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."

Re:Annoyance as a marketing technique?

[PeeAitchPee]

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!

My argument exactly . . . if we're not supposed to eat animals then why are they made of meat? ;-)

Referral money

[ID10T5]

1) Design an evangelical hack to promote/support Firefox.

2) Get a link to your site posted on /. so you can rake in referral $$ from noob /. readers checking out your hack.

3) Profit!

I finally figured out #2!

Re:Is this easy

[Firehed]

Well go figure. As soon as I put my "Switch to Fx" code at the page, it starts rendering correctly in IE. I had no idea it was that sensitive, but apparently threatening browsers makes them work better.

Re:That's retarded

[SnprBoB86]

"The 'Embrace and Extend' strategy on which Microsoft has relied since about 1998 is designed to be divisive and ultimately to support Microsoft's one interest: by hook or by crook, to land everyone on the Microsoft platform."

Don't like Microsoft's extensions? Don't use them. I've been developing software on Microsoft platforms for years and as far as I know, all Microsoft extensions are clearly labeled as such in the documentation.

For some examples, see:

• "* Denotes an extension to the W3C DOM." [microsoft.com]
• The originally sited conditional comments [microsoft.com] page lacks the "Standards Information" section that every related page contains. [microsoft.com]
• "The __try/__except and __try/__finally statements are a Microsoft extension to the C language that..." [microsoft.com]

"So feel free to act as apologist for the soulless corporate machine if you must"

Real people work at Microsoft. I'm proud to say that I am one of them. These are smart people that are doing their damnedest to produce world class software. The truth of the matter is that Microsoft routinely produces extensions that ADD VALUE to Microsoft products. I often use a variety of the MSXML extensions to the DOM because I am developing for Microsoft platforms and they SAVE ME TIME as a developer. I use the __finally construct in my C++ code because it saves me from creating dozens of trivial wrapper objects for simple memory allocations.

"That last point is the key. Why on earth would MS build an entirely new way to get one's email when secure IMAP or POP3 already exist?"Lots of reasons:

• It's web based (Why would Yahoo build its web mail? Why would Google build GMail?)
• Outlook web access also provides access to all features of exchange which include...
  • calendar
  • address book
  • tasks
  • notes
  • public folders (such as email distribution list archives)

If you should be mad at anyone, be mad at those who create applications with no reguard for alternative platforms. You might argue that Microsoft is in that category, but you would be wrong. Outlook Web Access has had a "Basic" version since 1.0 that has always been compatible with alternative browsers. If you are going to build a cross-platform product, don't use Microsoft extensions. The sad truth is that since Microsoft owns the desktop market, the "soulless" 3rd-party corporate machines that produce software and web pages that only run on Microsoft's browsers and technologies do so because the small market share of other platforms does not justify testing against other platforms and more importantly, Microsoft extensions SAVE THEM MONEY in development time.