Transparent Browser Upgrades

Posted on June 2, 2003

My colleague Oscar Merida has some thoughts on convincing people to upgrade to Mozilla Firebird from IE:

I’ve been
installing Mozilla and related projects on friend’s and family’s PCs
for a while now to help them upgrade. I don’t think you even
really need to mention that its not IE, just say – want me to upgrade
your browser so that it blocks pop-up ads and gives you tabbed browsing?

Exactly! Heck, if you install Firebird with the Luna theme, it looks so much like IE6 does on Windows XP that they may never even know they’ve switched. This kind of “stealth switch” is going to become more and more common, I think, as end-users who don’t care about what browser they’re using (so long as it works) turn to their geek friends for help/advice.