Converting my coworkers to Mozilla

At work, TDC, we use a home grown CMS system to manage all the pages at tdc.dk and tdconline.dk. The system has grown to become quite complected. Most of the people using the CMS are using Internet Explorer since it's the browser thats being delivered and supported by the internal IT department.

So I decide to change that. Convincing people to use Mozilla Firebird instead of Internet Explorer isn't easy since people are so used to Internet Explorer and the way it works. Most of the developers are using Mozilla Firebird tough.

But most of the people don't really care about open source, security, etc. So talking about tabbed browsing don't really convert any of them into using Mozilla Firebird. Popup blocking can convince some people but since they are working mostly on internal system it doesn't really count.

So I needed something that could convince them to use Mozilla Firebird. So I decided to develop an Mozilla Firebird extension to the CMS system. I'm also the developer of Linky so I had most of the framework available.

After a couple of tweak to the CMS system, we now have an Mozilla Firebird extension that enables people to right click on all of the pages on tdc.dk and tdconline.dk and edit the articles inside the CMS system. It also enables people to right click on all the images and edit the images in the CMS system.

Sounds simple? It is. But this will "save loads of hours" as one of the new Mozilla Firebird user was telling me. Now people are emailing me wanting to run this Morezilla or whatever it was called!

Missing accomplished: Some Internet Explorer users converted!

For the technical people
The extension is enables an extra context menu for the domains tdc.dk and tdconline.dk. The context menu provides different options. The extension basically looks at the source of the page, using document.commandDispatcher.focusedWindow.document.documentElement.innerHTML and looks for predefined tags imbedded inside HTML comments. The extension is also aware where on the page the user right clicks. So if the right click happens on an image gContextMenu.onImage or a background image gContextMenu.hasBGImage the context menu changes.

Since some of the pages are actually many articles put together it could be cool if it was possible to edit each or the articles. I implemented this by determining the node that the user right clicked on gContextMenu.target and the walking 5 divs up using the parentNode until I find the predefined tag.

8 Comments

I think about 20 people are now using Mozilla Firebird here at work.

Comment by Henrik Gemal at December 12, 2003 10:17 AM | Permalink

Very good!

I also try to convert people around me to use Mozilla/Firebird. But it proves to be very difficult, just like you only pop up blocking gets some of them to convert.

A big problem is that a lot of people use MSN Messenger so they use the Email link when they want to open hotmail. If there was a way to let
that link open in Mozilla/Firebird it would be much easier to keep them from using Explorer.

Comment by Darice at December 15, 2003 09:31 PM | Permalink

Its sort of possible, first convince them to use Messenger Plus. Then they'll be able to use Mozilla. Its part of Mozilla teams aims to get more chat protocals into their suite and then Firefox etc.

Comment by John Ellis at August 1, 2004 07:13 PM | Permalink

Scott: No I dont think so. Launchy is Mozilla extension so it has nothing to do with which browser is opened when clicking on a link in Messenger.

But with Mozilla Firefox being your default browser it should work!

Comment by Henrik Gemal at September 17, 2004 08:55 AM | Permalink

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