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Explorer Destroyer
slayer99 writes "I came across Explorer Destroyer yesterday, which is a project that aims to increase the market share of Firefox in a slightly more proactive way than is usual. They provide some code which you add to your front page which presents a banner to IE users urging them to switch to using Firefox. As a bonus, you can potentially make some money via Google's Firefox referral program."
...another browser monoculture. Morons.
Isn't this the same kind of actions that open source advocates condemn, when Microsoft and friends use it ?
Is it just me or does annoying the people you're trying to attract sound like a poor idea? I know when I am annoyed by something I'm more likely to resist. For example, whenever I meet militant PETA people I really want to go kill baby bunnies, skin them, and wear their bloody firs as a coat... and I'm vegetarian!
I think if I were an IE user I'd refuse to use Firefox on these grounds. Impress me on technical or philosophical merits, not by being a bully.
What if the entire Universe were a chrooted environment with everything symlinked from the host?
Ya right, I want to explicitly drag the browser war straight into my commercial web sites. That should help business. What kind of web sites will you see with banners telling the user to switch? This is no better than the old "Designed for x Browser" buttons that were displayed in the past. In fact this is worse.
As long as the IE has a dominant role in the browser world, trojan writers will concentrate on it. There are already the first trojans aiming for FF, and I'm not sure if I want them to become more.
Also, it's not really a program I can support. Inform those that don't know about their options, but don't get on their nerves. Ever opened an IE (when your standard browser is something else) and noticed how it bugs you with "IE ain't your standard browser, do you want it to be?"?
And how annoying this is?
And how it doesn't want you to make IE your standard browser even MORE?
Why would you think it makes someone use FF instead of IE if you keep bugging him just the same way IE pesters you?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There are plenty of banks whose websites conform to W3C standards, and which consequently are usable with Firefox. I don't have any problem with my on-line banking (with Firefox, of course). Maybe you should change to a better bank? If your bank is backward in the way you describe, it probably has other problems which are not yet apparent to you.
Huh? This is the same type of bull that makes me hate IE only websites. At least most IE-only problems can be attributed to stupidity instead of malice. If someone tried to deliberately hinder my access to their site because I use Firefox, I'd likely never visit the site again.
Worryingly, the wording of this site makes it sound as though Google is affiliated with ExplorerDestroyer, which is very far from the truth. In fact, I imagine that Google would be worried by this page as it detracts from their "do not evil" ethos.
Phoenix, Boston, Little Rock, see a pattern?
Hmmm.....I surprised they don't follow their own rules, I could view the site perfectly in ie without being asked to switch to firefox.
Wrong. A user who comes to the site with Opera or Mozilla or Safari, or in fact any W3C-compliant browser, will not see the message (unless browser options are set to lie about its identity, which is probably not a smart thing to do anyway). This initiative is not intended to lead to a browser monoculture.
Having said that, I would have preferred to see a script which detects grossly non-standard behavior, rather than a specific browser. I'd have no problem with MSIE being dominant if it respected agreed W3C standards.
What the fuck? You're talking about crippling consumer choice to force your ideas on them and make money for yourself? Are you sure you don't WORK at Microsoft?
This is annoying for those who cannot switch browsers for one reason or the other. In my opinion, web developers should aim to make their sites usable for as many different browsers as is reasonably possible. Including Internet Explorer, Lynx, mobile phones and old Netscape versions. Usable does not imply that the site needs to look pretty in that browser, but people should be able to access the (text) content.
Your users will have a reason why they use a particular browser, and often it's not because they're too lazy/dumb to install a "better" one.
where's all that Karma?
I think Score:5 posters comparing it to the tactics of Dr. Microsoft forget that this feature is non-obligatory and you need to spend actual time inserting it into your webpage.
As for idea itself, I agree, it is too aggressive.
It would be better if someone will come up with the idea of how during every IE crash instead of "bug report wizard" (did they hire me for that?) some "buy firefox wizard" would popup.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
We're not talking about hackers trying to "prove" that ISS is insecure, or some people defacing some homepage. There's no money in that, and that's something done by people who do it for bragging rights, for street (or rather, IRC) credibility and for their ego.
Trojans are a business. The amount of POCs and ego-boosters is dwarfed by the number of commercial trojans and worms. Hacking servers and taking down sites is no business. Trojans is.
Now, to be profitable, trojans need a high penetration. And for this, they have to work on as many machines as possible. That's one of the reasons why there are VERY few trojans/worms for Mac and Linux, and as far as I know, there are actually NO commercial trojans for those systems. It doesn't pay as well as writing one for Windows. And if the browser is an issue, your target for a commercial attack is the IE. Simply for its penetration.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
But isn't it poetic justice that we use IE's dirty little hacks to bring it down? Remember that evil always contains the seeds of its own destruction.
Technoli
Oh, Firefox has an extension for it? Is it the one that breaks with every new Firefox version?
This is problem #1 for Firefox (with the memory leak being #2), and is very stupid: Say you have five or six extensions, they discover a huge security leak, and you lose those extensions, at least until the developer catches up. And some of them are part of the reason you use Firefox. You're between a rock and a hard place. (Way back when 0.9 came out, I didn't update to it until damn near the time 1.0 came out because I liked my extensions.)
don't give a flying rat's ass about code and source code, I, as a end user, just want things to work a certain way.
And you just put your thumb on a huge problem in the Open Source community. There are people who actively try and discourage the use of closed source -- including drivers like the nVidia ones -- simply because they're closed source. I have an nVidia graphics card. I have Linux. I want to use the two together. (And note: installing the nVidia driver was the easiest thing I've installed in Linux.) Would I rather nVidia release their source? Sure.
But fuck it, sometimes you just want it to just work.
I use Firefox as my primary browser. I've customized the hell out of it. I like that about it. But this article made me think of the last time I went to a website that outright refused to load without IE, and it offended me. I remember the "best viewed..." crap. Telling the user what to use is a load of horse shit and is the type of thing we're better than.
Firefox is a better browser than IE. There is no doubt about this in my mind. But annoying people won't get them to change. Here's how I got my sister to use Firefox: It blocks pop ups by default, and it has tabs. Those two things were enough. She doesn't give a shit if it uses the "em" correctly. My mom and dad don't give a hoot about XHTML.
Open source? Good luck getting 90% of users to care what that means. Most people don't even understand what source code is.
Not everyone is a computer geek, and not everyone has to be.
There's all this paranoia about IRCing as root, even servers that K-line root@*, but it's all pointless. Most people IRC as root, including me, because they run mIRC in Windows.
I don't see it any different than web browsing as root, and guess what, there has been far more exploits against M$IE than there have against mIRC. Or xchat.
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
I have a similar browser detection script, but I don't want to antagonize my users. When they're using IE, I show them a text-only Google Firefox referral ad, and a brief note about why IE isn't quite as good.
But I avoid the most common mistake that browser detection creates, that is to lock people out of sites that are perfectly functional. Agreed, some of my interesting CSS magic doesn't show up, but I don't want to annoy my users -- just get them to use Firefox.
I also detect when Opera is faking itself as IE, and ask the user to set the user-agent string back to Opera, so that IE's web stats aren't overly inflated.
Perhaps not, but that's how you manage it. The studio producer used to say to the man with a cause: "If you have a message to deliver, take it to Western Union."
Whether they think it's dirty or not is neither here nor there. The fact is that saying "My website that does nothing that other websites don't do is inaccessable for several mainstream webbrowsers" doesn't promote your favorite browser - it just makes you (the developer of such a site) look like a complete moron who doesn't care about his or her readers. (Readers who make have otherwise been customers.)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.