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Firefox New York Times Ad Hits the Presses
Dave writes "The long awaited New York Times ad for Firefox has finally hit the presses. Because of the vast number of donations the ad covered two pages of the newspaper. It's being timed to coincide with 11 million downloads."
Does anyone have a higher resolution image so I can actually read the names.
-- john
It'll be interesting to see exactly how much this (wonderfully designed) ad will affect the number of downloads over the next few days. Here's to hoping this makes a difference with all the Joe User's out there.
... the web browser I'm fed up with is FireFox?
One has to wonder, will 'Monkey' Ballmer and his gang of miscreants reply to this? Will we see a big 'IE. Get with the program.' on the next days? They cannot let this stand...
j.
I can't get to the spreadfirefox.com site (damn /.) but from the summary, it sounds like the ad went out today. I thought we (donaters) were supposed to get a little pre-warning before it went out so we could actually head out and buy the paper.
Argh.
I can't say I fully understand the business model behind the Mozilla project. There are no ads on their homepage or within their product that generate income, so just how exact are they funding their project (and advertisement). I always figured it was a sort of philanthropic effort.
But I wonder how much this will affect the number of worms/trojans that start affecting Firefox vulnerabilities. I think Firefox is superior to IE, but it has enjoyed staying out of the spotlight enough to avoid the attention of malware writers.
I'm right at the bottom of the paw. It's cool that they had enough money for two pages, but it might have been better to have spent the extra money on a different publication.
-- john
What effect will Firefox's growing poularity have on its future vis-a-vis security? Does it become a more inviting target for malicious coders? Do any of you out there know if Firefox is written well enough to withstand such attention? I've been using Firefox since V.08. and I have watched with growing concern as its popularity has increased. Wether justified or not, I felt a little safer with this browser when less people were using it.
Regards,
JP
The facts expressed here belong to all, the opinions to me. The distinction between fact and opinion is yours to decide.
Most of the readers will be unaware that Firefox does not suffer from the security problems that IE does. They may simply answer the question: "Are you fed up with your web browser?" with: "Nope. works fine"
Mozilla needs a better way to get updates to Administrators. I love the product and use it all the time at home and work. I also mention it every chance I get. But it needs a way to get patches installed, instead of reloading the whole product or figuring out what files need replaced with a folder compare. What say ye!
While this ad is ok, I have ask what do the second, third and fourth advertisement look like? When will they run? How long will they run?
In order to market this product, perhaps a long term campaign that stresses all the ways Firefox will make interent browsing easier would be good.
One ad can simply state: "No pop up ads. EVER" with the firefox logo and link to download it. Another ad could highlight the best, most useful extensions. I think the weather update/forecast extension would be perfect for this.
Also: Are there ANY ads appearing on the NYT website, or any other high traffice website? This would make it easy to download the program.
I still recall the day when IBM announced the PC and DEC ran the ad "Welcome to the club"...
I expect the rest of my IT career will involve using Free/Open Source software more and more...which is fine with me. I like stuff that works and works well.
(By the way, I am one of those folks who can kill Novell networking software just by logging on...wish I had the same talent for Windows...)
Supreme Granter of Doctor of Obviology Letters ("A FIRM Command of the Obvious")
It might have been better to have the two pages appearing with an ordinary page of text in between them, for example, the page of names first, then in a page's time, the main advert.
This would mean that skipping it was less likely, and there was a bit of foreshadowing: hopefully the reader's curiosity at this list of names and something called "Firefox" would make them pay attention to the main advert when they then turned to the next page and saw it.
---
"I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing and it was everything that I thought it could be."
Why not create a webpage with black and white ads for firefox in various sizes in PDF format. Then start a grassroots campaign where people inclined to donate could use those PDF files to take out small ads in local newspapers across the country. Prices of course vary but small black and white ads can be quite affordable for small newspapers which reach only a few thousand readers. I think such a campaign could dramatically increase exposure. ...just an idea.