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Firefox Seeks Full Page Ad in New York Times
blakeross writes "Join us over at Spread Firefox as we raise funds for the most ambitious launch campaign in open source history. A portion of each donation will go towards taking out a full-page ad in the New York Times celebrating the release. All donors will be listed in the ad, the signatories of a declaration of independence from a monopolized and stagnant web."
the signatories of a declaration of independence from a monopolized and stagnant web
That type of hyperbole does nothing to help spread free software. I certainly hope the print-ad doesn't lower itself to these levels.
Trolling is a art,
"...all these people use firefox! switch!"
nonetheless, it should be interesting to see...
Hopefully this will boost the popularity of the browser enough to break the 10% browser share mark proper. Congrats to all the donors - this is great work!
The web is definitely stagnant.
Have you seen the amount of scum you find in most http://www.* links? Scum like that only forms on stagnant water.
And much like cream, it always rises to the top.
Firefox will only get a single shot with most users. If they download Firefox and have any problems with it at all they will go back to IE and never consider Firefox again.
Firefox is still gaining ground against IE. It may be better to wait a little longer and let Firefox muture a bit more before trying to convert the general masses with this type of advertising campaign.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
After all, the W3C standards are effectively recommendations. We're all using something that isn't fully-conformant. So it's really up to the Firefox team to put together something that can properly interpret what's out there rather than to wait for what's out there to become perfect or at least not crash their browser at every sixth page.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
In this case, the grass roots are doing the marketing...
It's quite ironic, actually incredibly ironic, that a process that is almost entirely driven by word of mouth would aim for promotion using above the line advertising.
Personally, and this is just an opinion, I reckon that money would be better spent on wining and dining journalists and trying to get Firefox on the cover of Times Magazine.
Or, alternatively, try to get Firefox banned for violating obscenity laws. That is usually excellent for publicity.
But a full-page advert? Seems kind of boring.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
This is a great move by Mozilla. Here are a few reasons.. 1. A good majority of people only know of Internet Explorer. They find it easy to use, and don't really have any problems with it. 2. What most of the people don't know is that there are major problems with security, and given that a lot of people do use it for bills online, shopping, etc. 3. The current stream of IE issues have made people more aware that they need to switch something more secure, but they really don't know what to switch to. 4. Wahla! They have Firefox, a credible, easy to use, and most importantly secure web browser that is starting up the browser wars all over again. With the ad, Firefox is going to get much more needed publicity and help changing a lot of things in HTML and the browser wars.
I'm not a Microsoft-basher; I use their products productively virtually every day of my life. Excel is my workhorse, Word my constant companion for nearly a decade, PowerPoint my standard for presentations, Visio Professional a powerful tool in my arsenal, and I rely on Outlook to keep track of notes, emails, contacts, tasks, and my calendar.
I have also been using Internet Explorer since about 1996, when it came pre-loaded on a computer I bought. I found it to be adequate, and certainly seemed to be on the cutting edge (anybody remember "push technology"?). But increasingly over time it came to be an annoyance, and may represent the worst of what Microsoft is accused of: arrogance (openly flaunting internet standards and creating new ones on its own), monopolistic aggression (folding IE into Windows, virtually destroying the independent browser market overnight), and outright carelessness (creating a browser with a seemingly endless number of security holes). IE is relatively slow and clunky, has a sub-par user interface, and seems to be an ideal breeding ground for adware, malware, spyware, worms, you name it.
saru mo ki kara ochiru
This could be very important. It's easy to underestimate the importance of marketing and getting out the word. The effect this can have on ordinary people (if you're reading this, your probably aren't one) is something That Very Big Corporation is well aware of.
kudos!
* - replace Internet Explorer with "the internet" for most users.
Free Mac Mini
I've been using Mozilla and later Firefox for quite a while now - I like it - but the bitter partisan political stuff is just a big turn off for many people. If you assault them with all sorts of insults to their PC, their OS, and even the web browser that works at least acceptably well for many of them, they'll probably write it off as some zealous partisan attack.
/.ed right now, and they didn't seem to have the ad up anyways, but I hope it's a bit more subdued than the summary.
The people who hate hate hate MS and/or IE have already moved on. I'm sure they'll cheer the ad, but that's a big waste of money.
SFF's site is
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
that is read heavy by the business community.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I know there was that slahdot article recently about malformed HTML crashing browsers, but claiming it crahses every sixth pages is an over exageration of staerring proportions.
I use firefox all the time, and I've not found any actual web page that crashes the 0.9 - 1.0PR versions.
The only page I've found with rendering gliches is Gamespot, that flickers all over the place while loading, but is OK once done. My Slashdot problems have stopped since 1.0PR.
It already can properly render most of the web. Also if a web page is actually broken, there is no way to properly render it. At best you can best guess what maybe it is supposed to be.
Actually, unlike IE, pages render correctly in Firefox, including Slashdot. Just because a site isn't done properly and thus isn't displayed in Firefox as it is IE (which apparently will accept horseshit for HTML), doesn't mean that there is anything wrong with Firefox. I understand that this is not exactly what you implied, but it is a common misconception nonetheless.
On the other hand, there are VERY few pages that display weird in Firefox, with Slashdot being the only prominent example that I can come up with. However, many people are still only developing for IE, which is shit, and thus their pages are shit, and look like shit when rendered correctly in Firefox (though this is rare).
The bottom line is that you can't wait for the web to change. You have to make it change. Go download Firefox and at some point when browser usage is no longer 95% IE (and it already is much less on some sites), the web will change.
Then switch to another bank. I know that my bank Fleet Boston/Bank of America's website renders and functions just fine in Mozilla, and has ever since I put in a ticket requesting that they fix the one page that had problems when I first signed up. If your bank tells you that you can not use the browser of your choice then tell them you will take your business otherwise. With one million downloads in under 100 hours it's not an insignificant amount of business to turn away.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
When will slashdot have standard compliant XHTML/CSS code?
Why not USA TODAY? If the purpose of the ad is to spread awareness AND educate-USA today or the Wall Street Journal would be a better choice. Not to get into an argument about the political leanings of the paper, the Times readership tends to be more informed and better educated about this topic.
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
Close. Don't forget the enormous hosting fee they are going to have now. That is where a portion of your dontion is going. No one ever calculates that into their profit schemes. Amateurs!
I didn't say you couldn't find any, I said *I* couldn't find any. :)
I think, when he typed "Dr. Spock", he actually meant "Yoda".
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
:wq!
Yes, it's advertising.
/.ers surely would give a small portion of their income to the Mozilla Foundation, I think we make an exception for this and call it legit news too.
However, seeing as many
If you are considering donating to this cause and haven't yet given money to the good people at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, you could probably use a good priority realignment.
--
I fail to see what's wrong with a "stagnant browser"?
Now viruses, buffer overflows, bad security design, ok, IE is guilty as charged of those. But stagnant? Here I was thinking that's a damn good thing.
It reeks of the old dot-com thinking that surfing the web should be "an experience", or other such bullshit. Except while everyone wanted to _offer_ some unique experience, but noone wanted to _have_ it. Even the very same PHBs that preached about how their site will be an unique experience, you never heard them say "I visit this other site daily for the unique flashing hard-to-navigate experience."
Noone really wants a web page to be a unique life-changing experience, and noone really wants a browser that is more than a window into the web.
And in that picture, you really don't need more than the current browsers offer. They already do their job just fine, and the plethora of sites are doing a fine job with those browser features already. And whatever job they don't do directly, there are plugins for that. Time to move on already.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The percentage of all web sites that are designed for Internet Explorer's bugs is tiny and shrinking. Serious companies that depend on their websites for business (banks, Amazon, online stockbrokers) got the message long ago; I haven't found a website that I need that I can't use with Mozilla or Firefox, in quite a long time.
Cutting-edge web designers, like Eric Meyer, have been leading the way to standards-based pages for years.
Firefox will only get a single shot with most users. If they download Firefox and have any problems with it at all they will go back to IE and never consider Firefox again.
That's correct, but if we don't try to change that, it'll remain like that forever. If more people are aware of Firefox and actually using it for their daily webbrowising experience, it'll lead to more open-standards complient pages and more awareness of what open-standards mean: no single vendor is able to lock you into their proprietary tools.
It may be better to wait a little longer and let Firefox muture a bit more before trying to convert the general masses with this type of advertising campaign.
Firefox won't ever "muture" to the point of supporting the old IE proprietary "standards of on e vendor alone", so it won't ever handle old pages designed specifically for IE quite right.
So please, don't come with this "let's wait and see" while Microsoft tries to lock the web with XAML and other sickness...
The time is now to change that. We have a kick-ass modern, slick web browser which is open-standards compliant and comes shock-full of great usability appliances and is also secretely comes with a fine smart-client technology which futurely will see much better use: XUL GUIs.
I don't feel like it...
Hah! My bank's website looks fine in FF, IE, Konq and even Lynx. And I wrote them a very nice letter telling them that they should appreciate their IT staff.
Average Joe isn't going to install anything but Internet Explorer unless his "computer expert" friend tells him it's shit. Hell, as you say, he probably doesn't even know what Internet Explorer is.
The advert should be in computer magazines frequented by "power users" and/or windows administrators. Actually, this is also the market that the Linux distributions should be pointing at, there's no point trying to sell or even give Linux to end users, they don't understand what it does.
Deleted
I wouldn't say that the web is totally stagnant, but in certain areas it certainly has been stagnant. There are a lot of tremendous things that we could do with CSS, except that Internet Explorer hasn't been upgraded in 4 years so there's no point to using those features since 97% of the market can't use them. If Firefox had 60% market share, I have no doubt we'd see CSS 3 move along much more quickly. I dream at night of CSS columns support...
And other serious journalists? They often read the New York Times too.
As for the question of how to design and present this ad, and whether Firefox is ready for this ad, I am less certain. I love Firefox, but it still misrenders my favorite Internet time-suck, Slashdot. This is a pretty major and obvious rendering bug, and the stubborn-ass Mozilla people seem to think that this or it's dependencies shouldn't be listed as an Aviary-1.0 blocker. Utterly inconceivable - and yes, that word does mean what I think it means. How can I recommend a browser to my friends, family, and now the entire Western world that I still find annoying to use on a daily basis and whose drivers refuse to acknowledge a critical 1.0 bug?
Furthermore, what is this shit about putting everybody's name in the NY Times? Nobody wants to see an ad with a thousand names across the bottom. If you want to put names on it, put some names and quotes that will at least sound like they have credibility to the generally-intelligent-but-non-technical-elite audience. This sounds like an ego exercise instead of a real advertising campaign. I don't want MY name on a tiny corner of a full page ad, I'd rather just have an acknowledgement somewhere on the Mozilla.org webpage thanking me for supporting their launch. Furthermore, if I am helping finance this launch, I want to see what I'm buying. Show me the money... err.. the ad copy, and I'll consider helping to fund it. I sure hope if you are going to put this much money into it, you did actually get somebody who understands how to design impactful print ads for this audience to design it, right? Right?
Mozilla would get further by paying the Dells of the world to put Firefox on their PCs as the default browser.
Speak truth to power.
Seriously, this is nuts. This is not the fault of Firefox. This means that they are relying on client-side enforcement of security, rather than server-side enforcement for authentication and authorization. Which is just broken.
Ok, first off, the notion that the underdog that actually complies with standards is somehow the badguy is completely misguided. It's IE that doesn't conform to the standards, and contrary to many MS'ers, the standards are not measured by who's winning the marketshare battle.
Secondly, install Firefox and use it exclusively on a fresh, patched XP box and then come back and tell me about how the Mozilla team needs to learn more about Spyware.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
The website is currently /.ed so I can't check this but who are the people running this scheme? Is it endorsed by Mozilla.org or is it a bunch of guys who want to play on the hearts of open source advocates everywhere to get some free beer money?
I quick whois of the domain shows it's not owned or hosted on the Mozilla servers, so it just makes me suspicious...
I'm sorry but a browser holy war is not suffecient requirement to change one's bank. If your financial institution is so mediocre that you'd go somewhere else JUSt because its webpage is IE only, chances are you could/should find a better one anyway.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
$30 to get your name in the paper.
And most of the ad just be a list of names, which will consume most of the space best used to plug Firefox itself.
A better donation strategy would be:
$100 for your name to be added, limit of N names
$anything if you just want to chip in and help out.
This allows those who don't have $30 to spend to contribute (I'd love to contribute a couple of bucks if it were a well-designed advertisement), while giving the big donaters a reward for their donation without making the ad nothing more than a list of names.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Mozilla is killing me here - I thought that the whole point of open source was for users to decide ON THIER OWN if they want to switch from the commercial apps to free ones?!
Why advertise? Especially in the times? Are you guys nuts?
Fools. Try raising money for homless people or those without food or running water. That's more admirable that getting me to switch from IE to FireFox because IE enables Active-X by default..
Geezus.
Still wondering why this "charity" would be more worthwhile than one that say, oh I dunno, feeds hungry people, provides health care for sick people, keeps tabs on our government, etc.?
:)
It's not.
Donate to both.
Problem solved.
The enemies of Democracy are
Uhh, pages that render poorly in Firefox are more likely due to poor coding on the page rather than the browser. Every instance of poor rendering that I've seen has been due to someone coding a page to work specifically with IE (asp, etc). If IE was w3c compliant, and developers wrote compliant code, you would see most of that garbage disappear.
IE development is dead, anyway. You can wait all you want.
They should add the update functionality before an actual "1.0", don't you think?
/. firefox stories. This feature should have top priority in the current firefox development. Or do you want to get first a 20% market share to disgruntle and disappoint the masses (painful uninstall, install, get all extensions again process). They will back off from firefox and lose their interest in IE alternatives.
This has been discussed a couple of times, especially in the latest
It may seem a little harsh, but in the Macs we don't have nearly the same browser monoculture we have in Windows. And of course, the Windows user base is an order of magnitude larger than Macintosh's. So the battle must be fought in Win32 world.
OTOH, if you really mean by saying that 'Safari already won that battle' is that there's no need to use anything but Safari, then you're thinking down the same path that led us to our current predicament. By the same token, too high a usage rate for Firefox (above 70%) is also a bad thing, but considering that scenario is rather far-fetched, no one worries about it today.
Why not the Wall Street Journal or something that is more relevant to everyone. Not everyone reads NYT. USA Today would be better...
-- $G
How are they abusing their power? This is a legit piece of OSS, licensed under the OSF approved Mozilla Public License.
/. legal teachings, trademarks are lost if they are not protected. See Xerox, Kleenex, and maybe eventually Google for such instances. Lack of trademarked artwork in no way hinders the actual functionality of the software, so what's the problem? In a more practical sense, protecting their trademark also ensures that not just anyone can roll a Firefox build, put in lots of crappy patches that make it suck, and make it look just as legit as the official builds. In that instance, who gets the blame for a shoddy product? More than likely not the person who made the build.
The "artwork" problem you mention stemmed from the fact that MF is protecting its trademarks. The code itself is free and available, but as you may remember from
Plus, what bug # are you referring to? You link to an attachment, but an attachment means nothing without the discussion and context of the actual bug. Not to mention the attachment has a revision date of June 2004.
Right now, you're making a mountain out of a molehill. Marketing and brand recognition is one of the categories where OSS suffers, simply because everyone is busy coding and resources are scarce. Even recently, most of the major marketing efforts on *behalf of* Linux are coming from major corporations (with cash), such as IBM, Novell, and RedHat. Linus is too busy to be worried about TV ads (rightfully so). It's good to see that Mozilla recognizes this is a weakness, and continues to address it.
Don't forget that because this is all open source, if something really truly bad starts to happen, nothing stops you from branching and starting your own project. See xorg if you need an example.
How many people in the target audience actually care about versions numbers? Let's be realistic here its probably between 0 and 0. People who have not heard about Firefox already (ie the target audience) are not going to say "oh its ONLY 1.0, I'll wait for 2.0". Version numbers only matter to geeks not normal users. My wife, my father, my brother, and my mother all would NOT be able to answer the question "What versions of IE and Windows Media Player do you use?". And these are people who surf the web, do spreadsheets etc on a daily basis. Icon placement and name are what matters. Version number does not. Trust me that's the last thing people are going to think about when they see this ad.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Or maybe the FOSS community should look at Mozilla and what they're doing right. How many other open source project are as successful as Mozilla? On the desktop? Cross-platform? Against Microsoft? You know, maybe the "FOSS methods" methods you mention are just not as good as traditional marketing for these sorts of applications.
:)
The *real* *question* is whether Firefox is free or open-source?
No, that's not the *real* question. Hate to break it to you, but only a very very tiny minority even worries about that question. Real questions that matter to the success of Mozilla are things like: is it easy to use? Is it standards compliant? Is it easy to install?
This is an example of why copyleft is superior to less-restrictive licenses
I disagree. Oh, you mean, the GPL is superior because is restricts what I can do with the code.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
Actually, unlike IE, pages render correctly in Firefox, including Slashdot. Just because a site isn't done properly and thus isn't displayed in Firefox as it is IE (which apparently will accept horseshit for HTML), doesn't mean that there is anything wrong with Firefox.
Well, that depends on your goals. If your goals are to conform to standards, congratulations, you've succeeded and the rest is a rather moot point.
If your goal is to take market share away from IE, you might run into problems. I doubt the average Internet user will see a page broken in Firefox, which works (or worked) in IE, and go "damn those Microsoft bitches and their crappy implementation!!" They will likely blame Firefox, even if that's wrong. Or more likely, they simply won't give a crap whose fault it is. They had a browser that worked for them and now they have one that isn't working. Back to IE they go.
We're in our own little slashworld here, where people care about standards and implementations and who's somehow right versus who's somehow wrong. There's nothing wrong with that, but we can't assume it is widely true outside of our little world. Most people are going to use what they perceive works better for them. Pages that only render in IE, or pages that downright REQUIRE IE, might be all the impetus some people need to switch back or avoid switching altogether. Maybe they can be overwhelmed by the other better features (I have no idea how I used the Internet without tabs!), but your task just become more difficult.
I dont't think a browser will become good by not conforming to standards. I don't think _any_ browser should mimic IE's behaviour, which is anyithing _but_ following w3c standards or recommendations.
Just because so many people use IE that doesn't mean we (or Firefox or anyone else) should drop the following of standards just to render broken code like IE does.
Broken code should be rendered broken, so the coders who put up shitty pages realize that their skills are reasonably flawed.
It's the same old MS poliy that everyone can click their way thourgh anything. Joe Anybody sits down, produces 2 megs of frontpage generated crap which is 10 k's in clean source and css, and thinks (s)he's a genius, because IE renderes it ok.
I can but hope the day will finally come when not only linux people and real coders will produce compliant page sources, but everyone. Utopia.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Hmm....maybe this is a feature? Email is supposed to be plain text....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
While you're at it, get some friends who are fluent in the major languages of the world to review the names, of risk being embarrassed by some joker who thinks that seeing names like "G. Randecazzo" or "V. Otze" appearing in the NYT is hilariously funny.
Advertising like that is likely a waste of money. Why not use those funds to pay the programmers to make FireFox even better?
As we know, computing continues to live by de facto standards. IE is the de facto standard for web browsers, and pages that render in IE must also render in other browsers. The computing industry sets its own standards, for better or for worse. Other industries have real standards that they must apply (ex: basic OBD-II functionality on automotive engine control systems in the US), but that's not how it works in the computing industry.
The goal of the web is not to form all content into a generic standard. The goal is to make information available to the most people and the current way to do that is to support IE. What behavior would you propose for an ideal standards-compliant browser? Not rendering pages that have poor markup? I think some people would love that, but fortunately for the public it will never happen (and should never happen as that would defeat the purpose of the web).
--
Registered .sig quotient : 1337
they should create a msi installation image for mass deployment! they should spend money creating that package instead of placing it on an add and they will get more conversions. we have hundreds of computers just waiting for a switch to firefox. though there are some msi installations created by 3rd party, i would like it come from the team. they should also be able to integrate it to group policy in windows.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
And personally, I use Saft and PithHelmet to address your other concerns.
Here's Firefox with 25 tabs open -- each tab only has a favicon listed, which makes it difficult to determine what each tab is. Additionally, you can't access all the tabs at once -- it doesn't even offer a pull-down menu to access tabs past the edge.
Safari manages to keep the visible tabs at a useable size, and provides a simple way to access the rest. Firefox shrinks tabs to the point of uselessness, and prevents you from accessing the overflow.