A recent Google Webmaster Central Blog post advises webmasters to request a visitor’s permission before installing software. This is excellent advice. Automatically installing software on to a visitor’s machine can make it appear that the site is installing malware.
A recent Google Webmaster Central Blog post advises webmasters to request a visitor’s permission before installing software.
This is excellent advice. Automatically installing software onto a visitor’s machine can make it appear that the site is installing malware. The Google blog post mentions this and adds that installing software in this way runs the risk of triggering Google’s Malware filters. The result of this could be having a site labelled in the Google search results with "This site may harm your computer”.
There is also the very real risk of losing the trust of the visitor. Many modern browsers will alert a user that a site is trying to install software and, if the user’s permission hasn’t been sought first, this can ring alarm bells.
I would go one step further: avoid having content that needs specific software to be viewed. Why risk limiting your audience? Having fallback content to seamlessly replace any feature that requires extra software to run can only benefit your site in the long run.