These kinds of popups always humor me. They put so much effort into making them look EXACTLY like a Windows program or dialog box. And I'm using OS X, they stand out like a sore thumb.
I screen-grabbed it on the iPhone--looked like a fish out of water.
If their code really did provide an Explorer interface on the iPhone it'd be almost worth installing on purpose.
They could see your OS from your browser and send a different image...
They could, but they don't. Why would they go through all that effort to snare an extra 5% of computers
Well, for one reason, that 5% is strongly correlated with people who could afford a more expensive computer...
This is a downside for media sites which use ad networks running low-quality, unvetted ad programs.
I got this on my home computer yesterday. I had a bunch of sites from hacker news open and I couldn't tell which one spawned it. Now I know. Kind of scary, it looked fairly authentic, certainly authentic enough to fool someone like my mother.
They do fool my mother, who sees things like this constantly (constantly enough to ask me about them a lot). The sad thing is that they're completely obvious to me (an XP-based picture on her Vista laptop). If not for people like my mother, I'd be completely ignorant of this matter given my linux box at home and browsing habits.