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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."
For a webpage with a lot of members who hate advertising, it sure is interesting to see how many stories about advertising we have and how many slashvertisements we get.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Just make sure they don't have the ad opposite a full-page Microsoft one...
Due to lack of disk space this user has been discontinued
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,
Just made my donation...#186 according to the receipt. I think that this is going to be a great way to get out the message of browser alternatives. You can put in whatever name you want to be listed. I wonder how many times Bill Gates is going to show up?
My
Disguising it as a news story? Oh, wait... Ooops, never mind...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Maybe we should rename it to Friedefox !!!
Apart from Slashdot, I can't find a page that doesn't render just fine in Firefox
"...all these people use firefox! switch!"
nonetheless, it should be interesting to see...
Hopefully they editors of this full page add will do a better job than the Slashdot editors did.
:)
And hopefully I won't be one of those editors either
How abt other papers?
Why does yahoo do this
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.
A portion of the contribution? Exactly how much of my contribution will go towards the ad? Why not all? Call me cynical, but this sounds like a pretty good way to make some money.
/. about O/S browser needing help.
1. post story on
2. use 10% of donations towards ad.
3. PROFIT!!!
This will prove to be unnecessary. Firefox's market share is growing and will continue to grow due to word of mouth and techs like myself who are taking the time to install it and show people the benefits of it. Anyone who doesnt know what it is already will not be intrigued by an advertisement but will instead ignore it. These are the same people that find nothing wrong with internet explorer and enjoy the "benefits" of malware without having any clue of what information about their browsing it is phoning home to the developers of the software.
If I lived in NY I would definatly go for this. Instead of getting a $15 t-shirt this kind of endorsemnt is more unique, and seems like a great way to send the message that Firefox has arrived.
This ad won't be run until Firefox 1.0 is complete, I hope.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
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.
http://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/marketing-public
I can't RTFA (/.'d) but for all but the odd website here or there, I find firefox renders as the author intended. I won't say correctly since I believe in most cases, firefox is rendering correctly, just the author/site deesigner wrote for a broken browser (IE).
I can browse slashdot, do my banking, pay my bills, hit a few of the forums sites I frequent, use several different webmail programs, order flowers for my wife, buy plane tickets, book a rental car, etc. etc. all through Firefox. The odd site that breaks when I browser to it, gets ignored, and I move to the next google result.
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.
Free Mac Mini
Why'd you have to pick a liberal weenie hippy paper like the NYT? Put it in the NY Post!
Free Scotland!
Will you be a part of the open source legacy?
NY Times Ad CampaignLet's mark the launch of Firefox 1.0 with a community marketing campaign that will take the buzz around Firefox to the next level: the first-ever, full-page advertisement in a major daily newspaper created and paid for by the open source community.
Here is how it works:
* The full-page ad will include the names of everyone who supports the campaign along with a message about the benefits/features of Firefox.
* The campaign will act as a fundraiser to support all Firefox 1.0 launch activities, not just the ad itself.
* An individual contribution of $30 will get your name included in the ad ($10 student rate).
* Special recognition -- Community Champion -- will be given to people who enlist 10 of their friends in this campaign. (These folks have a shot at having their name in the lower half of the ad.)
* There are also two packages available for businesses to participate.
* If you have a Spread Firefox account, you will receive 100 sfx points per name slot that you purchase or refer.
* The goal: sign up 2500 names!
* More questions? Check the FAQ.
* Ready? Click the newspaper on the upper right to join in!
We (sfx members and Firefox users) will only ever have one Firefox 1.0 launch -- this is it! Let's take the world by storm.
PS: The buzz about this campaign is already starting. Check out the story on eWeek!
PS2: Thanks to everyone who's uploaded images showing how you're spreading the fire. Keep those images coming!
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Wow, talk about pessimism.
Every single person I've converted to Firefox from IE has been more than pleased. All the techies I know have already converted, and the newbies appreciate Firefox's clean-cut, easy-to-use interface just as much if not more than IE's. It's also been shown by numerous studies across the web that Firefox/Mozilla has sizable market share now, making it force to drive the web. For example, w3Schools reports 17% for October of this year.
In other words, I already see the public making the change you think isn't happening. I also believe that it's only going to get better from here.
* - 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
Actually... the Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit, 501(c)3 corporation.
http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/donate.html
--Coming up with something clever... please wait...
that is read heavy by the business community.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Why is a list of names good marketing for Firefox?
I can just see it now...
Firefox browser 1.0 released
Mario "Lightfingers" Frazetti
Dane "the Gimp" Rostenkowski
Michael "Code Monkey" Miller
Peter "Frodo" Fry
etc...
What's the big deal about Firefox? It uses just as much RAM as the Mozilla browser does.
Debian (which I use) has shown that the Mozilla browser, mail, chat & composer can be broken into separate packages. That's what the big deal about FF is supposed to be.
The things that I really like about Mozilla are:
If FF used significantly less RAM than Mozilla, I'd put up with it's deficiencies, though.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Hmmm, one of the main reasons I switched TO Firefox is because IE crashes every time I try to close it. It then pops up its "I've crashed" window, with a click OK to restart IE button. Means closing IE is a multi-stage process for me.
Yes, I have all the latest service packs/updates etc.
An ad for an internet browser in the print edition of a newspaper that has an online counterpart? Hummmn, at least it will look good framed on the wall, I guess...
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.
BS.
I login to citibank.com at least once a month. I click the "Sign on to"->credit cards button.
I login, pay my bill surf, and leave.
I login to usbank constantly, as well as my local credit union. None bicker about the browser.
I think what they really need over at SpreadFirefox is not more donations, but more servers and more bandwidth.
For now, I've got our IT guy's blessing on running FireFox on my computer, but if they find out that it bypasses their fancy card-based security system...
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
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.
"Firefox will not be THE player until the day that people start writing pages that work under Firefox, ignore IE's "quirks""
This simply is not true. There are certainly sites out there that have problems on Firefox, but to say that they are few and far between is an overstatement to me. I almost never find one. And when I do, that is why there is the ieview extension.
Almost all page designs that are coming onto the web now are heavily CSS based, so "the latest and greatest" often works just find on firefox. Also, most page developers never really stopped designing for netscape as well, which saves firefox a great deal of the time.
The one or two times that I have run into a page that does not work on firefox does not even measure next to how much better the browser is for surfing the net.
Take for example Yahoo mail itself.Although it doesnt do a bad job of it like opera,its not near the perfect rendering of yahoo mail by IE.
As for overlap of text over each other , I have seen it happen over dozens of pages..
It also does a bad job in some sites where forms have to be filled - the form spaces go haywire,wont submit etc...but works well in IE.
Infact one of Firefox's own page had overlapping problems..I dont remember the link,but i had posted that link in one of my earlier comments [ If you can see my entire comment history:"Firefox messes up its own page" is the subject i think ]
For sites I am sure are secure, its better to stick with IE,because the webpage seems to render so prefectly in IE than in FF.You might have noticed this difference in many sites.May be because most sites are developed with IE in mind,but then thats the way it displayed in FF.
Many a time,I have filled forms with all details and hit submit,but wont work.then i switch to IE fill it again , it works flawless.Thats real iritation for me.
And you say " Apart from Slashdot, I can't find a page that doesn't render just fine in Firefox "......
huh
Why does yahoo do this
Seriously, people. Facts are facts.
From http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/:
The Foundation has been incorporated as a California not-for-profit corporation to ensure that the Mozilla project continues to exist beyond the participation of individual volunteers, to enable contributions of intellectual property and funds and to provide a vehicle for limiting legal exposure while participating in open-source software projects.
[...]
The Mozilla Foundation is a California non-profit corporation exempt from federal income taxation under IRC 501(c)3. Donations are tax deductible.
When will slashdot have standard compliant XHTML/CSS code?
Talk about facts. My website which is mostly hit from slashdot referrers throughout the day has stats that look like this:
1 12576 38.70% MSIE 6.0
2 12435 38.27% Mozilla/5.0
Now, I realize that browsers can fake this information but let's assume that it's basically correct. Just about any hit that comes from a referrer outside of slashdot is not Firefox/Moz.
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'.
Sounds like a good idea - but putting peoples names on the ad sounds a bit silly. How much room would 2500+ names take up on a page if they are even a slightly legible?
I think, when he typed "Dr. Spock", he actually meant "Yoda".
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
:wq!
* Firefox can't render custom scrollbars or formfields
* Having to ditch extensions entirely everytime there's an upgrade
* Having to restart the browser everytime you install an extension
* Adblock doesn't block ads nearly as well as IE with Admuncher installed (it even blocks text ads!)
* The TalkBack agent appears way too often for my tastes.
The only reason I switched in the first place was tabbed browsing. The way I have IE configured it already blocks popups (Google Toolbar) and Ads (Admuncher or custom hosts file.) But you can get SlimBrowser or Avant Browser now and they'll add tabbed functionality to IE. But what I do is just have multiple instances of IE open on the taskbar. Who cares when you have a gig of RAM? And I'm sure IE7 will add tabs.
Chess_the_cat. Banned. Again.
Ahem! That is a very incorrect link. If you want to see the REAL google cache go here
Mods: DO NOT mod me up! Providing a link to a cache is not insightful or informative, it is merely helpful.
Since we all think he's the most evil thing since Sauron ruled the Middle Earth, we all do understand what a bad idea it is to take out a full page ad to tell Microsoft, by name, who their enemies are, right?
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.
--
he means mr yoda
_ The_Empire_Strikes_Back
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_Episode_V:
Days later, while training, Luke discovers his X-wing fighter about to sink into the lake, then breaks concentration. Luke declares he will never be able to get the ship out, seeing that it is too big for him to extract from the water. Yoda says it is "no different, only different in your mind". Luke decides to "try" to lift the ship, but Yoda says "do or do not, there is no try". Luke tries to use the Force, but to no avail. Yoda reminds him that "size matters not" and gives him wisdom about the Force. Luke denies all of this, then Yoda decides to use the Force to lift the ship out himself. Luke is dumbfounded and non-believable. Yoda senses the youngster's failures within his mind.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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 web was a declaration of independence from a monopolized and stagnant print media.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Better idea: get a stoned chick to ask people to "switch"... that'll appeal to more people ;-)
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...
To wich I say "WTF"? I can't see anything different re: the fonts.Can you?
if there was only an easy way to turn off that damn tabbed browsing feature in Firefox.
There is. I'm not sure why you'd want to use it (I personally can't live without tabs, and even those who don't like them could just avoid opening any), but TabKiller is there for anyone who wants it.
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.
Some of my online banking or commerce type sites would bitch about non-IE, but I haven't run into that lately either. Every once and a while with mozilla the text may overflow from a table cell or something, but nothing huge.
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
I have been a fan of Firefox since before 0.1 and just bought $80 of stuff from the Mozilla Store, but I do not like the way the Mozilla Foundation is going.
5 6302&action=view> by the powers that be is that Firefox 1.0 be distrubuted under what they call an "end user license agreement" that disallows modification or distribution, and that restricts what you can use Firefox for--similar to the terms of Microsoft's software. If this happens, I will not be using Firefox in the future. It might even be argued that developers of Mozilla's software should have taken head of warnings about the NPL and MPL by FSF et al. This is an example of why copyleft is superior to less-restrictive licenses (especially ones that put less restrictions on certain organisations as special cases).
Personally, I think if they better integrated themselves with the FOSS community and started using traditional FOSS methods (as well as enocuranging the FOSS community to spread the word), this would help their marketing a lot better than an ad in the NYT. I do not object to the ad of itself--it may be a good idea--but it is an example of the way MF are thinking--specifically thinking ("monopoly"..."stagnant"...) about abusing their power over what is a brilliant piece of software.
>>in open source history<< (from story)
The *real* *question* is whether Firefox is free or open-source? My real objection is the attempts of people at MF to make Firefox neither (i.e.: proprietary). The whole thing about making the name and artwork proprietary a while back was not so bad (although it certainly led people to question MF's morality), as it was easy to remove references to "Firefox" or "Mozilla" and all the relevant artwork (but it still means that official builds are not free and do not follow DFSG).
The latest proposal <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=1
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
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
That way, when the user sees a broken page, he can (correctly) blame his troubles on MS... ;-)
Cheers, Ulli
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
I use both Firefox and IE. I haven't noticed Firefox crash more than IE.
What's more, a Firefox crash is a non-event, as the SessionSaver extension restores all my tabs on reload to the parts of the respective pages I was looking at.
Publicise the right things, and the switch is a no-brainer.
Information wants to be beer.
I'm not so sure about that...
File: index.html
Encoding: utf-8
Doctype: HTML 3.2
Errors: 106
No Character Encoding Found! Falling back to UTF-8
.
[snip]
.
This page is not Valid HTML 3.2!
Short version: There is a bug (217527) in Firefox. There is a fix, but it exposes a worse bug (246382), so the fix won't be checked included in 1.0.
The upside is that setting Slashdot to light mode means I don't have to see the horrible new color schemes :-\
I downloaded the latest Firefox version for OS X but it just doesn't cut it for me. I use Safari and I love the minimalist interface. Even the way Tabs are presented in Safari is perfectly thought out. Firefox is slowing gaining ground in the interface department but it's still too 1997. It has a few extra features but I don't have a pressing need for any of them. I also don't see any speed advantages. I wish them luck against IE for Windows world, but Safari already won that battle on OS X.
Apart from Slashdot, I can't find a page that doesn't render just fine in Firefox
Slashdot needs an "Ironic" moderation option.
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
Yeah, yeah, yeah. citibank.com may work in Firefox, but citi-bank.com requires IE.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
A List Apart had a story where they redesigned Slashdot to make it CSS-based (yes, it still looked the same afterwards).
Changing every single page on the site to CSS takes a lot of work
Not true. If you check out Slashcode you will see that there aren't that many templates.
Martin May
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?
Your grandma won't change from IE for the same reason that my dad keeps using that stupid Compuserve browser. You have to get them going with it from the outset, or present them with conclusive preoof that Firefox is better along with a totally bombproof means of getting it installed.
I'd have to agree with the grandparent poster. I haven't had any problems for years with any of the Mozilla/Firefox browsers when accessing Citi online banking and Citi Cards bill management. I use Firefox exclusively for any online financial manangement and have had no problems so far.
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.
Okay, well, Firefox is better than IE already (for starters, I'm using Firefox right now but somehow IE just doesn't work on my Mandrake Linux system), but three hours ago we learn of Firefox crapping out on bogus HTML code where MS IE was demonstrably more robust.
I would like to see these errors fixed in Firefox before it is launched (as v1.0) and before the NYTimes ad, and not only because we want Firefox to be ready to make a good first impression. Fixing these errors also shows me that the Mozilla Dev team is willing to take a realistic view of how good their product is, acknowledge problems, and fix it. Until they do that, I'm not prepared to spend money promoting the product.
I recognize that fixing these HTML parsing errors will take an ungodly amount of time. It will probably mean pushing the release date into December or 2005. But if they don't, MozDev (I mean the Mozilla Development Team) would then be acting like a large corporation: plan the budget two years ahead of time, plan the schedule one year ahead of time, and stick to it no matter what happens "or else senior management will have our heads!" Well, one advantage of non-corporate F/OSS is the agility in revising schedules and the large clout of the technical staff rather than marketing.
Please, MozDev, recognize the problem: Firefox crashes, and MS IE doesn't. Fix it. You are the shining example of F/OSS, the #1 application usable on Windows and F/OSS OS's alike. Don't let the hype and the need to "save face" push you into launching Firefox before it's ready. Microsoft pushed back Longhorn; you can push back FF v1.0.
And lest I sound like an ingrate, Firefox has been an absolutely astounding piece of software that is key to refuting Microsoft's claim that "F/OSS doesn't work". It's exactly for this reason that I don't want it all ruined because Mozilla puts out a full-page ad before it robustly parses improper HTML.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
Firefox can't render custom scrollbars or formfields
:P To customize form fields, add "-moz-appearance: none !important;" to the field's style, and then add style accordingly.
:P
Oh no custom scrollbars! The world is ending!
Having to ditch extensions entirely everytime there's an upgrade
Not anymore. Having upgraded from 0.9.3 to 0.10, it automatically updated extensions. Some didn't have equivalents right away, but soon did later. This won't be a problem anymore, as they aren't going to change the architecture anytime soon.
Having to restart the browser everytime you install an extension
And IE is any different?
Adblock doesn't block ads nearly as well as IE with Admuncher installed (it even blocks text ads!)
Um. Troll alert. Admuncher is a system level ad filter. It is browser/program agnostic.
The TalkBack agent appears way too often for my tastes.
What are you really trying to say?
The only reason I switched in the first place was tabbed browsing.
I doubt it. You didn't switch to simply try it out, like 99.9% who use/used firefox?
But you can get SlimBrowser or Avant Browser now and they'll add tabbed functionality to IE.
And, as everyone conveniently forgets to mention about these IE knockoffs, they come with their own security vulnerabilities along with all of IE's.
And I'm sure IE7 will add tabs.
Three cheers for vaporware!
"Practically" a religion? Just thank Marc that you're not being proselytized by the Church of Emacs.
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
* Firefox can't render custom scrollbars or formfields
Show me the part of the css/html spec that defines this. I can show you the part of the faq that says its downright WRONG to do it.
* Having to ditch extensions entirely everytime there's an upgrade
Didn't happen when I switched from 0.9 to 1.0PR.
* Having to restart the browser everytime you install an extension
Yeah. Sucks. Same as IE though. Atleast with extentions like sessionsaver, restarting doesn't make you lose anything.
* Adblock doesn't block ads nearly as well as IE with Admuncher installed (it even blocks text ads!)
Adblock blocks text ads just fine. Anything that has its own display element is blockable (And this includes PRE, P, SPAN, DIV, etc.)
* The TalkBack agent appears way too often for my taste
Download a build with it disabled? I only see it when my browser crashes, which is only due to bad Java causing bad memory leaks.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
Windows XP SP2 / FF 1.0PR
I get so tired of having to copy, tab, paste, didnt work, tab back, copy, copy, copy, copy, tab, paste. Dammit. tab, copy, copy, tab, paste. FUCKING COME ON. tab, copy, copy, tab, paste. There, finally.
Apparently I'm not the only one with the issue.
Results 1 - 10 of about 13,200 for copy paste bug firefox.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
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.
This happened to me before. It was because I had the adblock extension loaded. Yahoo distributes some ads from the same servers their content comes from.
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?
I like and use Firefox. But to be perfectly honest, it isn't the huge leap over IE that people want it to be. The achievement has been in getting something to run as well as IE, which is monstrously difficult in itself (one of the very first times an open source group has equalled commercial software in terms of user experience).
The primary benefits of Firefox are:
1. Security. You don't get spyware and such. You can also get the same result if you disable ActiveX controls and other features in IE, but most people don't do this. If Microsoft changed the defaults--which they won't because many sites depend on them--then IE would be on part with FF.
2. Tabbed browsing. This is a fairly small interface feature, though a very useful one. If Microsoft added it to IE--and they undoubtedly will, because it's easy to do--then there goes the biggest visible difference.
I realize that FF has other nice features (and I fully agree with people who cite them, because, again, I like and use FF), but those are the biggies. And the big negative feature is simply this: Sites that rely on ActiveX controls don't work under FF. Yes, I know, security, blah, blah, blah, but most people only see the "not working" part.
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.
citi-bank.com does not resolve according to nslookup.
Well I get new product recommendations on slashdot all the time. Heh. You damn geeks making me spend my hard-earned student loans.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
The flickering on Gamespot is due to bug 132337 . This was fixed last week, but I'm not sure it'll make it into Firefox 1.0.
Advertising like that is likely a waste of money. Why not use those funds to pay the programmers to make FireFox even better?
http://applemuseum.bott.org/sections/ads.html
e Win95.jpg
n ilaSitesCom/welibm.jpg
I prefer this one:
http://www.macmothership.com/gallery/newads5/Appl
or this one:
http://static.userland.com/manilasites/images/MMa
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.
Why invest in a newspaper ad when we could reach our audience through cheap popup ads?
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.