As much as it destroys a little piece of my soul every day, I have to use Internet Explorer at work. I’ve been using mozilla for years and years1 & using ctrl+t is second nature to me, and I normally have around 5 mozilla windows open, with around 10 tabs in each (well there’s a lot out there to read) – just the sort of thing I cannot do in IE. I tried to download mozilla on my first day, but we are blocked from downloading ANYTHING.
Oh shit – Fenton’s laptop screen just went all light and funny – gods forbid we have to get a replacement – I don’t need that kind of financial pressure!
Anyway, back to my story. We had a divisional presentation of a web interface that is being developed at the Land of Freaks, Acronyms and Meetings (oh screenback to normal – thanks laptop gods) and the browser being used was Firefox! “Aha!” I thought to myself, “I must ask why *they* can use it and not me”.
So our induction day rolls around (and don’t even get me started at the stupidity of holding an induction 4-6 months after people’s start dates) and we have a little presentation by the IT Manager – he asks for questions and people are asking stuff about various programs we use. “Aha!” I thought to myself again, “now is my chance”. So I ask my question and receive the most ridiculous answer imaginable: “because it is being patched all the time and is more secure.” I bit my tongue but so wanted to say, “you idiot, the reason it is being patched all the time is because it is so UNSECURE!” and then I asked why all the IT guys were using Firefox (and opera, as I found out later) and he was very quiet for a while responded that they needed to test the web interface on a variety of browsers.
I honestly have never encountered an IT Manager that was so very against using anything other than Microsoft products! In my experience IT Managers are so delighted that you are familiar with alternatives, they are really supportive of you using them.
1heck, we were even using firefox here in the hardly haus back when it was called firebird! Yes we are sadly geeky indeed.
