Getting people to switch to something other than IE by shoving it in their face
So I needed to look something up, but am unable to access the CVS Website because they apparently only support Internet Explorer and Netscape, and I am a big Opera user. From their site, after some browser-sniffing:
We recently upgraded the architecture on our Web site to make it easier for you to use and to allow for more secure purchases. These changes also allow us to begin developing new functionality and viewing options. Even with these technical improvements, CVS.com remains compatible with the majority of browsers and platforms that are currently used.
Our site is currently optimized to these browser types and above:
If you currently use Netscape Navigator, click here to update it to version 4.5 or newer on a PC or Macintosh computer.
If your browser is Internet Explorer, click here to update it to version 5.0 or newer on a PC or Macintosh computer.
How quaint is that? Choose one: IE or netscape. Seriously, I haven’t seen that in years, and from a large corporation like that. Charming, it is.
I’ll admit, I was able to access CVS.com’s content without firing up IE or Netscape, by simply using Firefox. But that’s not the point. The point is that if I already have a browser open, I don’t want to have to jump through hoops. But that’s common-sense, and we all know that. Websites should be built to be cross-browser compatible, blah-blah-blah. It’s not even worth going into detail.
Which got me wondering… Who is really at fault for the implementation of browser-sniffing, anti-accessibity practices? Is it really bad designers, or big companies and such, or should website visitors shoulder the blame?
Here’s where I’m coming from: Surely someone over at CVS made a decision to develop a website with specific known limitations, and surely their objective was not to limit or alienate their customers. That doesn’t make sense. Instead, companies that build websites for IE only have good justification for their actions: ninety-something percent of all internet users use IE. And so like many business decisions, the decision to build a specific (and in this case, inferior) product has measurable support.
So who’s at fault? Well, you are if you are using IE. You are perpetuating a product that’s inferior to its competitors, and forcing companies to make their decisions based on your bad decision not to upgrade. (Which amazes me, because with so many geeks out there evangelizing you’d think the remaining IE users would become enlightened.)
So here’s my solution. Call it the fight-fire-with-fire approach. We all know browser-sniffing is bad, but so is IE proliferation over suitable alternatives. So here’s what we do:
Include the following splice of code in your PHP-powered blog right under the < body> tag.
<!-- start Anti-Explorer -->
<?php if (strstr($_SERVER[”HTTP_USER_AGENT”], “MSIE”)) {
echo “<div style=”padding: 1em; border: 5px solid #F00; background: #FFC; font-size: large”>< b>Are you <i>still</i> using Internet Explorer?</b><br /> Do yourself a favor and upgrade your browser now:<br /> <a href=”http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/”>
Firefox</a>, <a href=”http://www.opera.com/”>Opera</a>, or <
a href=”http://www.mozilla.org/products/mozilla1.x/”> Mozilla</a><br /><br />
<span style=”font-size: small”>This message disappears on non-IE browsers, and is based on
HTTP headers.<br /> <a href=”http://browsehappy.com”>Need more info on why you
should switch?</a></span></div>”;
} ?>
<!– end Anti-Explorer –>
What this does is to put a big ugly banner in the face of anyone who’s using Internet Explorer, telling them to upgrade. Anyone using anything other than IE sees nothing. In fact, this website has this enabled at the top… either you see it or you don’t.
There’s a drawback to this code snippet: it’s based on HTTP headers, which can be faked by the end-user depending on their browser (if you are using Opera, try it under Quick Preferences). But aside from the occasional false positive, installing it only does good by getting your message out a highly targeted audience,namely the remaining IE users.
1 Comment
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This is brilliant and I will definitely use it on my WordPress blog. I do, however, maintain a number of web sites on a server that only allows the use of HTML (with JavaScript and CSS) and images. No server-side code such as PHP is allowed. I’m wondering if anyone has a client-side version of this hack available.