November 12, 2005

By Sheila Lennon / The Providence (R.I.) Journal

9:20 a.m. Saturday (Blogroll)

Kill Bill's Browser: 13 Good reasons to switch from IE to Firefox is pretty funny. (8. Mozilla has never made a talking paper clip.)

Number 14 is serious. Explorer Destroyer:

Get this tool for switching people from IE to Firefox.

For each person you switch, Google gives you $1, Microsoft loses marketshare, and an angel gets its wings.

Google on Nov. 4 announced it would pay $1 for every referral that led to a download of Firefox with the Google Toolbar built in, and the Downhill Battle folks ran with it.

They're offering scripts to Web sites — blogs are sites, too — that urge your IE users to switch. It a delicious take-off on the annoying messages Netscape, Mozilla and Firefox users were hit with at sites built with nonstandard Microsoft code and tags: Please "upgrade" to IE to see the site.

Explorer Destroyer scripts offer the opposite: A message suggesting you switch to Firefox comes in three flavors — a suggestion, an intermediate ("splash") page with a link to continue on to your site, or outright blocking of IE users (for one day?). You'll need a Google AdSense account to collect your buck a head.

The "Why we made this site" section of Explorer Destroyer begins,

We are a group of four friends and full-time political activists who live in Worcester, Massachusetts. For the past two and a half years we've been working on internet-based projects to give independent voices more clout in our culture and our media system. When you work on issues like this, free / open source software has enormous political significance....

The four are Holmes Wilson, Nick Nassar, Tiffiniy Cheng and Nicholas Reville.

Firefox is the grandchild of Netscape via the Mozilla Foundation, which can play with Google more easily since it spun off Mozilla Corp. in August. I'm usually running the latest beta (test version) of the newest version of Firefox, which is constantly being improved by a volunteer corps of code monkeys.

It's not unusual for me to have 30 tabs open in one window, a bread-crumb trail of my recent browsing that mixes news, blogs, music, games and, say, a half-dozen recipes for mussels. The latest Firefox lets me drag and drop those tabs to rearrange them, so I can clump the recipes together and then dump five of them in sequence when I've decided what's for dinner.

Also useful: I follow a link from search results, and find that I want to explore from that page, but also want to go back to other links on the referring page. No problem: One of the choices on the right-click context menu is "Duplicate tab" — I click that, a new tab opens with the same page open, and I go back with the first tab to the original search results. (This is how I end up with 30 tabs open.)

Firefox is full of such common-sense conveniences. It's based on how most of us want to browse the Web — pop-ups are blocked by default, for instance — not on how easily our eyeballs can be delivered for commercial use. I report bugs. They go away in the next version. Like any good power tool, you can add attachments whipped up by programmers who needed that function, too, and knew how to make it. They then give it to the rest of us, including the tool that installs it without fuss when you click a link on the extension's information page.

Also on Nov. 4, Mozilla announced an 'Extend Firefox' Contest which is likely to generate a whole lot more ways to have it your way. Two thoughts:

— I hope they make sure these extensions work together well when users combine them randomly on their PCs.

— And I wonder if we can ask for what we want, offer a wishlist to contestants with serious programming chops willing to make an extension they wouldn't have thought of. (I'll ask.)

Find out more about Firefox and download it at that link. It will import all your bookmarks and settings — you won't lose your history.

If you want to get rid of Outlook as well, Firefox's companion e-mail program, Thunderbird, integrates with Firefox, and imports your mail and address book to boot.

And, before you ask, no, I'm not getting paid if you switch. Consider this a public-service announcement from someone who switched long ago and never looked back. I've just sent an e-mail to Downhill Battle asking if the script can be run without an AdSense account, just because a mature, cooperatively developed, open-source Web browser is worth touting in the public interest.

It's FUBU: For us, by us.