It seems that Microsoft has enabled their Browser Choice system for EU customers today, several news outlets are reporting end users seeing the message and there are screenshots coming through on Twitter.
I can't seem to find any information about how this will affect corporate users, for some reason the blog post on Microsoft.com is blocked by our up-stream provider. All of our users operate in a Least-Privileged environment so offering a choice of browsers is just going to cause pointless support calls.
Questions
- How will the Browser Choice affect corporate users?
- It is possible to disable this on a corporate network, through Group Policy?
Comment
I have summarized some of the points brought up below:
Transparant Windows authentication is not supported by Third Party browsers, meaning SharePoint will require a login. In our case just using the interent would require a login as we use Transparant Windows Authentication to authenticate users against the proxy.
ActiveX and VBScript - many legacy peices of software were written for a world where IE was the only choice, this can be mitigated by a Supported/Unsupported model giving end-users the choice but putting some restrictions on it.
Group Policy integration - there are ways of getting Proxy Settings and security certificates into Firefox through group policy and start up scripts, even if we were to say that practically only three browsers would be used (Firefox, Chrome and IE8) that is still a huge swathe of extra testing and configuration.
integration with WSUS - FireFox is updated fairly regulary with security updates, at home this isn't a problem as I can elevate to an admin user to install the update, does Firefox give corporate systems administrators any mechanism for disabling Firefox update notifications.