Hot off the presses (or, at least, I’m not seeing it in the news or del.icio.us links, yet): Downhill Battle has declared all-out war on Internet Explorer, piggybacking on Google’s AdSense referral program. The offensive includes cut-and-paste code to foist Firefox on visitors to your site. Every one that downloads Firefox turns into a dollar for you.

[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.

I haven’t been able to find much this referral program, except for this thin news article. Hopefully, all the dots connect. As the Downhill Battle folks write: “Google gave us a carrot. Now take the stick and beat IE’s ass.”

Related Posts:

• Now *That’s* DIY (July, 2008)
• “If it’s not neutral, it’s not Internet” (May, 2006)
• Iteration of the Prime Intellect (November, 2005)
• More Notes on the Helio (July, 2007)
• TripSense (November, 2007)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 9th, 2005 at 11:44 pm and is filed under humor, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.