I’ve also released that site under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license, which should simplify matters for translations.

Finally, as a compromise between a full blog and little notes on the home page, I added another Twitter account, AltBrowser, where I’ll post not just site updates but random bits of news, comments, tips, etc. related to the topic.  I don’t have time to maintain yet another blog.  And I’m not convinced the net needs one.

I still hope to do that major rewrite, but this should bring it mostly up-to-date.

Browse Happy — the classic.

• Goal: Move users away from Internet Explorer.
• Target Audience: IE users.
• Promotes: Firefox.  Also Safari, Opera, and… um… Mozilla.  Hmm, someone needs to update that.
• Pitch: IE is dangerous.
• Method: Banners

Alternative Browser Alliance

• Goal: Keep multiple standards-compliant browsers viable.
• Target Audience: All users
• Promotes: Opera, Firefox, Safari.  Also Flock, SeaMonkey, K-Meleon, Camino,etc.
• Pitch: Competition is good for everyone.  See what’s out there.
• Method: Banners

End 6!

• Goal: Move people off of IE6
• Target Audience: IE6 users
• Promotes: Firefox, Opera, Safari, Flock, IE7
• Pitch: IE6 is outdated, buggy, and unsafe.  Use something modern instead.
• Method: Overlay for IE6 visitors

Save the Developers

• Goal: Move people off of IE6
• Target Audience: IE6 users
• Promotes: IE7, Firefox, Safari, Opera
• Pitch: Coding for IE6 is a pain.  Stop putting us through that.
• Method: Animated drop-down at top of page for IE6 visitors

(Yeah, I’m catching up on old draft posts.)

Of course, things have changed a lot since 2005, so I’m planning an overhaul of the whole site.

Definite plans include:

• Reflect the current state of web browser marketshare & technologies.
• List new tools, such as Dragonfly and Firebug.
• Update the list of browsers. (Add Chrome, figure out whether anyone uses Galeon anymore, etc.)
• More button/banner sizes.
• Release the whole thing under a Creative Commons license so that it’s easier for people to do translations.

I’m considering adding a blog for browser-related commentary. This would have to be low-frequency, comparable to something like css3.info, or I would have to bring other people in, because I just won’t have time to keep it updated regularly. On the downside, it adds a layer of software complexity. Also, I’m not sure it would add anything to all the blogs out there that currently focus on browser news.

I’d appreciate any suggestions from the general web user, developer, and browser fan communities.

Thanks in advance!

My first thought was that someone was running a dictionary attack against the domain, trying many different addresses to see which might be valid. Then I noticed that they seemed to be coming from <> — in other words, they were bounce notices.

Great. A Joe Job.

I enabled a catch-all temporarily. That did cause the server to slow down, as it was now actually processing the quadruple load instead of kicking back 3/4 of it with a “User unknown” error. (I hadn’t thought to disable spam scanning on the domain first.) In the 30 seconds before I turned it off again, it picked up 25 non-delivery notices. And those are just the ones that got past the spam filter.

As it turned out, they were just random junk. Some spammer had picked the domain and was using it to forge random From: addresses, and we were getting the bounces. In the old days they made up the whole address, but it’s easy to check whether a domain exists. So now they pick some real domain and make up a fake address. That’s harder to detect unless the domain in question uses some sort of verification system like SPF or DKIM.

So it wasn’t a Joe Job: no one was trying to besmirch the site’s reputation. It still meant extra traffic to the mail server, though.

This problem is called backscatter, and it exists for two reasons:

1. The sender address on an email message is easy to forge, like writing a fake address on an envelope.
2. Many mail systems will accept a message first, then process it. If it then decides to reject it, it can’t respond to the actual sender, only to the one listed in the message—and in the case of spam, it’s usually forged (see #1).

I don’t send any mail using the domain. The only reason it even has mail pointed anywhere is so that I can receive mail sent to the webmaster for the Alternative Browser Alliance. I suppose I could set up a -all (no servers are authorized) SPF record, and hope some recipients decide not to send bounces. But I’m not sure how much it would actually accomplish.

Anyway, the two lessons to take away from this are:

• Reject messages to bad recipients in the initial SMTP transaction. It’ll protect your server from backscatter (and dictionary attacks), because you won’t have to queue and process all the extra junk.
• Don’t generate bounce messages after the fact based on something as easily forged as the supposed sender. Otherwise, you’ll be contributing to backscatter.

While writing up my commentary on IE dropping WGA last Thursday, I realized that the original story was perfect for Slashdot. It had Microsoft, anti-piracy methods with privacy concerns, Internet Explorer and browser marketshare. So I looked to see if the IE team’s post was on the Firehose already, didn’t see it, and wrote up a quick submission. I also realized that I had an opportunity to plug the Alternative Browser Alliance in the text of the submission—something that I hadn’t been able to do on previous stories I’d submitted. (This is my 6th Slashdot submission to be accepted.)

So I submitted it Thursday evening, got a couple of dozen hits from the Firehose, and it got accepted around 11:30 pm, local time. I took precautions in case the traffic spilled over onto the blog, like turning on WP-Cache and disabling a few plugins, then went to bed.

Slashdot posted the story, Internet Explorer Drops WGA Requirement, at around 4:30am, and the hits started coming in. When I woke up, I checked to see whether the story had run yet, what the general tone of the discussion looked like, and—most importantly—whether the site was still up. Everything was running smoothly. (Katie remarked that I sounded “almost disappointed.”)

Ultimately, the Alternative Browser Alliance got an extra ~4,200 visits on Friday, most of them during the first few hours after the story was posted, and an extra few hundred over the weekend. For a site that normally gets 100-200 visits/day, that’s a big jump. The highest rate was 26 visits/minute, just after the story went live. Far less than the hundreds-to-thousands of hits per minute that some sites report, and entirely manageable for a small static page with a stylesheet and a handful of images.

K2R, linked via my name, only pulled in about 10 hits directly from Slashdot that day, and another handful from the About page over at ABA. Hardly a blip, really. I can’t say it’s much of a surprise, since I’ve never seen much traffic from the link on my name the other times I’ve submitted stories.

I’ll admit, I’m curious to see how the server would stand up to a more serious case of the Slashdot effect, as well as how well other pages (larger or dynamic) would hold up…but I’m not in a hurry.

Because Microsoft takes its commitment to help protect the entire Windows ecosystem seriously, we’re updating the IE7 installation experience to make it available as broadly as possible to all Windows users. With today’s “Installation and Availability Update,” Internet Explorer 7 installation will no longer require Windows Genuine Advantage validation and will be available to all Windows XP users.

As much as I prefer alternatives like Firefox and Opera, I’ve been frustrated at the relatively slow uptake of IE7. It’s just insane that 6 years after its release, we’re still stuck designing for IE6 as the world’s most-used browser.

So who’s still running IE6?

1. People running older versions of Windows that can’t run IE7, and who haven’t switched to something else. (This is a pretty small percentage, judging by OS stats.)
2. People who don’t know how to upgrade to IE7, or why they should.
3. People who actually want to stay with IE6 (whether for technical reasons or just stubbornness)
4. People who would be happy to upgrade to IE7, except they can’t/won’t run WGA (on principle, or because it’s broken on their system, or because their OS is pirated).

I don’t know how big each group is, but Microsoft seems to think it’s worth going after #4.

It’ll be interesting to see whether there’s a jump in IE7’s marketshare relative to IE6. Maybe we’ll reach that next milestone sooner than I expected.

Firefox 1.5 reached the end of its life today. That means that security and other fixes will only be available for Firefox 2 and later. Firefox 2 will run on all the same systems as the version you have right now, plus it gives you enhancements like spell check, phishing protection, and improvements to the features you already use.

Internet Explorer 6 is outmoded. It has limited support for the languages that make up the web (particularly CSS), and often disagrees with every other browser out there, forcing developers to write complicated code so that it will work on IE6. If you’re running Windows XP, you can upgrade to Internet Explorer 7. If you’re running an older version of Windows, you can benefit by switching to an alternative browser such as Firefox
or Opera. Whether you switch or upgrade, I highly recommend moving away from Internet Explorer 6.

Update: Mozilla has extended Firefox 1.5 support through mid-May.

The web is no longer an IE monopoly. It’s become an IE/Firefox oligopoly. Firefox is no longer an alternative web browser. It’s sold out, its ads are everywhere, and it even allows people to build Firefox-only code.

So, starting today (April 1, 2007), the Alternative Browser Alliance will no longer promote Firefox.

So what will replace it? I thought about Opera, but most of its install base is on cell phones and PDAs, and we all know the mobile web browser is dead, right? Safari? Well, it turns out that WebKit is shutting down.

So the site will be putting its weight behind iCab. It’s as alternative as they come, and it’s guaranteed to remain that way (since it won’t run on Vista).

Update: Yes, it’s an April Fools joke.

I found it interesting that when asked to describe Opera in three words, Ross’ response was: “Our best ally.”

Microsoft will be releasing the long-overdue Internet Explorer 7 any day now (possibly as soon as Wednesday, if rumors prove correct). It will only be available for Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003, and the upcoming Windows Vista.

I know there are people out there still using Windows 2000, Windows 98, Windows Me, and other older systems that won’t run IE7. Why not take the opportunity to check out something new? Firefox 2 is also due out this month, and Opera 9 just came out this summer.

Despite what you may have heard, the vast majority of websites really do work on all major browsers. And with alternative browsers gaining popularity, the number of websites that block anyone but Internet Explorer is shrinking.

Opera and Firefox will bring you tabbed browsing, RSS Feeds, security and privacy controls, built-in searching, pop-up blocking—all the advantages IE7 boasts over IE6. Plus you get more customization, built-in spell checking, download management, session saving, and support for up-and-coming web technologies like SVG graphics and WebForms 2. Opera adds blazing fast display, voice commands and mouse gestures (leave that keyboard behind!), and per-site preferences.

Check out Opera. Check out Firefox. Or check out a dozen other alternative web browsers. Try them out, and see what works best for you.

Then I realized the author of that post had another story show up on Slashdot today. I discovered this chain of links:

1. Slashdot: Just what has Microsoft been doing for IE 7?
2. Idealog: Microsoft Drops The Ball on Internet Explorer 7 Standards Compliance
3. SFX: Should NewsCloud.com Remain Firefox Only?
4. The Alternative Browser Alliance (via signature in comment)

You can see how powerful the Slashdot effect is, if it can cause a noticeable (if minor) spike in traffic to a page 3 degrees away!

Of course, it pales next to being linked from the ISC Handler’s Diary, which seems to have pulled in 15 10 times as many visitors in 2 days. (Thanks!)

Last weekend, Opera Watch linked to it in the follow-up to the RSS icon controversy. (I use the site as my URL when posting on browser-related blogs and forums, and Daniel was kind enough to include the link when he highlighted the news I’d posted in the comments.)

On Tuesday, I linked to it myself in a comment on Slashdot. For once, a couple of hundred people clicked on the link. Not long afterward, it started popping up on StumbleUpon after a dry spell. (Coincidence? Well, maybe.)

On Thursday morning, the site got posted to Linkfilter, which led to a few dozen visits.

And finally, Thursday night, BBSpot posted it in their daily links, resulting in over 1500 visits over the past three days!

Thanks to everyone helping to spread the word!

Now I have to start replying to comments…

In related news, I’ve finally broken down and added Flock to the list. Mainly I stayed away from it because I’d already listed 7 Gecko-based browsers (8 if you count SeaMonkey separately from the Mozilla Suite), and it seemed overkill to add one more. I first tried out Flock back in October, and while it seemed interesting, it didn’t really grab me. Now that it’s in beta, it looks like progress is solid, and it’s different enough from Firefox or SeaMonkey to warrant inclusion.

Seriously, I think these people are hurting the fight for standards….In having to choose whether to believe the Operanians or The Mozillians, I believe J. Random User will believe both. He’ll believe the Opera fans when they say “Phoenix [Firefox] sucks”, and he (or she) will also believe Phoenixers who say “Opera stinks”. And so, J. Random sticks with MSIE.

Arve mentioned his earlier post when he weighed in on the Opera splash page download kerfuffle, which is a great example of why I created the Alternative Browser Alliance. Both Mozilla and Opera have stated goals of promoting choice on the web. Both want to unseat the current dominant browser (i.e. IE). Those goals are better accomplished, if not by outright cooperation, at least by civility. As Arve puts it:

Please, instead of wasting all that time on endless flamewars against the “other browser”, spend your time evangelizing the product you actually use!

Also, a big thanks to Rijk for the shout-out on his blog!

By contrast, Flash: Those Who Ride the Lightning pulls in tons of visitors. Last week I put up an article on the Three Dimwits, the Flash’s comedic sidekicks from the 1940s. Within 24 hours it had received more than 150 hits. Within 3 days it was the top result for “three dimwits” on Google.

Why the difference? Well, my Flash site is long-established and authoritative. More importantly, it fills a specific niche. You can find a zillion pages about web browsers. But there are only a handful of large sites dedicated to the Flash, and mine is the longest-lived of them, aside from DC Comics’ own site. And until I wrote one, I could not find a page anywhere that actually focused on the Three Dimwits, just a set of stubs and the occasional comment in articles about the Flash.

Last Thursday I posted a suggestion box on the front page of the site. The results have been interesting. The freakiest part was probably that the first suggestion came in just five minutes after I uploaded the form! There’ve been 22 suggestions in the first week, which I’ve divided into three categories.

New Profiles

• sloe and steddy
• mr sprint
• jlu and fire
• cecile horton
• update to donna troy
• what about BigBang’s golden age Blitz? i could send some pics
• white lightning
• frank curtis
• captain invincible/darrel frye

I’ve added most of these to my to-do list. (Some were already on there, but I’ve asked for people to request them anyway as extra motivation.) I’m not sure about JLU and Fire, though. JLU is the animated version of the Justice League, and while I understand the Flash was flirting with Fire on a recent episode of the cartoon, they’ve barely interacted at all in the comics. (On the other hand, I eventually added Beast Boy in response to popular demand. Not only were people searching, they were typing in the URL manually just in case I’d posted it and forgotten to add a link.)

Note to whoever offered scans of the Blitz: If you’re reading this, please comment here and leave your email address! I’d very much appreciate the scans and any other info you have, but I don’t have any way to contact you!

New types of content:

• Issue synopses would be nice.
• appearances of all the flash villains outside of the flash comics
• More non-speedster profiles, such as Green Arrow, Brother Blood, Roy Harper, etc.
• Wallpapers, more pictures, more info on Kid Flash
• Image galleries
• some pictures galleries
• More cool pics of the Flash!

Here’s where things get a bit more problematic. Images take space, and the way I like to post them, they take a lot of time too. I see the idea is popular, though, so I’ll have to think about it.

Issue synopses would be a very long-term project unless someone wanted to step forward and help me with them. As it is, I’d rather focus on adding and improving the character bios for now.

So far I’ve deliberately limited efforts to list villains’ appearances outside the Flash and related books. There are two reasons: one is that some of the villains on the site aren’t normally Flash villains. Dr. Polaris showed up in just two Flash storylines, but has zillions of appearances in other comics. But even tracking down Heat Wave’s appearances outside the core books could take a long time.

Additional non-speedster characters are similar. On one hand, I do want a place to list, say, Hawkman’s appearances in The Flash. On the other hand, despite sharing a first appearance (Flash Comics #1, 1940), the characters rarely interact outside the Justice League and Justice Society. I do plan to add Green Arrow at some point (at least Ollie, and probably Connor as well), and I should probably add Roy and Garth to finish the original Titans lineup.

The weird stuff

• flash comics
• flash internet games
• info about the flash 3 wally west
• raven
• special

I’m not sure about “flash internet games,” but I suspect the rest of these were from people who saw a text box on the home page and assumed it was a search box. I mean, I have more info about Wally West than just about any other character on the site, and Raven’s bio is the third most visited page on the site!

And finally…

• This site is awesome! Thank you for all the updates this month!

Thank you for the kind words!

The idea is that a diverse browser “market”—one with three or four major browser suppliers all competing with each other—is the best way to maintain innovation and security. Anyone following the classic browser wars, the lull in IE development, and the sudden appearance of IE7 can see the difference competition makes for innovation. As for security… If someone can hit 90% of the world’s computers by hitting IE on Windows, we’re in trouble. But if they have to hit 30% each on IE, Firefox, and Opera, and even those are split among Windows, Mac and Linux, it’s a lot more effort for the bad guys.

I got the idea back in May, during some rather heated Firefox/Opera flame wars. It seemed to me that fans of the two browsers had more in common than they thought, if they’d just stop fighting each other. I worked on it during June, and launched a test version last month, asking for feedback from friends and from the Spread Firefox and My Opera communities. It’s still not where I’d like it to be (Comic-Con, then procrastination), but after the net went crazy over Paul Thurott’s “Boycott IE” article I realized I’d better launch what I had and refine it later.

So, without further ado, I’m officially launching the Alternative Browser Alliance.