Orange threaten to fine workers for using Firefox

From The Register 08/07/09:

[T]he corporate world is taking its sweet time upgrading from Microsoft's eight-year-old Internet Explorer 6, a patently insecure web browser that lacks even a tabbed interface. Take, for example, the mobile and broadband giant Orange UK.

According to a support technician working in the company's Bristol call centre ...Orange UK still requires the use of IE6 in all its call centres, forbidding technicians from adopting Mozilla's Firefox or any other browser of a newer vintage.

This technician tells us that about a quarter of the Bristol staff had moved to Firefox after growing increasingly frustrated with IE6's inability to open multiple pages in the same window and overall sluggish performance. But a recent email from management informed call-centre reps that downloading Firefox was verboten and that they would be fined £250 if their PCs experienced problems and had to be rebuilt after running Firefox or any other application downloaded from the net.

"Under no circumstances should Firefox be downloaded," the email read. "Downloading any application from the internet is against Orange policy. There is NO support for Firefox in the operational environment. Orange Web applications are all designed to run on IE6 and therefore there is a likelihood that functionality will be impaired on Firefox."

Oh, you mean because Firefox adheres to acknowledged web standards, for instance? Hmmm. And surely no support for Firefox is preferable over support but for the odious and outdated IE6?

The company for whom I previously worked, like so many others, seemed perfectly satisfied with running IE6 despite its horrendous record for security. Surely enough time has passed since IE 7 launched – now superseded by IE 8, of course – for companies to have found the time to upgrade.

I realise many companies’ intranet sites are pernickety creatures and were written for an era when IE 6 ruled the day – which meant coding around the loathsome browser’s idiosyncrasies. But surely there has to become a point when enough is enough – even if that means making a tweak to your intranet sites?

Interestingly, I read earlier that Digg are planning to stop supporting IE6 for submitting Diggs, though web users may still view Digg.com using IE6. You know, if they really hated themselves.