We wrote about the results of our Firefox campaign a couple of days ago. In short, a free offer made lots of people switch web browsers to Firefox. We had expected that a lot of people would install Firefox and come back to our website to be able to be able to sign up for a free Pingdom account, but it was very interesting to see how many actually did it.
As the saying goes; if you don’t try it, you will never know. Now we know. You can change user behavior with offers like these, even for something as relatively complex as installing a new web browser.
We are not the only ones who think that these results are interesting. Reklamfeber, probably the largest ad news site in Sweden, and the always interesting Adland wrote about it this Tuesday. It was also mentioned on Adrants, another ad news site.
It is also obvious from some of the reader comments to these posts that IE vs. Firefox is still a very hot topic. We took the liberty of translating a reader comment by a frustrated web designer from the Swedish Reklamfeber site:
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Internet Explorer could die? What a dream it would be to design websites! You would save so much time! One should actually send MS a huge invoice for all the hours spent on making customers’ websites look good in IE.
We really like Firefox a lot. It is the default browser in the Pingdom offices and we even created a Firefox extension called Mr Uptime. Though perhaps we wouldn’t go quite as far as the guy we just quoted, it is an interesting comment because it really demonstrates how strongly some people feel about Firefox and IE.
