I have never been a fan of tabloid newspapers. Virtually the only thing I dislike more than tabloid newspapers are readers believing in tabloid newspapers, and sadly there are too many of those.
Lately the Norwegian tabloid VG ( Verdens Gang, roughly translated world's times) ran a story related to certain usage of the Firefox referral program offered by Google.
Well, to clear a few things up, despite VG trying to make this sound like a new thing, the Firefox referral program was offered to US publishers the 4th of November 2005. International publishers, of which I'm one of, living in Norway got access to the Firefox referral scheme the 28th of November 2005.
If they had done some more research they would have found out that Google has hired several known Firefox developers in the past. As firefox is an open source project, creating an extension for it (such as the google toolbar for firefox) is easy, and it can usually be more flexible than for proprietary systems. But I guess it isn't of interest for VG that google might be have monetary interests to offer a referral program.
The article is focusing on Explorer Destroyer. A set of javascript code snippets used by a small group of individuals.
That someone took the referral program to the next level and requires people to use Firefox in order to visit their website, instead of just offering a suggestion, doesn't really come as a surprise. And that is what ExplorerDestroyer does, at least in "Level 3: Dead serious". It offers two other levels as well, level 2 offering a "splash page" that an IE user would have to continue from to see the rest of the page, and in level 1 showing a field recommending users to switch to Firefox.
Although any real web developer will frown down upon such actions, it is generally easier to develop a website with a spesific browser in mind, and chances are these sites have flaws when rendering in other browsers than Mozilla Firefox, and rather than fixing the site, they decide to use such as script.
The World Wide Web Consortium, in short W3C is responsible for maintaining amongst others the HyperText Markup Language(HTML) recommendations used to write the markup for websites. Internet Explorer (IE) has historically, and still is in voilation of many of the recommendations, and you often have to use different sorts of hacks to separate IE from other Web User Agents in order to serve a good looking website to it. Hopefully this is better in version 7 of the browser, although that won't help for a number of years due to different update cycles.
I particulary dislike the ending of the article in VG: Roughly translated it says "Both Google and the company behind Firefox refuses to comment the case at this point. And with that the hate-campaign continues".
I'm pretty sure that whomever received the request for comment is still laughing at VG. Neither Firefox nor Google is related to the "campaign" in the first place, and it annoys me that the wording might lead people to believe that VG is implying that Google is behind the "hate campaign".
