Browsers cannot be underestimated

Organizations have always paid little attention to browsers on users' personal computers, but from now on, the IT department can no longer ignore such practices.

Over the past two years, many factors have made IT necessary for the IT department to consider browsers as a commercial software.

First, cloud computing is increasingly used in enterprises, such as office collaboration products and CRM systems, which forces CIOs to give a green light to various Internet-based applications.

Second, both applications deployed inside the enterprise and commercial products sold externally start to use the browser as a front-end component.

Third, there are more and more reliable browsers, and IE is no longer the only choice for enterprises.

In an interview, Andy Armagost, a Unix/Linux system administrator at briham, told me: "browsers are the most important software we have ." A large part of users' requirements for technical support are related to browsers. Therefore, their company specially designed several internal applications for Firefox.

However, it is not common for companies such as Andy to attach importance to browsers. As far as I know, 60% of enterprises are still using "old" browsers like IE6.

What does this mean? At least most employees in the enterprise IT department have very low browser education. This "Indifference" denies their employees the right to get better security performance and experience from new browsers.

However, it is worth noting that with the constant innovation of various browser companies, there will also be a wide variety of browsers with different standards. For enterprises, it is increasingly difficult to keep up with the latest development of various browsers and understand their different versions and plug-ins.

For some browser developers, the challenge of coexistence of multiple browsers is obvious when developing public websites or commercial network application software.

I have been in touch with a company named Zoho, which provides network-based communication and collaboration software for small and medium-sized enterprises. It now has to invest more time and resources to adjust its own software to support different browsers. Moreover, this must be a long-term investment because they have to monitor the browser status after the software is released.

In addition, not only new software developers are in trouble. Even Google has encountered problems in application software development. On Google's official website, "known issues" include "files cannot be loaded" and "tables in workbooks cannot be renamed.

However, even so, no company can use this as an excuse to stare at only one browser, because the richness of Internet applications makes the trend of SaaS and cloud computing more and more clear. One day, most applications will be implemented on the Web end, and this day may soon arrive.

No one can ignore the opportunities hidden in browsers.

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