Unfortunately, WordPress 2.5.1 displays a link to browsehappy.com in the footer of the WordPress admin when you use Microsoft Internet Explorer to manage your WordPress-powered site. If you follow the link to visit Browse Happy (which is run by the people behind WordPress), it tells you that “Internet Explorer can make your computer unsafe”, and tries to persuade you to use a different browser.

The site’s message may have good “web standards” intentions – but I really don’t see what this has to do with blog software. Like it or not, MSIE is out there, and people use it extensively. Using WordPress to push a contentious web site, campaigning against one choice of web browser, is tantamount to advertising. Besides, many users don’t get a choice in which browser they have to use on a daily basis.

Moreover, whatever the ideals of the Browse Happy campaign, having the icon in the WordPress footer is particularly annoying when advocating WordPress for commercial projects – by which I mean “projects where users question what it says on the admin pages”.

Because of this, I created a WordPress plugin for a recent project to remove this Browse Happy link. This article describes the plugin and how to install it.

The plugin is pretty simple – it just removes the browse_happy action from the in_admin_footer event. I’ve tested it with WordPress 2.5.1, but haven’t tested it with earlier versions.

If this plugin sounds useful for your own WordPress installation, then please do download v1.0 of the Remove Browse Happy Link plugin. You can use the plugin in any way, and customise it in any way. The only thing I would request is that you don’t redistribute it, but link to this page instead.

Once you have downloaded the plugin, unzip the downloaded zip file, and copy the remove_browse_happy.php file to the /wp-content/plugins/ folder of your WordPress site. You will then need to enable the plugin via the WordPress Manage Plugins  admin interface. And that’s it!