Hi!
Anthony G. Atkielski wrote:
Christian Mattar writes:
Netscape was a bargaining chip, so that the deal "using IE in AOL"
against "Having an AOL-Icon on the Windows desktop" stayed alive. Nothing more, nothing less...
Sorry, but I don't go for conspiracy theories.
Of course no one except a few execs know all the details, but above mentioned deal is well documented.
The fact is, at the time, many companies were choosing MSIE for the same reasons that AOL did. MSIE provided a lot more options for companies that wanted to heavily customize the browser for their customers or employees, and it also provided administrative tools that let large organizations control the configuration of the browser in large deployments.
Note that if Firefox is to compete with MSIE in these same situations, it's going to have to offer the same possibilities that MSIE does. I don't know how popular custom versions of browsers are today (the trend is towards commodity software), but the need for administrative controls in large deployments is just as great as it has ever been, if not greater.
There were many reasons to go for IE instead for Netscape back then, yours is only one of them...
The main point was, that IE4 did everything NS4 did (many parts better - Internet security wasn't that much of a concern as it is now), came preinstalled with Windows and at no cost, whereas companys had to pay Netscape for a license. Paying for a browser... Foreign concept today, isn't it? (Opera excluded of course)
Anyway, that was then and now is now...
I agree though that Firefox definitely needs administrative tools, the MSI installer is a huge step towards that goal.
Talking about security stuff: I think the backend provides several finer grained options than those being presented in the GUI. You can only set them by editing your prefs manually.
See <http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/components/ConfigPolicy.html> for more information.
Christian _______________________________________________ Mozilla-security mailing list Mozilla-security@mozilla.org http://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/mozilla-security
