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."

Comments

Unbelievable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't this the same kind of actions that open source advocates condemn, when Microsoft and friends use it ?

Re:Unbelievable.

[Pneuma ROCKS]

Isn't this the same kind of actions that open source advocates condemn, when Microsoft and friends use it ?

Absolutely.

I would like to point out that this "project" has been pushed (possibly by its creator) on SpreadFirefox.com for quite some time, but it has met with the appropriate response: NO. Link to the post. I'm an active SFX member, and I can tell you that most members of the community realize how annoying and stupid this idea is. Browser-detection scripts and browser-specific behavior should be buried and forgotten. Firefox is about standards, and the community acknowledges that.

I know the creator of those scripts is trying to help, but his/her aim is terrible.

Re:Unbelievable.

[FooBarWidget]

I expected a post like this to be modded up to +5 Insightful. But frankly, you people miss the damn point!

Look at all the IE-only websites. Firefox has reached about 10% market share now, yet there are still people out there who develop for IE only, with no legitimate reason to do so. If you speak to those webmasters, you'll probably hear something like "I don't care about the minority". Why is this a problem? Because as long as IE has the most market share, it holds back the W3C standards!

• For example, IE doesn't support PNG alpha channels. This is 2006, every single browser but IE supports alpha channels, there's absolutely no reason for IE to not support it! Yes yes I know about IE 7, but how many years will it take before it's out? IE 7 won't have a significant market share for a long long long long time, and during all that time we're stuck in the no-alpha-channel-dark-ages. And yes I know about the PNG hack, but I shouldn't have to use it! And the PNG hack doesn't work for background images (translucent background images can be very useful for rounded borders or shadows).
• IE's (at least version 6's) XHTML support sucks. It has almost no XHTML support. XHTML is rendered as HTML 4, but a bigger problem is that IE doesn't even support the application/html+xml MIME type!! As a result I'm forced to configure my web server to send text/html as MIME type, causing all the other browsers to interpret the document as HTML 4 instead of XHTML. This makes XHTML almost useless.
• CSS support. IE doesn't support the 'overflow' property, for example. IE's support for 'margin' and the 'em' unit is broken.
• And numberous other things. When I design a website, I test it in Firefox and Konqueror, and validate the code with the W3C validator. If it's valid, and it works on Firefox and Konqueror, then it usually works on Opera too. But not IE. Almost every single time I have to use IE conditional statements to include a custom, IE-specific CSS to fix the layout.

This has got to stop. As a webmaster, I'm sick of hacking my website to be IE-compatible while I'm already W3C-compliant, and I'm sure many webmasters are sick of it too. The only way to fight this is to ensure that IE loses more of it's market share. We cannot wait for IE7, that takes too long and who knows what else Microsoft refuses to fix. Yet Firefox still doesn't have more than 10% market share. It's time for more aggressive weaponry, because apparently you can't win by playing the nice guy. Plus I'm sick and tired of all the IE-specific sites. The only way to get rid of them is by decreasing IE's market share.

I don't care what browser will have the most market share, as long as it's not IE (or IE shells). Every single modern browser out there has good support for W3C standards - except IE.

Re:Unbelievable.

[FooBarWidget]

Uhm no it isn't. Every single browser except IE has superb support for W3C standards. As long as any non-IE browser gets more market share, webmasters who want to design a website according to the W3C standards will be able to do so, instead of holding themselves back and resorting to IE-specific hacks to make the website render correctly in IE, just because IE's the only one that doesn't render things properly.

Re:Unbelievable.

[Pneuma ROCKS]

Do most people really "choose", or do they just use it because they don't know better? I think it's the latter.

That's true. But you should ask yourself whether most of these people even care about knowing better. My guess is they don't.

Installing Firefox or any other browser only takes a few seconds.

That's what it takes you to install Firefox. You do realize there's people that never download or install programs, and people who don't even know what downloading or installing means, don't you? How many people know what a browser is? And again, how many people care? That point is mute unless you plan on going around the world installing Firefox on all computers and showing people how to use it. No, it's not the same. The icons are different. Laugh all you want, that's the reaction of a real user.

Your second point is, again, very true, but unrealistic. People don't care about this. They want their browser to work. Is it unfair that Micrsoft is taking advantage of this and promoting the creation of IE-exclusive websites? Hell yes! But, in the end, it's all about giving the users the best experience possible. You're not doing that by supporting a project like this.

My only hope is that webmasters will become more aware of web standards and develop sites that are compatible for most browsers, IE tweaks and all. That's as good as it gets, IMO.

Re:Unbelievable.

[edmulroy]

"I'm sick of hacking my website to be IE-compatible...
...I don't care what browser will have the most market share,
as long as it's not IE..."

There is a name for those people who visit your site while using IE. They are called your customers. You sounds as if you do not care about your customers. We all know how well an attitude like that has worked for companies over the years.

Some people don't use Firefox because they already have IE and it works. Others don't use Firefox because of how it works.

They might not like how it does things like
- no "Stop" button on the toolbar
-a mandatory search control toolbar - the kind of "browser helper" thing people have been told contain spyware (anyone remember "Gator"?). (if they wanted a Google, Yahoo or other search toolbar, they would have downloaded and installed one)
-they want to view page source in an editor and not in a dumbed down browser window.

As to conforming to standards compare the rendering of the left column (width: 22ex;) on this site when viewed with IE versus with Firefox.
    http://home.nc.rr.com/emulroy/programg.htm

Many use IE so know it works. They normally prefer to not fix what they feel is not broken. If your web site is one of the rare ones that does not work with IE, they are more likely to decide the site is broken than that to download and use some other browser.

If you want to promote Firefox then tell people compelling reasons why it is better for them
and not some "Microsoft is the evil empire with all that money and we socialists object to that" type of drivel.

. Ed

Annoyance as a marketing technique?

[goofyheadedpunk]

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.

Re:Annoyance as a marketing technique?

[linebackn]

How many times have you come across a website which, in stead of giving you content, advised you to update your IE to 5.0 or higher?

I come across this kind of thing all the time. Way to often. And while *I* turn away from such sites, regular blow joe users will stop using whatever non IE-browser they may be using and "just use IE because everything works in IE". And it is damn near impossible to convince these people to not use IE.

It is high time to start fighting fire with fire (and Firefox!).

I don't see why people are getting so uptight about this. People are free to use their own judgment as to how to inform, warn, or outright block IE users. If these people want to design sites so they work in Mosacic and Netscape 2.0 they are free to do that too, but the web is moving on with or without them.

not keen

[icepick72]

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.

Please, please don't!

[Opportunist]

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?

Re:Please, please don't!

[bunratty]

As long as the IE has a dominant role in the browser world, trojan writers will concentrate on it.

By your reasoning, hackers would concentrate on Apache instead of IIS because it runs more servers. Wrong, they still attack IIS more. Likewise, hackers will focus on IE because it has more known unpatched vulnerabilities than other browsers.

Firefox Deterrent

[gihan_ripper]

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.

You missed an important point

[njdj]

..another browser monoculture.

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.

Annoying

[danimrich]

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.

Re:Annoying

[John Courtland]

You must not realize how much of a son of a bitch it is to make something work in IE along with everything else. In a very short amount of time I can have a nice looking site with proper nav bar, menus, and content working on FireFox, Opera, Safari, Lynx, Links, and it will even degrade properly in Netscape 6... but then if I were to open it in IE, everything is hosed.

I have a huge project I'm working on right now to upgrade my company's website design and functionality, and I would be lying if I said refactoring proper valid HTML into some mess of shit to get IE to render it properly wasn't taking up 25-30% of our development time. And by development time, I'm including not only totally new HTML/JSP pages, but new backend Java, new Javascript and new SQL tables, procedures, views and a new SQL database. Thirty percent. We cannot use any select controls because Microsoft managed to design IE in such a way that the select bar, out of all the controls on the page, is the lucky control to get its own HWND. This somehow precludes it from obeying z-ordering. So I had to write some javascript to emulate that behaviour. Let that sink in. I had to basically emulate a simple HTML form control because IE was designed by what I can only presume are retards.

So your opinion about having web developers "aim to make their sites usable for as many different browsers as is reasonably possible", to me, is poorly thought out. Instead of forcing hordes of web developers to pour hundreds of extra hours into basically developing shit, why can't Microsoft write a browser that simply TRIES to not suck? Cut the infection off at the source instead of trying to force everyone else to deal with it. It doesn't even need to be too much better, but all these hacks are the epitome of poor design and they certainly don't promote best practices. What happens to my hacks when IE7 comes out? Am I going to have to refactor my fucking code? I should send a goddamn bill to Microsoft for the fucking coronary I'm going to experience from being so pissed at their incompetence. Sorry, I got a little hot headed there. Goddamnit I'm tired of IE.

Re:That's retarded

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

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.

Re:Stupid, stupid...

[Khaed]

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.

Re:That's _exactly_ what we need...

[DaHat]

> Why not? I have encountered numerous banners stating "We only support windows and internet explorer", or "your operating system/browser is not supported at this time".

Why not? Because it ends up with people who employ such tactics resorting to the same tactics that they complain about so much.

So it's ok for web sites to require FireFox but the moment they say that about IE it's suddenly wrong? No... It's hypocritical.

Last I checked, FireFox and OSS was about choice and forcing people to change sure seems to disregard choice and adds to the general perception of snobbery on the OSS side.