5 ms·

While this is true, allow me to give another POV. I run corporate security and internal IT for a 100 person SaaS. I "nudge" our users towards Chrome. Why? Becau

• dijit 4mo ago
  while valid points, my company uses Microsoft products and they are pretty abysmal in whatever domain they have products in. Edge for example being one of the weaker browser options. (though better than it was in the IE era). Being forced to use various tools for compliance is frustrating, doubly so if it helps create a stronger monopoly position, because a monopoly position creates stagnation, which makes worse products. But those worse products are forced on users, even when better ones start to come about. This is the crux of my issue, Microsoft is the king of this behaviour, and they are using this a lot which is squeezing the metaphorical testicles of almost all companies in Europe.
• chinathrow 4mo ago
  If you run a SaaS, large parts of your orgs should be on all major browsers regularly.
  • ArnoVW 4mo ago
    I have a handful of endpoints, used by staff that represent a low level of risk, that use Firefox for that precise reason. But really, we have a couple of million enterprise end-users, some of which surely using Edge. If we as much as move a button without telling them about it three months in advance, it's the end of the world. In 10 years time, no customer has raised it.
    • DANmode 4mo ago
      Edge: Chromium with Google Chrome-like data collection, but with data going to Microsoft instead.
• lol768 4mo ago
  > Because Google has more resources to secure their browser They've kneecapped ad-blockers, when ad networks are perhaps one of the biggest causes of malware installs/page hijacking/other unwanted behaviour. I'm not sure how you can consider Chrome remotely secure in this light.
  • flir 4mo ago
    My org (or rather, the org they pay to run their IT) blocked browser plugins with a security justification. I find this incredibly amusing, and at a different point in my life I'd already be gone. When you outsource IT, there are many, many misaligned incentives.
    • remus 4mo ago
      > I find this incredibly amusing, and at a different point in my life I'd already be gone. How so? Bad actors buying existing extensions with large user bases then publishing a new version which does bad stuff is a pretty common pattern. It certainy seems like a reasonable concern for a corp IT department.
      • nazgul17 4mo ago
        Not GP, but I think the point was that no extensions => no ad blockers => major malware vehicle unlockable, short of disabling JS
        • flir 4mo ago
          Bingo. I figure they had a switch they could toggle and they thought no further about the tradeoffs. Because their primary concern is their own liability, not what's best for the org their contract is with.
      • michaelt 4mo ago
        99% of security experts I know use ad blockers. When there are unpatched browser vulnerabilities, attackers will use ad networks to inject attack code into reputable-but-ad-laden websites. And even when there aren't unpatched vulnerabilities out there, many ad networks will happily accept scam ads, ads that trick people into downloading malware, fake download buttons and suchlike.
• verall 4mo ago
  Do people get pwned by anything besides spearphishing or ads nowadays? I think ad->phish or targeted phish emails is the only shady thing I've been exposed to in like 10 years
  • LtWorf 4mo ago
    Running npm install is a good way to get compromised.
• PunchyHamster 4mo ago
  having soon-to-be-nonfunctional adblocking will be far more dangerous to org than any extra security those options might provide
  • zdragnar 4mo ago
    Ubo lite is plenty functional. It's not as full-featured as ubo, but... I don't see ads. At all. What sites doesn't it work well on?
• Wowfunhappy 4mo ago
  > But it's not your laptop. It's the company's. Sure, which is why you should lock down the laptop. Blocking Firefox in Google Workspace seems like entirely the wrong layer for this.
• makeitdouble 4mo ago
  This feels like the whole IE6 dance coming back. People know how it ended, but don't seem to remember how it started, which is a shame.
• LtWorf 4mo ago
  Google has the resources to do it, but do they actually do it? By the looks of it I'd say "no". See the whole thing with libxml2 for example, or how they started boringssl to "fix" the issues with openssl, but they run it as an internal project you cannot depend on.
• NewJazz 4mo ago
  It's a pain that when you cannot do what you want to do. But it's not your laptop. It's the company's. But it is my craft, and to be limited to what tools I can use in my craft can decrease the value of my work, and in doing so decrease the company's productivity.
  • Arainach 4mo ago
    Let's say you earn a million dollars a year (most of us earn far less). At quite a few companies, a 50% decrease in your productivity (and changing browsers is nowhere near that) would cost the company significantly less than dealing with the fallout of any of the following: * A user intentionally leaking sensitive documents outside the corporate network * A user installing an infected browser extension that gives attackers access to corporate resources * A user accessing malware or ransomware which infects corporate resources. That's on top of the cost of having the IT department having to debug issues among users with bespoke tool sets which can often interact in unintuitive ways. There are many stupid ways that companies "optimize" costs that cost them more in the end. Standardizing the browser and extension set for data loss protection is not one of them.
    • NewJazz 4mo ago
      All of what you listed is preventable at a mild labor cost to the same degree as other browsers.
      • Arainach 4mo ago
        That's not obvious at all. The feature sets and tooling are very different. The person you replied to said as much. You (and I) aren't that special. People who are actually irreplaceable are astonishingly rare, and unless you're one of them, employees who will gripe about things like what web browser they use are often not worth the trouble at scale.
        • NewJazz 4mo ago
          employees who will gripe about things like what web browser they use are often not worth the trouble at scale. Firms who enforce homogeneity through policy are not worth the trouble at scale.
• mbac32768 4mo ago
  This is the correct answer. Having your users run multiple browsers by default (instead of with whitelisted exceptions) is now multiple attack surfaces the org has to manage.
  • radley 4mo ago
    Very curious how you avoid supporting multiple browsers. Apple, Google, and Microsoft each require users on their platforms to use their native browsers for secure connections. And if your company has any web presence or apps, you usually can't cherry pick which browsers your customers can use. That means some portion of your company will need access to other browsers for QA purposes.
    • mbac32768 3mo ago
      At the minimum I might say you only allow Chrome to access Google Workspace/SSO, which is needed to access like 95% of company resources. This is, in fact, the topic of the OP. You can do additional device management to lock down the rest of the machine. You can force Chrome and restrict Safari/Firefox/etc on Mac just fine. Same for Windows.
• amiga386 4mo ago
  > I can manage Chrome using the config infrastructure provided by Google https://mozilla.github.io/policy-templates/ https://mozilla.github.io/policy-templates/