Fire up the Fox - Marketing to Firefox users

Nice post. We should make full use of the advantages to  compete against IE7.

The Fire up the Fox! project now has its own Project Homepage on the New SFx! Go check it out.

- Otto

It is now possible to Digg the page.

First of all thank you to everyone who has contributed to the discussion on browser detection.

1. we do not want to show Firefox users a GetFirefox button (it's a waste the user already has it)
   
2. but we absolutely want to show IE users a GetFirebox button.
   

This makes it much less stringent, it's not a problem for example if:

1. a Firefox users gets to see a Thunderbird button, or
2. an Opera user gets to see a GetFirefox button.

The original detection scheme meets the requirements quite well but does have some of the suboptimal side effects, and as others like Sergio have pointed out there are ways to improve that. Most of it relates to Opera users, and I have done a quick count on yesterdays log, it contained 455 pageviews made by Opera users, 169 of those had user agent strings which included the text "MSIE", in other words, yesterday 37% of Opera users would have been classified as IE users by the original script. That is quite a lot in my opinion and warrants a correction of the script.

It was mentioned correctly by factboy that Bon Echo and Minefield would not be classifief properly, so they would fall in the other browsers category with the original script. Out 47,000 pageviews just 19 were made with Bon Echo and none with Minefield. OK, it's not that much, but it would be nice to treat them as Firefox users. However people who use these browsers are advanced users who do not need me to tell them what they can do with their browser nor where they can download Thunderbird or OpenOffice. It is therefor questionable whether it warrants an extra check at this time. However for the sake of trying to make a better script I will include it.

With these changes the script now looks like this: 

var ua = navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase();
if (
    0<=ua.indexOf('msie') &&
    0>ua.indexOf('opera')
) {
    // Show GetFirefox Button
} else if (
    0<=ua.indexOf('firefox') ||
    0<=ua.indexOf('bonecho') ||
    0<=ua.indexOf('minefield')
) {
    // Show button for Fire up the Fox page
} else {
    // Show button for Thunderbird or OpenOffice
}

Obviously if you are going to use a script like this, you should also provide an alternative for those who turn off JavaScript by placing code for a GetFirefox button between <noscript> tags. Another good way to do the same thing is to follow the example provided by Kelson, using DOM and JavaScript to replace a banner or button (this method degrades better when JavaScript is turned off by other means than in the browser itself). And finally if you have the possibility to use server side scripting (such as PHP) that is actually the most foolproof way to get it right.

However let's not let the browser detection discussion cloud the purpose of this whole excercise, which is to offer Firefox users something else than a button to download Firefox. I posted my method as an example and to inspire other people to do something similar. One part consists of detecting the browser, but the other part is to provide a web page with a good overview of the possibilities. That part may be even more important and I hope to have built something good for that.

Anyone can feel free to send Firefox users to the Fire up the Fox page if they want, or build their own page or at least show them a Thunderbird, OpenOffice or SpreadFirefox button as showing them a button to download Firefox is a waste (except maybe for the purpose of upgrading pre-1.5 versions).

Otto - Fire up the Fox

Feel free to adapt my DOM-based JS code for this.  The idea there is to have a default banner defined in plain HTML and use JavaScript to replace it based on the detected browser.  The big advantage of this over the document.write + noscript method is that it also works with XHTML.

--

Can Firefox users and Opera fans agree on anything?
The Alternative Browser Alliance

 well.. I don't know too much about javascript and don't know what I'm doing wrong.. but it just doesn't show a thing

I wrote this on my blog:
 

 <script type="text/javascript" language="Javascript"> <!--
    var ua = navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase();
    if (0<=ua.indexOf('msie')) {
  document.write("<a href="http://www.mozilla-europe.org/es/products/firefox/" border=0><img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/00/Adoptfirefox-es.jpg/300px-Adoptfirefox-es.jpg"></a>");

} else if (0<=ua.indexOf('firefox')) {

  document.write("<a href="http://www.7is7.com/software/firefox/fire_up_the_fox.html"
border=0><img
src="http://www.mouserunner.com/images/Fire_Up_TheFox_180x60.png"></a>");
    } else {
  document.write("<a href="http://www.jabberes.org/introduccion"><img border="0" alt="Jabber, la mensajería instantanea LIBRE!" title="JabberES" src="http://www.jabberes.org/files/imagenes/imab/180-60-m.png"/></a><br>pasate a Jabber");
    }
 --> </script>

 where is the error? :S
 

Using that property (userAgent) can lead to mistakes because both Firefox (with UserAgentSwitcher) and Opera can "pass themselves" as Internet Explorer.

One property that really distinguishes Mozilla browsers is the "product" property in navigator object (navigator.product is 'Gecko').

And what really distinguishes the dumb Opera is the word Opera in the userAgent property even when it pretends it is IE...

If a browser doesn't have navigator.product property (null) and the Opera word isn't in the userAgent, but MSIE, you have a bigger chance to be facing a GE"SWINE" Internet Exploder...

Sorry for this comment, tried to help, and there are still other ways to separate IE from other browsers...

Thanks for the mention Otto, but my contributions are minimal, you’re the brains behind it all.
What I like most about Fire up the Fox (besides the name), is that it adds more Firefox content to the Web, and if anyone reads my ramblings, you know that I’m an advocate for more Fx content being put on the Web so more people will find it in search engine results equaling more exposure for Firefox.
But the focus of your Fire up the Fox is on current and new Firefox user’s which is great because there really aren’t a whole lot of offerings for this type of content in one place.
Nicely done and I fully support your project.
P.S. Nice button ;)