Yahoo Pushing IE7 On Firefox Users

El Lobo writes "Looks like things are heating up again in the browser wars. Google has been openly supporting Firefox, so now Yahoo is displaying a new feature on search results pages for FireFox users. It appears that Yahoo is pushing downloads of IE7 from Microsoft and including itself as the default search engine installed in the file menu area." I got the invitation to download IE7 when running Firefox on a Mac, and even when running IE5 under CrossOver; but not when running IE7 under Parallels.

Comments

Fair enough

[El Lobo]

They are not "pushing". It's just an advertisement. I have seen worse, for example all those Firefox evangelistic campaigns like: "Make history with Firefox", "Rediscovery the web with Firefox", "Add a Firefox button to your web", "Firefox in your email signature", "Firefox site prefeared" . Hell I've even seen a "Screw IE" button once on some "respected" site
Nothing different from this "Firefox protects you" official Google site: http://www.google.com/firefox
Fair enough. Nothing to see here, folks [bg]

Re:Fair enough

[Anti_Climax]

I hit one page looking for a free/open source application (wish I could remember which one it was) and was greeted with a large banner at the top and an audio recording saying my computer was "infected" with internet explorer and I should switch to Firefox to remedy it.

Now I can understand the advantages and disadvantages of Firefox and IE, but annoying me by acting like a jackass isn't the way to convince me to switch.

I will say, after trying IE7 under Vista at work, trying Firefox 2.0, having issues with IE6 remembering my settings and finding out about IETab, the switch was an easy decision for me. Pundit asshattery hurt rather than helped the situation.

Re:Fair enough

[Renegade88]

Linux free for over 10 years.... And proud of it!

Just like every other lemming around. Nothing to be proud of in particular.

Many BSD users have been Linux-free this whole time, other than the ones that teethed on Linux, then quickly realized there was something better (like me). Just because someone doesn't use Linux doesn't automatically mean they are using an inferior OS.

Re:Fair enough

[asabjorn]

I would agree if it was not for the fact that Microsoft acquired the browser market share that it currently has through questionable practices (read monopoly abuse) so the tactics it is using to target the users of it's biggest competition should be limited. From Yahoo!s perspective it probably makes sense financially to do such a deal with Microsoft, but inherently this is more about Microsoft trying to push it's browse platform as a way to lock users in to it's main platform. Therefore it would be better if Microsoft was prohibited from doing such deals because that would probably increase the competition in the marketplace and Yahoo! could make a similar deal with an alternative browser instead (e.g Opera).

But I would say that in the so called browser wars the government has largely failed at performing their role in limiting Microsofts abuse of their operating system monopoly in achieving a monopoly position in another market. It is not illegal to have a monopoly, it is just illegal to abuse it.

Re:Fair enough

[Anne Honime]

I hit one page looking for a free/open source application (wish I could remember which one it was) and was greeted with a large banner at the top and an audio recording saying my computer was "infected" with internet explorer and I should switch to Firefox to remedy it.

Now I can understand the advantages and disadvantages of Firefox and IE, but annoying me by acting like a jackass isn't the way to convince me to switch.

After years of us, users of alternative browsers (opera, netscape 4, etc.), we've been fed up by litteraly thousands of "I don't care if it displays badly on your monitor because only IE matters" sites, you find offensive that a correctly designed site reminds you in a mild way that your attitude (among millions of "I pee on W3C standards" like you) has and will harm you ? Now that you're eating your own food, that sounds seriously funny. But I must admit a wave sound is a bit too much ; personaly, I validate my pages and make a warning that my site won't support any broken browser. This links to a list of good browsers, and IE isn't in it, full stop.

Does it matter?

[uchihalush]

It's not really a big deal because if the experience on Firefox really better than IE, as we tout it is, then the converters will have no choice but to stick. Even if they download IE to see if it's better, the better browser WILL in fact win. We are not talking about people who are reluctant to switch, it's those who already have. If they are not having an enjoyable experience on firefox then let em leave who the hell cares?

Re:Does it matter?

[RAMMS EIN]

``It's not really a big deal because if the experience on Firefox really better than IE''

That's not the only issue. Another issue is that IE has the bulk of the market share, especially among non-tech-savvy users. This means web developers always have to consider how IE behaves on their sites, even if the behavior is clearly a bug in IE. For years, this has stalled progress on the web, because Microsoft would not support certain features in IE, making it unattractive for web designers and developers to use them.

The growing market share of Firefox has led more sites to include certain niceties, even if they didn't actually work well or at all in IE. This has increased the attractiveness of Firefox, as well as compelled Microsoft to improve their browser.

Arguably, it would be a Bad Thing if this development were stopped just now it's starting to yield fruit. Competition between web browsers is good, it leads to better browsers and better sites.

Not "pushing" until they block your user agent..

[plasmacutter]

It's not "pushing" until they block the user agent of your browser..

My school started doing this last year.. I navigated to their registration site with safari and got a nice little "we won't let you go to this site with your browser of choice" message..

I promptly enabled the debug menu and chose MSIE6 as my user agent.. it then let me in and I had absolutely no problems doing what I wanted to do.

Now this may become a much more sticky problem when they start taking advantage of the "remote attestation" in treacherous computing to prevent you from lying to the servers of anticompetitive schticks like this school of mine.

Hardly pushing

[grasshoppa]

It's a freakin' ad.

Pushing would be forcing you to install IE7 to use yahoo.

Re:I don't get it

[Skater]

Very bottom of the page. I just got it running Firefox 2.0 on Linux (Kubuntu). THAT'S what passes for "pushing" these days? An "MS IE Optimized for Yahoo" ad at the BOTTOM of the page, below all the results, navbar, etc.? "Pushing" IE to me would be, say, blocking use of search.yahoo.com with other browsers or something - and even that would be questionable "pushing" since there are plenty of other search engines, and I don't think Yahoo's is so great that I could live without it (in fact, until just now, I haven't used it since Google appeared).

If that's pushing IE, then websites should feel free to continue pushing things in that manner. It's the most unobtrusive ad I've ever seen. I didn't even notice it until you pointed it out to me.

This is a nonstory.

Wasted ad if they don't check the OS

[Chris Tyler]

I just tried a search on Yahoo and got the same ad. They must have checked the User Agent string to see that I was using Firefox. But why didn't they check to see if I was using Windows? -- why bother advertising IE to me if I can't run it on my system?

Apples and oranges

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenBSD is a distribution of BSD. Linux is a kernel. You're comparing one distribution of BSD to the multitude of Linux distributions.

You have a point, but you're making it poorly.