Ed Bott writes about Explorer Destroyer, a programme some Firefox fanatics have dreamed up to try and force people into dumping IE and using Firefox.
I’ll side with Ed on this. To deliberately degrade an IE user’s browsing experience is just the kind of thing FF supporters should be against.
And bear in mind that a significant number of web users aren’t in control of what browser’s on their desktop. They might be home users on a machine set up by a geek who don’t know how to change browsers… they might be corporate users who are using IE because of corporate policy… they might be in a Net cafe.
To my mind it’s just as ratty as, say, MS deciding to release some software for XP only, when there’s no technical reason it can’t run on Windows 2000. Screw the user, it’s all about market share at any cost.
As a contrast, here’s the WordPress mob’s campaign: BrowseHappy.
Agreed. It’s a bad idea.
Putting a banner at the top of a webpage is hardley a major degregation. Blocking the site certainly is. But instructions on changing browser are provided. If using IE because of corporate policy, it’s a bad policy. And if they’re in a net cafe, whatever they’re doing can’t be that vital; they can always go to another cafe that does supply Firefox. At least they’re not feeding them the web page of death.
I can see why people would regard it as reasonable – that’s the kind of shite that non-MS users have been forced to put up with for years; there’s a user-agent liar extension for Firefox because of that behaviour.
I think I prefer BrowseHappy ‘tho.
Bad corporate policy (mandatory IE) may be bad, but it doesn’t mean Joe User has any control over it whatsoever. And I wonder how many Net cafes run Firefox? (Okay I admit it, it’s been ages since I’ve gone into one.) And who says activity in a net cafe isn’t vital? Vital to who?
I think it would require a special brand of stupidity for web site owner to decide to needlessly lock-out IE users. Yes, non-IE users have seen it before. But two wrongs don’t make a right.
By the way, the ExplorerDestroyer people have been particularly stupid in including four-letter words in their spiel, pretty much guaranteeing it won’t go very far with the mainstream/conservative/family web surfing segments.