Later this week, Browsium Inc will officially launch UniBrows. I feel tempted to make a joke about cosmetic eyebrow products, but I’ll refrain. In fact, UniBrows is the IT department’s answer to Microsoft’s refusal to support the millions of enterprise line of business applications that were built for IE6, and won’t run on IE8. This is likely the biggest blocking issue for any IT department facing an upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7. Microsoft’s stance is to ask their customers to “remediate” their applications to IE8. Remediate is a big word that means rewrite. Frankly, it’s surprising that Microsoft has chosen to abandon its customers in this fashion.
Nevertheless, Browsium solves this problem effectively and cleanly for the IT manager. It gives the IT manager the ability to define profiles specifying settings and configurations including browser engines, java versions and so on for individual sites in the organization. When the site is loaded into IE 8, the correct browser engine (IE 6, for example) is loaded transparently to the end user.
The IT manager simply creates a profile:
Specifies the rules for the profile:
and pushes it to user.
When a user hits a site that requires the profile, that profile is loaded. It even allows individual browser tabs to load their own profiles separately from other browser engines.
UniBrows is as close to seamless as anything I’ve ever seen. It solves a huge problem for Microsoft and their customers. Priced at what can only be described as a “no-brainer” for the corporation, I predict millions of seats will be sold.
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- Microsoft Counts Down to IE6′s Death (pcworld.com)
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