Now whilst Mozilla's download day is a particuarly effective PR stunt designed to drive adoption and visibility of their product, it serves as a handy reminder that there are alternatives to Internet Explorer.  Is now a good time to move away from IE in the business environment.

Every good story should grip the reader to the very end, however I shall depart from the accepted wisdom and instead deliver the denouement first.

Q. Should I replace Internet Explorer on company computers with an alternative browser?
A. No, at least not yet!

Testing here is the key.  It used to be that the requirement to support Integrated Windows Authentication (NTLM) was a stumbling block, but with a little configuration Firefox easily overcomes this potential hurdle.  Simply navigate to the about:config page in Firefox (version 2.0 or 3.0) and add the domains you require NTLM authentication for into the value section of the "network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris" preference item.

There are a number of small functionality differences which may surface particuarly in 3rd party intranet-based applications and it's these that can slow or halt adoption; users can be surprisingly change-resistant. 

Ultimately we'd like to be able to recommend installing Firefox, but most of the advantages over Internet Explorer come down to tools and tweaks which are of more use to home than business users.  The two biggest supposed upsides are security and rendering support so we'll deal with those seperately.

Security

Frankly security in the browser is as much about machine setup as it is about in-browser strength.  If you are having problems with IE security then it's highly probable you've not locked down your systems first.  Now we're not saying that IE security is flawless, it isn't.  However your browser is only one piece in the security puzzle.  And remember, not using IE doesn't mean IE's security issues can't still be exploited.

Rendering Support

Here you'd think Firefox would win out, but in a business environment quite possibly not.  For far too long businesses have not only put up with the "foibles" of Internet Explorer, they've explicitly coded for them meaning IE bugs have become damn near intranet standards. 

In conclusion we think if you want to deploy Firefox 3.0, wait for Internet Explorer 8.0.  If Microsoft are true to their word, and ship IE 8 in standards compliance mode by default, it should prove sufficent to persuade intranet developers to make their applications that bit more standards compliant which could be enough to blow the browser space wide open.