Back in December, when this blogmeister was redesigning the static version of the St. Louis CofCC Website, I was considering putting the Explorer Destroyer scripts at the top of the page’s HTML.
In other words, people who would access the page using the Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser would have seen a special message at the top of the page, above the regular page content, advising them of the virtues of downloading and using a web browser other than IE.
I would have modified the script to suggest Firefox and Opera browsers, though the original scripts only point to Firefox, and at that, a Google Toolbar version of Firefox downloadable from the Google servers.
The reason I wanted to do this, or more properly, the reason I am hoping that people switch to browsers like Firefox and Opera instead of IE and instead of IE shell applications (e.g. Neoplanet, Avant, Maxthon, Deepnet Explorer) is that I think it’s risky to have virtually everybody using one kind of browser to surf the internet. This would give the designer of that one browser too much leverage over the world wide web itself.
In an ideal world, the web’s traffic would be 30% IE, 30% Firefox, 30% Opera, and 10% everything else.
After some thought, I began to lean against the idea. And after counsel and advice from the Board of Directors of the St. Louis Metropolitan Area Council of Conservative Citizens, I ultimately rejected the idea.
Both this blog and the static St. Louis CofCC site are not my personal organs per se, but the instrument of a group of people, an organization. It would come off as unprofessional to push this sort of thing on such a website.
Also, many people who access this blog, the static St. Louis CofCC website, and the CofCC National Website do so from computers at their places of employment. Corporate and enterprise workstations are less likely to use non-IE browsers.
I can tell these two facts because the site statistics for the St. Louis static and this blog show that traffic is higher on business days than on weekends and holidays. Also, the stats for the static website show that the lower weekend traffic has a higher rate of usage for non-IE browsers, and the higher business day traffic has a lower usage rate for the non-IEs.
For me to put a script that would pop a yellow box atop the static website that would appear each time that John or Jane Doe log on to the static website from their work computer, suggesting that they do something that their computer’s corporate firewall would not allow them to do (download and install an alternate browser), would be unprofessional, and it would only irritate such work-bound web surfers.
That decision was made months ago. So much to my surprise, I see today that one Paul Thurrott, a man who is much an enthusiast for Microsoft products as one can be without being a total syncophant or being intellectually dishonest, is going to use the Explorer Destroyer scripts on his blog.