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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."
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.
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?
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.
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?
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