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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,
Disguising it as a news story? Oh, wait... Ooops, never mind...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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...
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!!!
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
It's nice that they're taking out an ad for FireFox, but let me know when they manage to get a full page spread of Samantha Fox
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'.
The newspaper campaign is not entirely about switching instanatly. Its about 'recognition'.
Next time the executives are playing golf and one of us techies who was lucky to be there mentions Firefox in some offtopic conversation, the exeucutive might respond: "Right. Right. I remember something like that in NYT a couple of weeks ago. Remind me again in the office tomorrow".
And then you know that you have made a breakthrough.
Remember the golden mantra of marketing: Its all about brand recognition.
Free XBox, PS2
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?
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.
agreed - and by the way, do you know how much faster i can read the NYTimes website since I installed Gentoo? My G4 Gentoo PPC is really fast since I included the new "FastRead" USE variable.
Gent00 R0cks!!
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
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.
Apple ran a great ad in the SJ Mercury when Windows 95 came out. It was a full two pages that just said:
CONGRATU.LNS
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?
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
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.
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.
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!
* 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
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.
Wasn't it the slightly uglier and funnier:
Worst BBC News Stories
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.........
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Registered .sig quotient : 1337
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