their right mind would make a non-demo that isn’t viewable in IE,” though it might not have alternating colors on the table or rounded corners on the boxes. while there are webmasters that make production stuff that doesn’t work in anything but IE. IOW, you never have to worry about compatibility whatsoever.
And if you want something else, okay. No installation. Duh.
um, there’s no installation of Safari on Macs or Firefox on many Linux distros. Don’t act like people don’t use Linux because I manage DESKTOP Linux systems at work.
It’s very clear from all of your posts that I did not do a good job explaining what I want.
Users could care less about installation because the IT team does that for them. Users could care less about standards compliance or anything web-development related because the web team takes care of that. Users want things that will make them safer and more productive. I wasn’t able to find anything of particular interest and that’s what I’m looking for.
I want IE replacements for Googlepedia, Tree Style Tabs, NoScript, AdBlock and stuff like that that Chrome and Firefox both have (well, Tree Style Tabs in Chrome is still in development). I want replacements for Zotero. I didn’t find anything particularly useful other than the live bookmarks…that actually didn’t seem to work, but that may be because I was testing on IE9.
Okay, I didn’t realize you were talking strictly to the users, not the IT team, though considering I assumed you were using Windows at work, that has to say something.
I still think that never having to worry about compatibility ever is a plus for users, though. Yes, a page that treats standards like a religion won’t work, but they don’t care about those.
But now to think of something else…. It’s probably what the user uses at home.
but whether they use it at home doesn’t help them. We are trying to do +1 with their productivity not inform them of why what they are doing now is good (even if I disagree with the basic premise that using IE is good).
I would disagree that they necessarily use it at home. My girlfriend used Firefox before we met and she knows as much about computers as I do about anesthesiology (what she does).
I don’t want to say too much about work on my personal blog, but suffice it to say it’s a 4000+ person company and we run the gamut from PhDs in pharmacology to art history, so it’s going to be difficult to make assumptions on skill level. However, we are targeting sort of the lowest rung of computer knowledge at work. There’s no need to necessarily push them toward either browser because people are just going to go download Chrome or whatever if they want it (even if not approved, all users are admins). As a side note, I believe Chrome is going through the EULA process again after the initial debacle with their EULA. The fact that it hasn’t been resubmitted should tell you how little users respect the EULA process…but we are trying to change that and that is something I will bringing up in the class. Regardless, Chrome, etc users will be on their own for the class.
What I suppose I really need to know at this point is if there is a third party “app store” for IE “accelerators” (which is the dumbest name for addons ever). The Microsoft “app store” is incredibly lame. I could probably look up whether such a repository exists, but even if I got there, I wouldn’t know what to try out. Since everything I have at home is Ubuntu (at least for the time being), I’ll have to wait until I get back to work to try out any IE stuff anyway. I am going to mention IE Tab in the class, so my hope is using IE will become a non-issue anyway.
Uh… I suppose it does have that proprietary extension of HTTP that allows it to authenticate a user with their current credentials, if you’re connecting to an IIS server…
…yeah. Good luck with that one. 🙂
haha yeah. We make good use of that. That reminds me though. We have instructions for NTLM in Firefox, but I am as-of-yet not mentioning in the class. I probably should at least link to the KB article in the notes.
The only good arguments I can think of are inertia-based (99.999999999% website support and familiarity). Sorry.
thanks for the thoughts though. You forced me to clarify what I wanted which no doubt will help others give me better solutions…should solutions exist.
Great virus support. And with Active X, those add ons work great at making sure a virus is always close by.
It isn’t what you want, Doug, but centralized administration is a big thing. One guy twiddling with active directory can decide everything you can do with IE. Probably other browsers also, but IE is designed for it.
Of course, in my workplace (which is basically IE-only), that guy locks out plugins that we use on internal sites (and most users are not admins), so that support staff (me) gets to manually unlock them on a person-by-person basis.
Honestly, I can’t think of anything particularly good about using the Neanderthal browser for anything except checking to see that your site doesn’t look too bad in it.