A Microsoft executive on Thursday used the furor over Mozilla's decision to curtail support for Firefox 4 to plead the case for Internet Explorer (IE) in the enterprise.

"I think I speak for everyone on the IE team when I say we?d like the opportunity to win back your business," Ari Bixhorn, director of IE at Microsoft, wrote at his blog. "We?ve got a great solution for corporate customers with both IE8 and IE9, and believe we could help you address the challenges you?re currently facing," he added.

Bixhorn wrote an open letter to John Walicki, the manager of workplace and mobility in the office of IBM's CIO. Earlier Thursday, Walicki voiced their displeasure with Mozilla's decision to retire Firefox 4 from security support when it launched the new Firefox 5 this week. John Walicki said that he had been preparing to upgrade half a million corporate users from Firefox 3.6 to Firefox 4 in Q3 of this year. He found out that, with Mozilla?s release of Firefox 5, support for Firefox 4 had ended.

Commecnting on John Walicki;s concerns, Asa Dotzler, director of Firefox, has made it clear he doesn't consider the enterprise users worth supporting.

"Enterprise has never been (and I?ll argue, shouldn?t be) a focus of ours," Dotzler said.

"Mozilla?s recent decision to accelerate the pace of their releases further accentuates the problem of only supporting the latest version of Firefox," Microsoft's Bixhorn added.

He also clarified the Internet Explorer team?s commitment to, and support for, its corporate customers.

"we?ll support each version of Internet Explorer as long as the latest version of Windows that it runs on is supported. For example, Windows 7 Enterprise is supported through January 2020. Internet Explorer 9 will therefore also be supported through January 2020," he said.