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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."
Your arguments all seem very good and well thought out. Except that you create your own problems "When I design a website, I test it in Firefox and Konqueror, and validate the code with the W3C validator" and then blame it on IE.
What is the argument against the exact opposite stance? For example, I say
"I'm sick of hacking my website to be Firefox compatible while I'm already IE compatible". When I look at my web sites visitors, the number of non-IE browser SIMPLY does not justify the work needed to support Firefox.
"But Firefox is standards compliant!!" Who give's a rats ass? I have worked with standards for a long time, ANSI, IEEE etc and all they do is slow progress to a snails pace with bickering, in-fighting and compromises that produces 'worst of class' improvements.
Now I will give you that IE got pretty stagnate as a result of lack of competition. But standard compliance hasn't done dick for that. What Firefox needs is to say screw standards and come up with some innovations that give me a reason to use it. Until then, the DeFacto standard, which in the end is all that counts, is going to remain just that.
I agree that W3C compliant sites should render correctly and you are correct that IE does not always do so.
However...
In this case, this is an extension to HTML. And as much as standards compliance freaks hate extensions, your argument is not valid in this particular instance. You do not need to develop a workaround for a feature you would not be using if your page is W3C complaint because you would not have used this feature to begin with.
IE extensions have proven to be a very good thing for the web overall. It has always been IE that has pushed the limits of dynamic web pages through the inclusion of similar extensions (primarily for the development of Outlook Web Access) which have given birth to the technologies that fuel AJAX and other modern web techniques.
This, however, does not preclude you from hating conditional comments for other reasons.
http://brandonbloom.name
Seriously, this is only going to piss users off. They'll think your site is broken and only works with some browser they have to go install. If they've never heard of Firefox... maybe they'll think it's spyware. If they know what Firefox is they'll most likely be pissed that you're so arrogant as to monitor which browser they're using and either try to push your idiotic ideas on them.
Stick with the Firefox logos and sharing the browser with friends. People who load this script on their sites are only trying to impress their fanboi friends.