There’s a big chance right now to switch people to Firefox and it might not last very long — Microsoft has a new version of Internet Exlporer on the way and lord knows what they’ll be doing in Vista to force people to use it. Firefox has to get a big foothold right now.
If you have a blog or website and are pissed off having to deal with IE6 users or if you just care about open-source and the public interest, now is the time to really take the internet back.
Mozilla built us a wonderful tool. Google gave us a carrot. Now take the stick and beat IE’s ass.
Explorer Destroyer – Switch to Firefox
Yeah, this is cool. And I love that my friends from Downhill Battle are behind it. They’re such badasses.
And props to Firefox on turning one years old!
technorati tags: downhill battle, firefox, spreadfirefox, explorerdestroyer, badass, opensource
Factory Joe 
Wrong wrong wrong guys. This is just reverting to Microsoft’s own bad old ways. Are you trying to crush diversity and innovation? Do you really want Firefox to be the one and only browser? Is Microsoft not allowed to create and innovate?
Yes yes, I’ve heard all the old tales about Microsoft’s behaviour in the past. Don’t bore me with them, commenters. But I want to see more choice, not less.
And how the hell does “pissed off having to deal with IE6 users” square with “now is the time to really take the internet back”? IE6 users – rightly or wrongly – make up a massive part of the internet. What are you going to do? Go round to each of them individually and say “Sorry, you can’t have the internet any more, you’re an IE6 user.”
And for the record, I use IE and Flock. Both of them. I’m broad-minded enough to do that.
Thanks Laurence. I actually agree with you, too. I’m all about more choice on the web — provided that web standards that we all agree to abide by are implemented as one expects. Which at least has me sympathizing with the Explorer Destroyer campaign.
If it weren’t for the IE’s abyssmal support for standards, a lot of the history of the web would be vastly different though, so I guess in some ways, it comes as a mixed blessing. As a web developer/designer, I definitely know what it’s like to debug against IE. It sucks. I mean, that had a lot of do with our choice of Firefox on which to base Flock. Now we’ve got three worthwhile options in Gecko’s corner — as a web developer, that makes me very happy!
I agree with respect to the web developer point of view. I’m a web developer (amongst other things) and coding for cross-browser support can be a royal pain. IE does just about everything different from other browsers. (Notice I’m not saying ‘wrong’, just ‘different’ – I don’t want to get embroiled in the browser standards flamewar; but I’m sure you know that IE’s poor support for standards is as much a result of market growth and demand for new browser functionality through the last 10 years as it is Microsoft’s historic reluctance to adopt ‘not invented here’ or ‘not finished yet’ standards)
The thing is, when I’m doing web development I’m thinking about my customers. These are just normal people doing normal things and sometimes they want to surf the web and maybe use something I’ve written. I’ve got no right to give them anything less than a decent experience, even though it takes so much more effort to achieve that across the different platforms.
It would make my life as a web developer easier if everyone used Firefox, and only Firefox. But as a lifelong fan of computing and programming, I’d be very sad to see that kind of uniformity.