In the past two years, a variety of factors have made browsers a much more important piece of business software for IT to deal with. One consideration has been the rising popularity of cloud computing in the enterprise, which has led CIOs to green-light the adoption of Web-hosted applications of various types, like office productivity, collaboration, and CRM. In addition, on-premise enterprise applications, whether in-house or commercial products, increasingly favor browsers as their front-end components.

Last but not the least, is the rising range of viable Web browsers. Microsoft's Internet Explorer for a long time was the only browser option, but today there are significant user bases for Firefox. Forrester Research reports that IE holds 78 percent of the installed base, Firefox 18 percent, Chrome 2 percent, Safari 1.4 percent, and Opera 0.2 percent. Even within the IE family, fundamental changes in IE8 in many ways mean IT should treat it as a separate browser.

The greater dependence on a larger stable of browsers, not to mention their numerous versions and plug-ins, complicates the environment that IT must manage, with greater impact on the business when compatibility or other issues arise. And the pace of browser updates is only adding to the pressure.

The Browser as an Enterprise App

"Enterprises need to think about the browser as a productivity tool, not as a transparent application. They need to look at browsers more strategically," says Sheri McLeish, a Forrester analyst.  "The browser is one of the most important pieces of software we have right now," says Andy Armagost, the Unix/Linux system administrator at Brigham Oil & Gas. The browser is the front end to various applications, including Yahoo's Zimbra Collaboration Suite, which is the company's main e-mail and collaboration platform. So it's not surprising that "a good portion of the help desks requests we get are related to browsers, like needing a particular plug-in to do something on a particular Web site," Armagost says.

At Brigham Oil & Gas, the browser of choice is Firefox 3 because the IT department believes it offers better performance and is more secure than IE and previous Firefox versions. Thus, Brigham Oil & Gas has designed several of its in-house applications specifically for Firefox.

Still, the IT department keeps an eye on the other browsers. It has to track and support IE, which is the only browser option for certain sites and Web apps that use ActiveX technology. And it tracks Google's Chrome; though still young, Chrome promises interesting improvements in performance and other areas, Armagost says.

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