Mozilla's ActiveX Extension

As the IT director of a medium-sized company, it is one of my explicit duties to secure the corporate WAN in general and computers in particular from any non-operator-sanctioned program that degrades memory or CPU performance. Since all spare CPU cycles are either sold to affiliated research labs (or donated to non-profit ventures such as Folding@Home), the corporation has such seemingly-stringent policies as no screensavers, power saving, and especially no adware.

Moving ~50 computers and over 60 people to a non-Internet Explorer browser required both exceptional diplomacy and a superior product. A test deployment of Mozilla 1.6 pre-FireFox met with considerable clamor by the upper management due primarily to how "bulky" it felt and its UI in particular. So, when the CEO's wife emailed me to say that she had tried FireFox and it displayed the company's intranet exceedingly faster than Internet Explorer, it took me by surprise.

Armed with her glowing testimonial, I immediately convinced roughly 25% of the employees to make the switch, and soon ran into the "stubborn user" mentality. Armed with raptor-like senses, I would get email after email regarding "bugs in FireFox" every time an external website was simply offline. Literally, every single HTTP error you could imagine was attributed (incorrectly) to FireFox. Additionally, it appears that one of the shipping companies we outsource to actually requires ActiveX support. Once this news propagated, nearly 75% of the office's FF deployments were reversed...even by the CEO's wife, apparently.

I combatted this trend by surreptitiously installing the Internet Explorer FireFox theme. I even went a step further and used IE's icon for FF. BELIEVE ME! This ONE THEME will conquer 99.999% of all 'stubborn users' complaints.

Yet, I knew that such samfoolery wouldn't last a single workday, even with the invaluable "View in IE" extension. After searching for a solution, I stumbled upon The Mozilla ActiveX Plug-In. With this and a little tweaking (only pages explicitly listed are allowed, for instance), no one has the slightest idea it is even Internet Explorer, unless they go to Preferences, which they generally never do (they just bug the hell out of me).

Well, that said, I hope this helps some one.