The company last week launched a program called “Browser for the Better” in association with Feeding America. Formerly known as Second Harvest, the Feeding America network provides food assistance to more than 25 million low-income people facing hunger in the United States. The organization reports that more than 17 million children in the U.S. receive free or reduced-price breakfast and lunch at school, but with summer upon us and schools closing until September, those 17 million children will lose access to the programs for three months.
Microsoft’s Browser for the Better campaign (running through to August 8) will donate the financial equivalent of eight meals to Feeding America’s network of 206 local food banks for every completed download of Internet Explorer 8.
“Our customers have told us they want to have an impact in the lives of their friends and neighbors,” said Amy Barzdukas, senior director for Internet Explorer at Microsoft. “The Browser for the Better campaign is all about making it easy for people to make a real difference. Not only are they contributing to their community, they’re getting a more secure, modern browser designed for the way people browse the Internet today.”
So if you want to make a difference, you can download Internet Explorer and sleep soundly at night, knowing that you’ve bettered the lives of eight people with just the click of a button. Is anyone planning on downloading IE8 now that you know about the program? Really, we can’t see the harm in everyone downloading it and just not using it if you’re already married to Firefox, Chrome, Opera or Safari.