BMR777

You can't force the browser to switch, but you can refuse to load your page for certain browsers. I can imagine maybe the OP wants to block IE6 or something. You'll have to get the user agent of the browser and then check that against a list and then you can do something, like show a page telling the user to use a different browser. The user agent can be changed by the user in some cases though, so it's not a fool-proof way to prevent someone from viewing your page.

Are you trying to load a valid web address? You have: $merch_map = "http://spot_map"; Then you have: $url = $merch_map.'/'.$thumbnails.''.$ext; Which gets passed to your download function and then to readfile. I think maybe it's having trouble because you're not ending up with a valid URL, that is http://spot_map/opt/... is not a valid url, there's no domain extension.