Uh, do they need Windows or do they need Internet Explorer? There's a huge difference. You do know that there are other browsers available on Windows, right?

Figure out which of the two it is, and get back to us.

Internet Explorer is deeply melded into the rest of the Windows operating system infrastructure upon which it depends. I don't think you will ever be successful in porting such a thing to Linux.

If a web site will not display on my web browser that is the web site's problem not mine.

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Steve Stites

at my corporation the self-service portal is ie only.

i do believe that this was / is caused by MS "giving away" a ton of "tools" with a WinServer purchase

tools that hard code calls to Internet Explorer and windows gui api
and uses MS's activeX

basically having the company's them selves vender lock THEM SELVES


this might have changed in the last few years ? but i daught it

Plenty of corporations that have otherwise internally standardized on MS-Windows use site-building tools that are specific to that environment ... and which link seamlessly to other aspects of their Microsoft-only environment. For them, for those intranet web-apps ... that makes perfect sense. You can "reach" a lot of different things in their environment from an IE web-page application.

But you can't do the same thing for something that must face the general public. (It goes far beyond "the Silverlight plug-in.")

The Windows environment is very deep and complicated – and, very specific to Windows. I don't think that it would ever make sense to try to make IE run anywhere else.

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Very true.
My poin being that I haven't seen a web site saddled with IE dependancies in a long time.
Sure, there are legacy intranet sitews built by morons, liars and theives but they generally require the whole Windows "experience" not just IE compatibility.
For the sites written by the idiots, theives and general vermin ask them for a copy of Windows to run in a VM and point their bosses to a few web standards and browser market share pages.

IE always used non standard (proprietary) extensions to html. This resulted in a lot of CRM or POS software front ends, written to run in a web browser, not being web standards compliant. While it's nice to think this problem is history, in reality it's anything but. In industry you will still find plenty of software which breaks in any browser but IE, and fiddling with the user agent string doesn't change that.

1 members found this post helpful.

On the inside of an organization, this is a very efficient and acceptable (to me) way to build web-technology based applications "for internal use only." Microsoft's extensions are there for a reason, and this reason has everything to do with the fact that Windows is a very deep and very vertically-integrated environment provided by one vendor.

These companies have standardized everything on Microsoft technology and they control every aspect of its deployment throughout their company. And, they do get the outcomes that they expect and require. This approach does work. The extensions allow these applications to tap into Microsoft-specific things which are not public Web standards nor supported by the public Web. (Which is perfectly acceptable – in fact, desirable – in fact, usually required – in this use-case.)

Microsoft Corporation does earn its money fairly.

(And yes, I just praised Microsoft on a Linux-centric web site!)

But you can't use those technologies in a public-facing web site, nor (satisfactorily) with non-Windows back-end servers.

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I disagree that it's wise to tie one's infrastructure to any vendor but I tend to think that if one must tie oneself to that vendor then why not use the functionality provided?
This was also the reason for my previous use of "web sites" attempting to make the point that intranet sites are a different thing entirely.

good points. the only issue i know of at my corporation was upgrading to windows-7 (we were win-xp up until 2 years ago) because that would mean no more ie-6 and several intranet sites would be broken with ie-7.

I still have a laptop, provided by our customer, that's running XP. Luckilly I don't have to work with it much -- unlike the employees of said customer...

Very fun fact: by default, IE loads Intranet sites with IE7-compatibility mode turned on, and everything else with IE7-compatibility mode turned off.