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Group pollicy sounds right for lazy admins. To manage Chrome or Firefox or etc they'd need to use a different tool. As an MS product they can fiddle with all of IE/Edge's settings using the same tools that they use to fiddle with the OS itself.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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ie/edge does everything required - admin's not being lazy, they are being smart, and avoiding being called out for complaints resulting from choices made to satisfy a few tech heads. It's not just about what you like for yourself, it's about what is a good, smart and well functioning choice for everybody in the entire company.
Chrome is a poor if not the worst choice, fine for those on new equipment, but being such a cpu/memory hog would cause problems for those on older equipment. No sane admin should endorse chrome unless they are sure no equipment in the entire company is more than 2 years old (and their network can handle the entire org checking/downloading updates every 10 minutes.)
Finally if it's a work machine, why load it with toys?
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Anyone who's ever been stuck with a dev machine with less than 4GB of RAM in the last couple of years or just stuck with a magnetic hard disk more recently will appreciate that point. If I have to use a low spec machine for a while I'm just happy if I can convince someone to let me have Cygwin and Sublime.
At the end of the day a browser is a browser. It's either compliant with the standards you need or it's not, and for the last couple of years as near as I can tell - IE isn't the least compliant browser around.
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Back in 1995, I bought my OWN dual monitor graphics card for like $1,000 out of my own pocket.
And I simply grabbed a second monitor that was not being used.
Someone complained to my boss that I should not be ALLOWED to do that, and after finding out I paid for the adapter, they suggested I should have to buy my own second monitor as well!
OMG!
It was the BEST decision I made, and I have had dual monitors ever since! although not its cheap and easy!
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I vaguely recall reading the chrome interferes with MS anti virus. Is this still true?
We're philosophical about power outages here. A.C. come, A.C. go.
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It comes preinstalled, less work for them.
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Not just net admins. I've been using IE since Netscape became irrelevant, and have seen no compelling reason to switch in the decade and a half (?) since. It's honestly as simple as that, at least in my case.
I'm not a web developer, so I don't have the deep-seated hatred.
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I'm with you on this one. I have tried all the others and they have never lasted more than a couple of weeks before going back to IE.
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dandy72 wrote: no compelling reason to switch
Here's a few: Broken Browser – Fun with Browser Vulnerabilities[^]
And yes, I know other browsers have vulnerabilities too. But some of the IE/Edge vulnerabilities that Manuel has found seem ridiculously simple once you see them.
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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If there's nothing that prevents me from doing what I'm trying to do, then nothing on that site qualifies as a "compelling reason".
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I can imagine a few reasons. Maybe the truth is a combination of these:
1. IE is available on all PCs and typically preinstalled, requiring no additional work.
2. It's auto-updated with Windows Update, requiring no additional maintenance effort
3. Companies often have some industry-level contract with M$ to support theit Windows, Office, and other M$ products installments. Therefore, even if unexpected problems turn up, they can rely on M$ support, and that of course includes IE.
4. Since more than 20 years, all web developers make sure to be compatible with IE. Unfortunately, even today, the same is not true for any other browser - possibly including Edge.
5. In large companies or holdings consisting of many individual subsidiaries, it's easiest to implement web-based services on IE. Of course you could throw more money at it to make those same services run with Firefox or Chrome, but why would they, when the alternative - to make IE mandatory - costs nothing at all?
6. At the management level deciding on such things, knowledge of browser alternatives is often ... incomplete. Rather than risk a switch for unknown benefits at an unknown cost, they stick with what they know 'just works'.
I've had a lot of contact with IT over these and similar topics, and I've come to believe that the first three are the main reasons. The others could be overcome, if you can convince management that it would be more secure or cost-effective to switch to another browser.
There's also another, newer reason: most modern browsers, except IE, have stopped supporting NPAPI, and that means Java, ActiveX, and Silverlight (among other things). Edge does not support plugins either (except Flash), and - since version 52.0 - Firefox doesn't either, although Firefox ESR is going to hold out for another year or so.
That leaves IE 11 as the only browser fully supporting plugins without a known deadline. Companies relying on Java et al to implement their internal services would need to make a major investment if switching to another browser. Of course, sooner or later, support for IE 11 will run out and they'll need to find another solution anyway.
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
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Stefan_Lang wrote: ... Java, ActiveX, ...
No browser except IE has ever supported ActiveX.
And that's a good thing. Who in their right mind wants to download and run an unrestricted executable from a random website? 
Java in the browser isn't much better; just look at the long list of security vulnerabilities. But at least it had some semblance of a "sandbox" to try to protect your computer from malicious code.
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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Who? Who ever downloaded Firefox/Chrome extensions, advocated as main selling point. [^]
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Extensions are programs that the user chooses to download and run. Unless there's a security vulnerability in the browser, no website can cause your browser to download and install an extension without your help.
ActiveX components are programs that the website tries to download and run on the user's computer. Often without the user's knowledge or consent.
Oh, sure, you can change your settings to block ActiveX controls not marked as "safe for scripting". But who decides what's "safe for scripting"? The author of the ActiveX component. 
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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No, ActiveX controls are not downloaded without user consent. That is an excuse made up by people who clicks any button to get a celebrity nude.
Websites are convincing users to download extensions to interact better, so this is the same.
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Stefan_Lang wrote:
4. Since more than 20 years, all web developers make sure to be compatible with IE. Unfortunately, even today, the same is not true for any other browser - possibly including Edge.
That's a little bit of a skewed view of things. The reality is that yes they work extra hard to make sure it's compatible with IE, but that's because it just works on Chrome and Firefox and IE historically (though less so today, and many of the differences are now hidden by frameworks and libraries) didn't follow the standards and had to do things it's own way. There was a time 15-20 years ago when some developers targeted only IE, but they got burned so many times when IE specific things didn't even work in subsequent versions of IE that they learned their lesson. Everyone I know develops web apps that they expect to sell (as opposed to those who develop custom internal apps) primarily uses Chrome (because the tools are better and it runs on MacOS and Linux) and then scrambles at the end of the development cycle to go back and account for the places where IE still doesn't follow the standards.
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Most places I've worked at least the the devs and certain others have always been allowed their browser of choice.
Immanentize the Eschaton!
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For web devs there must be a whole raft of browsers for testing.
We're philosophical about power outages here. A.C. come, A.C. go.
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Yes, obviously, but what I meant was we had no constraint as to what to use as our normal, non-dev, inter and intra -net browsers.
Immanentize the Eschaton!
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One word: Managebility. IE/Edge can be configured via a wide set of group policies, Chrome can't.
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If you don't Google it then you can confidently say it can't...
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This is correct and the reason I have switched from IE to chrome. all the security crap we have installed on the machines bring IE and the machine to a stop CPU regularly hits 100% If IE is open. since the scanning tool/ policies don't recognize chrome I have a lot less trouble.
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Actually, at our fairly large company, our default browser is Chrome. But we use Google Docs and Gmail for our corporate email solution. There are still some corporate websites that we have to use IE on though for their Silverlight and older ASP compatibility.
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