by In case you haven’t switched to Mozilla Firefox yet, there’s a new group of people out there encouraging web developers to put content on their pages to get you to try the “rebel” browser:
According to the Explorer Destroyer Web site, the group offers
Web-site owners scripting technology that detects whether a visitor is
running IE. If so, an alert will appear advising the visitor to
download Firefox so they can either view the site better or view it at
all. Whenever a visitor to a Web site using the group’s technology
switches to Firefox from IE, the owner of the Web site will get the
referral fee if they have signed up for Google’s AdSense program.There are three types of alerts site owners can put on their page–“gentle encouragement,” “semi-serious,” or “dead serious.”
If a Web site owner chooses “gentle encouragement,” site visitors
who are using IE will see a banner across the top of the page that
encourages them to download Firefox. A “semi-serious” site will put up
a splash page encouraging a user to download Firefox, with a link for
downloading Mozilla’s browser as well as a link to the Web site.Those who choose the “dead serious” alert actually block users with
IE from viewing the page, informing them they must install Firefox to
view the site. View a demo of what happens when a user clicks on a site with this rating.
I’ve used Firefox for a long time– it’s my primary browser. There are many cool add-ons, and I’ve made a few converts myself. So, if you’re so inclined, try it out!
Hmmm…. nowadays, I am terrified of downloading anything. I always ask my hubby (he built my puter) and he is the one who puts all the necessary anti-spy ware and such.
Thanks for the suggestion though.
already there! I like it better too, though I can’t pinpoint exactly why…probably the tabs and the general look of it.
The school has both EI and Firefox. Most of the time I end up using Firefox because EI keeps freezing up. It may be the school’s fault and not EI but I don’t know. I don’t know which one I’d take if I had to choose.
I made another post regarding IE market share. You will only hurt yourself to deny IE access to view your site. IE has 85% market share. The scraps are fought between Netscape, Firefox, Opera and other open source browsers.
I don’t think I would ever deny IE access to my site– but it’s interesting what lengths people will go to to promote what they think is best. That being said, I recognize marketshare, but don’t discount the other browsers. IE’s percentages continue to erode, and there’s no telling is IE 7 will really pick up any of the other browser’s converts. Why do I say this? Because most people use IE not because it’s the best option but because it’s installed by default on Windows boxes and people generally aren’t smart enough about what’s out there or don’t want to try something different.
If Firefox or Opera were installed by default, the market share would be totally different. I don’t believe anyone would go out and download IE 6.0 right now if the playing field was even. Even the 7 betas are missing a lot of features that Firefox has out of the box.
That’s the thing right there. IE by default. They certainly have the right to place their own product in their own product (IE in Windows). I prefer Firefox. But it would be folly to deny those generally-not-smart-enough-people-to-switch because the idea of a blog, a website, is to draw as many visitors as possible.
Linux as an operating system, for example, just hasn’t taken off as a personal computing tool. There’s a good reason. Genereally speaking – Windows (with the IE bundle) is just too easy to get up and running for your typical novice user.
You know what’s funny? Download.com reports that Internet Explorer 6 (SP1) actually has more downloads than Firefox, Netscape and Opera. A surprise package has more – Avant Browser (I tried it once not long ago and wasn’t blown away). I am pretty sure Microsoft doesn’t direct users from it’s site to download.com. Those are users looking for a browser or browser updates and chose IE6.1 for whatever reason.
To me, that’s about the best indicator that we have right now regarding users going out and downloading browsers. The playing field is not even. But you can’t call the download.com downloads forced downloads.
I don’t know if that’s a fair benchmark, though. I mean, how many people actually go to that site versus going to microsoft.com or mozilla.org? How many people have automatic updates? I’m certain that anyone that wanted to “fix” this stat could get people to go to the site and download it a bunch ot times.
We’re talking millions and millions of downloads. Nobody loves MS that much 😉
I picked download.com because in my understanding it is the most popular downloads resource. Microsoft won’t offer Firefox download links and vice versa. Download.com offers them all.
Firefox rocks. It was banned at my work at first (Because patches couldn’t easily be maintained on it). It just about drove me crazy to research on the internet without it. I actually started using Remotedesktop to my home computer, then doing my research from there ;-). Thankfully I eventually came up with a “business reason” for installing Firefox and have not had to remote in at home to do my research. It turns out that this was just in time ;-), we now are not allowed to remotely connect to computers outside our network!