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Parent is right. By the way, spread firefox! http://www.spreadfirefox.com/ http://www.spreadfirefox.com/ *minimalistic buttons* Spread Firefox! .. http://www.spreadfirefox.com/

Parent is right. By the way, spread firefox! http://www.spreadfirefox.com/ http://www.spreadfirefox.com/ *minimalistic buttons* Spread Firefox! .. http://www.spreadfirefox.com/

Parent is right. By the way, spread firefox! http://www.spreadfirefox.com/ http://www.spreadfirefox.com/ *minimalistic buttons* Spread Firefox! .. http://www.spreadfirefox.com/

Firefox downloads: 226547380 How many of those would do that?

"After a long day of coding, I like to kick back and sip an ice-cold bottle of Mozilla..."?

Actually, there was a time a few years ago that you could brew up a cup of Mozilla to keep yourself going through that coding session. Sadly, the company that used to do it (and contributed a percentage of his profits to Mozilla) has long since closed up shop.

Well, this isn't the evidence I was hoping for (I was hoping for some actual statistics you'd used in forming your opinion - it turns out you just hadn't seen the drastic measures you were hoping to see.)

1. The Mozilla group advertises the security advantages of its Firefox browser. Unfortunately, it lacks the funding for a TV campaign, but a donation effort was successfully made for a two page ad-spread in the NYT. If you're hoping for anti-Microsoft campaigns launched by the government, I'm afraid you'll have to wait on. Microsoft would yell "Antitrust!" before the first ad reached TV. There are no standards of what an application/operating system should accomplish. Unlike a drunk driver, Microsoft is not breaking any laws.
2. Apple released such a campaign, but it only briefly mentioned OS X's security advantages over Windows. Again: home user desktop Linux distros lack the funding for a TV campaign, the government is not in the position to launch such a campaign.
3. Fine victims of malware, you mean? Maybe we should also fine victims of burglary for having houses so insecure they were broken into and thus contributed to the takings (and therefore prolonged the lifestyle) of a burglar.
4. The national wallet won't like it, won't stand for it, no sir. Unfortunately, that transition would cost a lot of money in contracts, support, downtime, retraining, installation, replacement of software tools, research, etc. It's a good goal, but it will take a long time to happen.
5. There are already good OSS alternatives to most major office products. OpenOffice.org is the most frequently cited. It operates on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X with X11 (included on the installation disc).
6. That's your solution? "Accept it"? It won't work, accept that!
7. Personally, I disdain the thoughtless media circus that circles around drunkards, especially minors. However, their crime could easily have threatened others lives, not just the wallets of those fall for some scam or another. Again, though, you're talking about punishing victims. These aren't people whose tires are bald, these are people whose tires were slashed while they were driving. Also, again, there are no standards as to what software products should be able to accomplish. If there were such standards, they would serve to choke and not to boost OSS initiatives. GNU/Linux and other OSes would be caught in litigation's red tape, fees and possibly fines before they could launch.
8. They're called identity theft awareness campaigns. The FTC has launched such campaigns. The EU has launched such campaigns. In the USA, several banks have launched such campaigns in joint effort. I'm not aware of any current community involvement, but that doesn't prove it's not happening.

Isn't this the same kind of actions that open source advocates condemn, when Microsoft and friends use it ?

Absolutely.

I would like to point out that this "project" has been pushed (possibly by its creator) on SpreadFirefox.com for quite some time, but it has met with the appropriate response: NO. Link to the post. I'm an active SFX member, and I can tell you that most members of the community realize how annoying and stupid this idea is. Browser-detection scripts and browser-specific behavior should be buried and forgotten. Firefox is about standards, and the community acknowledges that.

I know the creator of those scripts is trying to help, but his/her aim is terrible.

Firefox just recently passed the 150 million download mark.

Redhat alone sold 215,000 sold 215,000 Linux licenses in just the 2nd quarter of 2005.

Think outside of your tiny world of single-pc households and do the math. There are a lot more Linux installations than there are Firefox installations.

It is slashdotted and dugg.

Well, funny can be good, but I think the Mozilla Foundation should be careful with selecting clips that are involuntarily funny. Most of the people that have sent in clips seem to be good-natured people that just want to "spread the word", not to become the next Star Wars kid. Could easily backfire.

Of course, that doesn't preclude me from making fun of them. Take a look at this guy for instance. Evidently, he enjoys "firefuck". Now, I don't know what a firefuck is, but it sure sounds intriguing! Possibly the word Hemingway was looking for when he wrote the lovescene in "For Whom the Bell Tolls"..

They have some pretty sweet prizes, too:

• 1st: $5,000 gift certificate to B&H
• 2nd: A get up of three 19" lcd panels
• 3rd: An alienware pc

Such options, of course, are already available, as a certain poster attests.

Yes. The GPG signature is from today, and their have been no additions to the tree since it was locked down. Oh, and that thread on Spreadfirefox is mine! http://www.spreadfirefox.com/node/20564

cool, they even used my thread at spreadfirefox http://www.spreadfirefox.com/node/20564

"I guess we've found a purpose for those 8 core CPU's we've been hearing about..."

You laugh, but SpreadFirefox are giving away dual-processor, Firefox-skinned Alienware machines (price tag: $4700) "to the three developers who extend firefox in ways that are worthy of such raw computing power."

Has anyone seen an actual link to the contest itself?

I've dug around the mozilla.org site, but all I found was this Stay Tuned! blog entry.

The subject of Critical Mass for Firefox is an interesting one; we can perhaps estimate when it will arrive by looking at the first browser war. The start of the "Viewable With Any Browser" campaign is a good indication of when IE began reaching critical mass, so sometime between the release of IE 3.0 in 1996 and 4.0 in 1997. Similar to today, the vast majority of the market share was divided between just two browsers, so let's just look at the ratio of the top two browsers to one another. When IE 4.0 was released it was 72% NN and 18% IE, a 4:1 ratio. We can take this as the upper limit to critical mass.

Assuming that trends continue as they have (where IE declines are translated almost exclusively into FF gains), the 4:1 ratio will be reached when FF rises to 19% and IE slips to 76%. This has already happened in some countries (e.g. Germany) and is not far off for the U.S. (OneStat reports 81% IE and 14% FF) or Europe as a whole (XiTi reported 15% FF in September). The only question will be how long it takes...

We can estimate that as follows. To rise to 19%, FF needs to increase by about a third in the U.S. If that's proportional to overall FF downloads, the counter needs to reach ~133 M. In the 25 days since it hit 100M, there have been 5M more downloads (~200K/day). Doing the math, that means that critical mass will be reached no later than early April, 2006.

No surprise then that M$ had to uncouple IE7 from Vista; the estimated date for IE7's release is December 2005 with Vista not for a year after that. Yet I think IE7 is going to have a hard time slowing FF down since FF 1.5 is due out in December too :)

How about just having a "download Firefox" link on Google.com? They get, what, a billion visitors each day? All the people who really want to spread firefox are already spreading Firefox.

I think from the discussions I've seen at SpreadFirefox.com that there's awareness that the counter is really just a promotional tool, and that it can't possibly reflect an accurate count of users. You might download it 20 times; someone else might download it once and deploy it across a company of 200 employees.

As a promotional tool, it's successful, but the meaningful numbers are usage statistics. Those are the numbers that web designers need to consider when creating content. By that measure, Firefox is also doing well.

... the counter is still up. With less than 5 million to go before 100,000,000, I don't want to miss the final tick as it goes by.

Actually, things in Europe are quite different from one can read from the aforementionned report. See http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=node/view/18773 .

Germany is at 24%
Finland is at 34%
Czech Republic is at 23%
Poland is at 22%
France is at 16%

These numbers are measured by independent French firm XitiMonitor, which publishes a monthly report on browser market share.
In a related note, see also http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=node/view/18802 , which demonstrates a steady monthly growth for Firefox in Europe, with a rough estimation of more than 37 millions users in the Old continent.
Disclaimer: I am a Mozilla Europe employee.

Actually, things in Europe are quite different from one can read from the aforementionned report. See http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=node/view/18773 .

Germany is at 24%
Finland is at 34%
Czech Republic is at 23%
Poland is at 22%
France is at 16%

These numbers are measured by independent French firm XitiMonitor, which publishes a monthly report on browser market share.
In a related note, see also http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=node/view/18802 , which demonstrates a steady monthly growth for Firefox in Europe, with a rough estimation of more than 37 millions users in the Old continent.
Disclaimer: I am a Mozilla Europe employee.

Indeed, the SpreadOpenOffice.org site has been set up to provide a similar level of marketing push.

The activity on this site is very low and even the link to OpenOffice is outdated. No way this can compare to SpreadFirefox.com.

I call bullshit. They MYTH about more people looking at the code is exactly that, A myth, 99.9% of people never look at code and those that do more than 99% are not qualified to find security problems

So lets say only .01% of FireFox users are looking at code.

How large is the installed base? For simplicity, I'll go with published figures for downloads - I figure repeat downloads are roughly offset by bulk installs from one download.

Hell, I'll cut it in half.

So SpreadFirefox.com reports there have been 89,000,000 downloads.

Cut that in half and you have 44,500,000.

Now take .01% of that figure. That's 445,000 - the number of people YOU estimated look at code. Now lets find the security experts - in fact I think your estimate that only 99% of people are really unqualified to examine security issues is too optimistic (having done extensive corporate application security work myself), I'll say 99.9% of programmers are probably not qualified to really look for security issues in code.

The final number is now down to a mere 4,450 crack security programmers.

So of course that number seems awfully large. Lets cut that again, say to even just 400 people - an absurdly large cut.

How many people do YOU think Microsoft has looking at IE code? I can tell you right now that 400 would be an awful lot for one project even for a company the size of Microsoft. Now how many of THOSE people do you really think are qualified to look at security? Would it even be 50%? Is that large an increase even possible over the general populace - or does it even matter since you still fall hundreds short of the number I produced above.

My original theory is bourne out by the observation that even though FireFox has more patches issued month to month, it literally has a few orders of magnitude fewer exploits. You may claim that IE is more prevalent and thus more likely to be attacked - but this is a false argument that ignores just what a juicy target 89 million browsers would be. Simply put, if it were anywhere near as easy to attack FireFox as it is IE, there would be more exploits for FireFox than we are seeing. More patches are simply a sign of better QA.

How's this skin?

Yes and I am still boycotting VHS in favor of Betamax http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war/ .

Boycotting a product is not the right answer. The bottom line is that the user will use what comes with their system unless they are given a reason not to. So what we need to do is http://www.spreadfirefox.com/ evangelize standards and the browsers that adhere to those standards.

This constant bickering over which browser is the more double-plus good just alienates the user-base and makes them see it as "some geek thing" that they do not want to be a part of.

Or, as I do on my site, you can take the time to make it render (mostly) properly in IE, but display a fake information bar across the top inviting the user to check out the alternatives.

I think it's a bit less user-hostile, but might get the message across at the same time.

http://www.spreadfirefox.com/

Found this, but I don't see a link to an actual icon file download.

This, partially, is the difference between Firefox and most other OSS products. There's a huge effort to encourage widespread adoption. It's really admirable - look at http://www.getfirefox.com/, http://www.spreadfirefox.com/ (the one that was hacked, shh,) the NYtimes advert. It's all far more organised and well executed than any "advertising" others put out. And it's working, along with the efforts of its faithful users. Eventually, even the "no way" group will switch over, if people keep trying. There will be no incentive whatsoever to stay, as there will be so many other people already adopted it.

Red Hat Advanced Server 3.0 powers spreadfirefox.com:
Response Headers - http://www.spreadfirefox.com/
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 20:01:52 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat)

Red Hat doesn't make an advanced server, redhat makes Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS, ES & AS.

Also RHEL 3 ships with Apache 2.0.46, RHEL 4 ships with 2.0.52.

According to Red Hat's site, the vulnerability for php has been patched as of July 7, 2005. My guess, lazy admin.

RHEL3:
https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2005-564.html

RHEL4:
https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2005-564.html

Exploit they used:
"I found out that there's a "new" drupal exploit which allows posters to inject arbitrary code into the system for execution on the server -by way of comments. The Drupal.org site is presently down, and apparently has been last night. If you're running Drupal 4.5.1 or 4.6.2, turn off your comments. For visitors here, I'm sorry that you presently cannot comment and I'll turn them back on as soon as possible."
http://www.knowprose.com/node/2866

Sample source code of the exploit:
http://www.milw0rm.com/id.php?id=1088

Red Hat Advanced Server 3.0 powers spreadfirefox.com:
Response Headers - http://www.spreadfirefox.com/
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 20:01:52 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat)

This vulnerability has been known for over 2 weeks. Was there no Redhat patch available or did the admins slack off?

Also, isn't it strange how Drupal gets 2 posts on Slashdot in the same day?
Community, OSL and Sun Jump to Drupal's Rescue - http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/15/121 2241&tid=169&tid=8

-Joe

To answer the question, what is Drupal...

Drupal is the open-source CMS behind:

• KernelTrap
• SpreadFirefox
• Gnome Footnotes
• Linux Journal

and many more sites. Even if you don't know Drupal, you've probably visited a Drupal site before. Drupal is known for its modular architecture, clean code and developer friendlyness.

To that end: My iPod has replaced my radio, my homebrew PVR automatically strips out all commercials from my few favorite TV programs, and when web-browsing at home, I block all internet ads using Firefox and Adblock.

So you say that will lead to the end of "free" content on the internet? Good, I say. I would rather pay outright for information and entertainment I consider valuable, rather than rely on some dodgy click-for-profit advertising scheme that is quickly proving itself intractable anyway.

And to Doubleclick and all those who make a living from advertising: I won't go as far as Bill Hicks, who semi-seriously suggested such people shoot themselves, but I will urge you to reconsider your career choice. Make something or do something that contributes to society, rather than trying to sell us crap we don't need, can't afford, or probably aren't interested in anyway.

http://www.spreadfirefox.com/

great marketing and proposal ideas found there.

Might also be applied to all other OSS

Gotta be that fuzzy "new math" used in the Million Man March a few years ago.

I wonder if we could organize a "Million Fox March" on Netscape's headquarters. There seem to be about 57,530,179 of us. ^_^

http://www.spreadfirefox.com/download_counter.php? ff=1

You can find out more information about it here.

http://www.spreadfirefox.com/download_counter.php? ff=1

You can find out more information about it here.

...FireFox downloads double to 100 Million!

But if that happened, it would hurt the great PR when Firefox reaches each new milestone!

Killed Maintain? Actually we've had several internal releases in the last few weeks. We've had several bug fixes in the last several months as well.

The Bouncer is a pretty fantastic tool that we developed here completely in house. Mozilla likes its to the tune of 50 million downloads. There are several other projects that we participate in as members, doing what our defined role is for OSU; helping OSU participate better in open source projects.

It sounds vaguely familiar...

http://www.spreadfirefox.com/download_counter.php? ff=1

-

Copyright 2005 Mozilla Foundation
Fri, 29 Apr 2005 16:32:01 PST
Mozilla Firefox Download Count
http://www.spreadfirefox.com/
Spread Firefox
-

Firefox
50,105,470

If only I had printed out three pages of paper and stuck them the back of my car first

....oh wait it's four pages. Nevermind he earned it.

We're not celebrating the person who made the download. We're celebrating the community and the specific community member who helped deliver that new user to Firefox. See the affiliate program at SpreadFirefox.com http://www.spreadfirefox.com/

- A

the counter isn't exactly "real".

Take a look at the code and you will see that it gets a seed from the server and calculates a rate:

if (last_time && time - last_time != 0) {
download_rate = calculate_rate(time, count);
tick_time = Math.round(1000.0 / download_rate);
} else {
download_rate = initial_rate;
tick_time = Math.round(1000.0 / download_rate);
}

It uses the rate so that the browser is somewhat accurate, but not truly.

Also of note, the default rate is 2.0/second :

var initial_rate = 2.0; // The initial rate, in downloads/second.

If you look at the source, you'll see that it is actually pulling a real number from an RSS feed.

It then defaults to 2 downloads a second, incrementing the timer by that rate every second. When it grabs the feed again a minute later, it then uses the "real" rate of downloads from the first grab to the second grab and starts incrementing by that amount.

It then continues to do that for as long as the page is up.

So the number is real-ish.

If you look at the source, you'll see that it is actually pulling a real number from an RSS feed.

It then defaults to 2 downloads a second, incrementing the timer by that rate every second. When it grabs the feed again a minute later, it then uses the "real" rate of downloads from the first grab to the second grab and starts incrementing by that amount.

It then continues to do that for as long as the page is up.

So the number is real-ish.

Looking briefly round the source it isn't *exactly* real time; it loads the rss feed at http://www.spreadfirefox.com/download_counter.php? ff=1 , parses it, then increments from there in javascript. The automatic increment interval seems to be based on the real interval, so they shouldn't get too far off.

Shouldn't we send the person who did that download some flowers or balloons or something?

Actually, we're rewarding the members of the Firefox community who helped that guy find Firefox. The big prize will go to the Spread Firefox affiliate who delivered the click that coincided with the 50 millionth download. http://www.spreadfirefox.com/fifty.html

- A