Wanna make money? Is it really an improvement?


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Thread: Wanna make money? Is it really an improvement?

  1. #1
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    Wanna make money? Is it really an improvement?

    "Switch your users to Firefox and make money.

    You already want people to switch to Firefox. Now's the time to get serious about it. Google is paying $1 for each new Firefox user you refer.

    This is pretty amazing. Now you can advance your ideals, save people from popups and spyware hell, and make some serious money. Millions of people have heard about Firefox and are ready to switch--all they need is a friendly push.

    That's where these scripts come in. They're specially formulated to give just the right push, maximizing souls-saved and dollars-for-you."

    My opinion- Firefox has security holes when run on Windows as well. And I'm sure as word spreads, we will be bombarded if we have to use IE at work or school. And what will Opera do? A free coffeemaker? There goes the Network Neighborhood!
    Explorer Destroyer
    "Why we made this site.

    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.

    Firefox is one of the most important software applications in the world because it can play a big part in determining the future of the web. It is crucial that an open-source, standards-based web browser becomes the most popular browser, and Firefox has a shot at being that. It's the best product, and its popularity is climbing, thanks to amazing efforts by the Mozilla Foundation, the SpreadFirefox.org juggernaut, and many others. But if we want to avoid giving Microsoft the power to define the future of the internet, Firefox needs to keep on growing and growing and growing.

    About 8 months ago, we spent some time talking about an aggressive strategy to get people to switch to Firefox. Remember those splash pages on websites that say 'You must be using Internet Explorer to view this page'. What if it was the opposite? What if websites said: 'You cannot view this page with Internet Explorer. Please download Firefox to continue.'

    It's a tough strategy. On the one hand, we knew it would convert way more people than classy-but-tiny "get firefox" buttons. But would bloggers and site administrators really put a splash page between 90% of their readers and their own content? Firefox fervor had reached a point where we thought that some people might actually do it, web-designers who do constant battle with IE6's lack of standards support. But we knew a lot of sites wouldn't. And we were really busy. So we tossed the idea onto the ol' idea pile and kept on trucking.

    Then a few days ago, Google announced that they would pay $1 for each referral to Firefox with Google Toolbar. The idea popped back out of the idea pile. Google has just set the stage for Firefox to literally "take back the web" and go from 11% of browsers to over 50%. If people can now spread Firefox, stick it to Microsoft, and make money for each user switched, an aggressive strategy just got more appealing.

    So here's the plan. Today we launched two websites: explorerdestroyer.com and killbillsbrowser.com. The first site has some free scripts that you can put on your website to encourage users to switch. The scripts will detect whether a visitor is running Internet Explorer, and if they are, it will either show a splash page telling them to switch or it will put a big switch banner at the top of the page (depending on how serious you want to get). If you sign up for Google's referral program, you can make $1 for each person that switches. Plus you'll be saving the world.

    The second site we launch is called killbillsbrowser.com. It's a parody site with jokes about Internet Explorer, but it's also meant as a serious way to convince people to switch. And when people switch on our sites, we'll make referrer money, which is nice too.

    We've personally spent countless hours struggling to make our standards-compliant websites display correctly on standards-bashing Internet Explorer. We've spent days fixing computers of our family members that have been hobbled by spyware that Internet Explorer allowed in. These annoyances alone more than justify a aggressive campaign to switch people to Firefox. But what really matters is putting the internet back in the hands of the public and ensuring that the technology that will remake so much of our world in the next 30 years is a public resource not a corporate one.

    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 ***.

    Sincerely,

    Holmes, Nick, Tiffiniy, and Nicholas"
    Last edited by hard candy; 04-26-2006 at 10:06 AM.
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  2. #2
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    Whoops!
    Didn't see your name up there Hard Candy!!!!

    As an aside, I hope they make ALL the Vachss books into movies
    Last edited by je_fro; 04-26-2006 at 10:24 AM.
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  3. #3
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    Quote Originally Posted by je_fro
    Whoops!
    Didn't see your name up there Hard Candy!!!!

    As an aside, I hope they make ALL the Vachss books into movies
    They are good. Hard Candy the Movie

    Disturbing, and makes you think.
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  4. #4
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    Did that a while back, although I dumped the ED javascript and server-sided the whole affair. IE is banned.

    No. Not for the money (3 bucks so far--big whoop).

    I did it just to piss-off the ie, msn & aol users.

    The emails, alone, are priceless!
    Last edited by EnigmaOne; 04-26-2006 at 05:32 PM. Reason: clar

  5. #5
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    Hmm... this is very fun looking. I'm going to use it, even though I don't use AdSense. Honestly my website isn't very special or anything, so it wouldn't do well with AdSense, but the few people who go to it or stumble upon it will be bombed by this message once I get it working (I'm not too awesome at HTML, so it may take me a while).

    Very cool though. Very cool. Hey, should we apply it to the front page of JustLinux? =P that'd be a neat thing to try. The only problem is people who use Opera and such would be out of luck which wouldn't be too fun. I guess if you use "Level 1" or "Level 2" it would work, though.
    Last edited by DSwain; 04-26-2006 at 05:15 PM.
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  6. #6
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    Quote Originally Posted by je_fro
    Didn't see your name up there Hard Candy!!!!
    This thread title immediately made me remember this one that was getting into the danger of being locked and moved to the thread graveyard earlier. Seems like hard candy is definitely back.

    "What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence."

    Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

  7. #7
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    The script is now on my blog, hope someone clicks it! If someone else would check it though, that would be awsome, I'm not sure if I did it right. Thanks! Though the only person who has ever given me money through downloading firefox was myself! (Shhh! don't tell Google)
    Last edited by PenguinOfWonder; 04-27-2006 at 12:09 AM.

  8. #8
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    Quote Originally Posted by PenguinOfWonder
    The script is now on my blog, hope someone clicks it! If someone else would check it though, that would be awsome, I'm not sure if I did it right. Thanks! Though the only person who has ever given me money through downloading firefox was myself! (Shhh! don't tell Google)
    Well I see it in the source, so I'm going to guess it works... =P

    It's running on my website. It takes up a whole lot more code space than my actual website does hahah but that's alright, it's worth it.
    The Swain

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  9. #9
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    Quote Originally Posted by DSwain
    Well I see it in the source, so I'm going to guess it works... =P

    It's running on my website. It takes up a whole lot more code space than my actual website does hahah but that's alright, it's worth it.
    I just cut and pasted everything... I had no idea haha

  10. #10
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    PenguinOfWonder: I just took a second glance at the source, and I realized you ran into the same problem as I did. At first I didn't notice, but for some reason they comment out the entire the script section. In particular it begins with:
    Code:
    <div id="space-for-ie"></div>
    
    <script type="text/javascript">
    <!--
    
    var hasIE_phone_home = 1;
    ...
    And then it ends with:
    Code:
     ...
           location.href += '?seenIEPage=1';
    }
    
    -->
    </script>
    Remove the marks which look like this: <-- and --> and then the rest should work fine, if you copied and pasted. That's a good idea, though. I should do that on my blog also (since I use Blogger also).
    The Swain

    dswain

  11. #11
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    Umm, those are HTML comments, not javascript comments. The code still runs.

    (They're there to prevent the javascript from showing in ancient browsers that (1) don't recognize <script> tags, and (2) show the contents of tags that they don't recognize. This way the contents are commented out, so any browser that fits both conditions above won't show the code, because it will recognize the HTML comment block. But the code still definitely runs.)
    Last edited by bwkaz; 04-28-2006 at 07:50 PM.

  12. #12
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    Quote Originally Posted by bwkaz
    Umm, those are HTML comments, not javascript comments. The code still runs.

    (They're there to prevent the javascript from showing in ancient browsers that (1) don't recognize <script> tags, and (2) show the contents of tags that they don't recognize. This way the contents are commented out, so any browser that fits both conditions above won't show the code, because it will recognize the HTML comment block. But the code still definitely runs.)
    I'll take your word for it, because I'm assuming you know more than I do, but it did not run when it had the comment marks wrapped around it (from when I tested it with IE6) but removing them made it work. So, I guess if it doesn't work, it's worth a shot to see if it'll help.
    The Swain

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  13. #13
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    Hmm; let me look at it on Monday (I don't have any IE installations here, I'll have to wait until I get to work). There might be some other issue with it.

  14. #14
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    Sweeeeeeet, looks great Penguin.

    I'll have to add that to my website as well the next time I'm plunking away it.

    Will report back.

    Mike

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