I worked for Oracle for a couple years. The trend toward IE-dependency is (largely) because of time invested in a lot of in-house solutions where ActiveX was em

I worked for Oracle for a couple years. The trend toward IE-dependency is (largely) because of time invested in a lot of in-house solutions where ActiveX was employed as part of the web app architecture. There may be other reasons, but I think the main one is definitely all the different apps they have (including some acquisitions, i.e. Siebel) which depend on IE. If they start to move away from IE dependency, it will probably be a long, slow transition.