Comments on: Brilliant Bit of Javascript for Redirecting Downloaders

By: Richard

Richard — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 21:45:53 +0000

Thanks for a very useful posting, it helped a lot with a download page I’m working on. In case it helps, your OS-agnostic link works on Linux with Firefox 3 and Opera 9.64.

By: Yanic

Yanic — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:32:30 +0000

Hi Patrick,

Will it also work and track correctly if people right-click and choose ‘save as..’?

Best regards,
Yanic

By: Patrick

Patrick — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 01:19:05 +0000

Fixed.

Incidentally, if you’re ever in Central Japan, I owe you dinner. (See my post about the results of the redesign — a major portion of the improvement in confirmed installs is due to your trick, and that is money directly in my pocket.)

By: Ethan

Ethan — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 11:33:48 +0000

TYPO Patrick

“If you stick that in the onscript attribute…” should read “onClick attribute”.

–
Ethan
Declan Software

By: MB

MB — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 22:44:02 +0000

“instantaneous recovery of a large portion of the 20% of folks who bounce out of the funnel at the download page”

Might not those people just be looking to find out more about the trial (e.g. how long does it last, will it work on their computer), or maybe just clicking the button because it’s big and blue..?

My hunch is that those 20% will just click cancel when the file-download dialog pops up; perhaps more than 20% will just click cancel.

But my hunches are very often completely wrong, so I’ll be interested to see what your testing uncovers.

By: Shane Crawford

Shane Crawford — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 18:07:13 +0000

fyi: A quick look at your Info.plist shows that the target version is 1.4+. You might ensure that your compile is targeting the 1.4 version of Java (aka: ‘javac -target 1.4′).

Mac OS X 10.5.2 is using java version 1.5.0_13 which could be an issue if the app was compiled with Java 6.

By: Shane Crawford

Shane Crawford — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 17:55:16 +0000

Your download link works with Firefox 2.0.0.12 and Safari 3.0.4 in Mac OS X 10.5.2. I had the same issue with trying to launch BC on the same Mac. It looks like it is crashing on launch. Running JavaApplicationStub directly from the commandline yields:

[JavaAppLauncher Error] CallStaticVoidMethod() threw an exception
Exception in thread “main” java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: Bad version number in .class file

Feel free to email me if you need a quick test on a fix.

By: Tony Edgecombe

Tony Edgecombe — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 16:29:30 +0000

In OSX 10.5.2

By: Tony Edgecombe

Tony Edgecombe — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 16:28:58 +0000

The link works but your application doesn’t. It never opens a window.