Microsoft Preempts The Salvation Army's Hurricane Relief Effort

I'm a firefox user - you may not know what that means. If not, go here and you'll figure it out.

So I'm sitting at work today (Sept 08/2005) and Dave sends me a link to MSNBC's main story, about FEMA having 25,000 bodybags on hand in the wake of Hurrican Katrina. When he said "Check out The Salvation Army ads in the main story!", I had to go and have a look. When I opened the page, however, all I could see were ads for MSNBC's email alerts and, further down the page, for the MSN Toolbar. I figured I'd refresh to see if they'd change . . . nope. Bad luck I thought, so I kept refreshing. Still the same two ads. I couldn't figure it out.

THEN, I realized something - I'm the only guy here in the office running FireFox. Could Microsoft, or one of it's entitities be preempting the "Salvation Army Aid the Hurrican Victims" ads in favor of trying to get a sorry FireFox user to sign up for some of their wonderful programs? Surely not.

But, as I feared, as soon as I opened up the same story in IE 6, I saw the Salvation Army Ads saying, "We combat natural disasters with acts of God" Clicking on the ad in IE brought me DIRECTLY to the Salvation Army donation server. In firefox, I found out that I could "Search and Browser Smarter . . . using the MSN toolbar with Windows Desktop Search". To add insult to injury, it opened in a new window, instead of a new tab!

COME ON, MICROSOFT! How low can you be? Just because I'm not a IE user, you're going to not let me know that I can help Katrina's victims?

I say, boycot Microsoft - wait, they own the world don't they? Use fewer Microsoft products!

Grace.