Explorer Destroyer 417
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."
That's _exactly_ what we need... (Score:0, Insightful)
Unbelievable. (Score:4, Insightful)
Annoyance as a marketing technique? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
not keen (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Unbelievable. (Score:3, Insightful)
Please, please don't! (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
No, it isn't (Score:3, Insightful)
There are plenty of banks whose websites conform to W3C standards, and which consequently are usable with Firefox. I don't have any problem with my on-line banking (with Firefox, of course). Maybe you should change to a better bank? If your bank is backward in the way you describe, it probably has other problems which are not yet apparent to you.
Firefox Deterrent (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Shouldn't they follow their own rulez?!?! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Please, please don't! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Unbelievable. (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [spreadfirefox.com]. 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.
You missed an important point (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
gg hypocrits; nextmap (Score:2, Insightful)
Annoying (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Unbelievable. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Unbelievable. (Score:4, Insightful)
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!
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
no big deal (Score:2, Insightful)
As for idea itself, I agree, it is too aggressive.
It would be better if someone will come up with the idea of how during every IE crash instead of "bug report wizard" (did they hire me for that?) some "buy firefox wizard" would popup.
"Ethic" hackers vs. "commercial" trojan writers (Score:3, Insightful)
Trojans are a business. The amount of POCs and ego-boosters is dwarfed by the number of commercial trojans and worms. Hacking servers and taking down sites is no business. Trojans is.
Now, to be profitable, trojans need a high penetration. And for this, they have to work on as many machines as possible. That's one of the reasons why there are VERY few trojans/worms for Mac and Linux, and as far as I know, there are actually NO commercial trojans for those systems. It doesn't pay as well as writing one for Windows. And if the browser is an issue, your target for a commercial attack is the IE. Simply for its penetration.
Re:That's _exactly_ what we need... (Score:2, Insightful)
Firefox is a browser, it can't compete. But, let's go on the assumption that you meant "Firefox advocates are competing fairly".....By childishly blocking people from their sites? People used to do this years ago when it was still Netscape Navigator. Worked so well then, I'm sure it'll work again this time.
Re:Annoyance as a marketing technique? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:That's retarded (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Unbelievable. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sorry you feel this way, but I understand your position as someone who does a lot of webmastering. I've done it myself, and yes, it's frustating.
I have to disagree with you, though. People have a right to choose, and they have the right to choose the crappy browser that breaks standards and monopolizes the desktops. I think IE will never fall under the 30% market share (note: completely made-up percentage), if only because there's people who just don't use their computers or the Internet enough to even merit downloading another browser. Those people will use whatever's intalled on their computer, and they won't care as long as it works.
What I'm trying to say is that you will always have to tweak your sites to work on IE. IE will always have a significant market share, and I don't see the day when they become fully compliant. They will fix some CSS bugs because of the pressure other browsers are exserting, but they'll probably stop half-way. It's just not efficient in terms of investment and revenue.
Annoying IE users will only drive them away from your websites. But maybe you'll be happy seeing the IE percentage go down and think of it as a good thing. I just think it's plain wrong. People just want to surf the web, why do you they have to pay for some stupid (for them) browser war?
Re:Stupid, stupid... (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Unbelievable. (Score:4, Insightful)
That's true. But you should ask yourself whether most of these people even care about knowing better. My guess is they don't.
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:That's _exactly_ what we need... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Unbelievable. (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm coding a couple of layouts at the moment. Made an xHTML structure, slapped on a stylesheet, and BAM. It worked in every sane browser. Fire up IE, and I get a grey, mangled blob. So in order to get that retarded thing to work, I have to add some IE specific CSS (ugh!) to load jpgs instead of semi-transparent PNGs, which I then have to absolutely position with *javascript*, in order for the image to be aligned with the background properly. And oh no, that's not all. I also actually have to develop all those IE specific JPGs.
In the end, I just thought screw this shit. I love sites that are functional in every browser, but *not* if it means having to spend extra hours just to fix it for one browser. If people want to continue to use an outdated browser which doesn't even support the most basic CSS standards, be my guest. Just don't expect any of my sites to look good on your monitor. If I lose a part (90% for all I care) of my audience like that: so be it. At least I'll know that my sites will be accessible to those with various handicaps, except for the IE-handicap.
Paranoia about IRCing as root (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't see it any different than web browsing as root, and guess what, there has been far more exploits against M$IE than there have against mIRC. Or xchat.
Melissa
Re:Unbelievable. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Please, please don't! (Score:3, Insightful)
1) IIS only runs on Windows, and so the host is definitely Windows, and so your pre-packaged exploit has a greater chance of running if you manage to crak the server (not so a *nix, which you don't have a 'spolit for)
2) *nix admins are more diligent/security aware than Windows ones
3) the attackers do it because they hate M$
4) IIS is a softer target than Apache (definitely true historically, not so much so now)
5) Apache doesn't actually host significantly many more sites than IIS, certainly not so many that IIS-hosted sites are hard to find
I could go on, but you get the idea. The basic premise is that Apache is just harder enough to crack than IIS that it simply isn't worth the bother; there are plenty enough IIS sites to crack as it is. These people mostly aren't in it for the challenge, they're just using prepackaged scripts they've downloaded from a darknet IRC channel somewhere and sent off indiscriminately looking for a victim.
As Firefox (and Linux for that matter) gains market share and becomes more popular, it will be more worthwhile trying to create exploits for it. Sure, most of these will be social-engineering ones rather than true remote exploits, but so what? It makes little difference to the end user who's tricked into installing an extension that zombies their machine.
Subtlety works better ... (Score:2, Insightful)
But I avoid the most common mistake that browser detection creates, that is to lock people out of sites that are perfectly functional. Agreed, some of my interesting CSS magic doesn't show up, but I don't want to annoy my users -- just get them to use Firefox.
I also detect when Opera is faking itself as IE, and ask the user to set the user-agent string back to Opera, so that IE's web stats aren't overly inflated.
Re:Annoying (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Unbelievable. (Score:3, Insightful)
Almost? The IE dev team has Fucking Killed(TM) XHTML. XHTML is useless to the point where usually the only sensible approach is to just settle on plain HTML. And remember that IE7 will not support application/xhtml+xml either, so XHTML is dead and stays dead.
Usually my approach to fixing IE's horrible CSS support is to conditional comment in a style sheet that just ensures that the site is navigable. I don't care if it looks like ass and whether IE users have two scrollbars while everyone else has none. In the future I'll probably add a conditional comment that displays a box saying something along the lines of:
Re:Been there, done that (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps not, but that's how you manage it. The studio producer used to say to the man with a cause: "If you have a message to deliver, take it to Western Union."
Re:Unbelievable. (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [rr.com]
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
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)