NYTimes Reports on Firefox

Soldrinero writes "Just three days after running a community-sponsored two-page ad, the New York Times is now running a news story on Mozilla Firefox. Our favorite browser is presented in a very favorable light, and there's a good discussion on both Firefox's useability-enhancing features and its security merits. Being fair, they also present Microsoft's solution to security problems: 'Microsoft does have one suggestion for those who cannot use the latest patches in Service Pack 2: buy a new personal computer'"

Comments

Did somebody pay them ?

[yogikoudou]

Why an ad if they make a good article for free ?

Re:Did somebody pay them ?

[RealUlli]

To get the article you have to buy an ad.

I think the big ad resulted in some higher-ups at the newspaper noticing that big ad and the cash-flow, which in turn resulted in them asking their editors why nobody had looked at that product yet.

So some reporter took a look at Firefox and was delighted...

The rest is his[ s]tory... ;-)

Regards, Ulli

Word of mouth

[UconnGuy]

Word of mouth advertising is the best. With the NYT article, and "geeks" like us spreading the word about Firefox, more and more people are starting to use it.

Just the other day, I had a friend who couldn't go to any site on the net without IE crashing and the Send Report box coming up (does anyone actually send the reports??). Anyway, she was getting frustrated, so I pointed her to Firefox's download site. She downloaded it and now uses it exclusively. She loves the look and feel and says it seems much faster in rendering sites. I told her there may be a couple sites she will have to use IE for, but for the most part, Firefox will work.

She said she is going to tell her friends about it. As I said earlier, word of mouth advertising is the best way to get the word out....especially for people that aren't very knowledgeable technology wise.

HP.com and spreading regard of content providers

[Hank Chinaski]

hp.com has officially recognized firefox as a standard browser

*** Policy in effect starting December, 2004 **** In Autumn of 2004 we have seen a dramatic increase in customer usage of the Mozilla/Firefox browser on our Web site. Mozilla has positioned their Firefox browser as a more secure, faster tool for browsing the Internet. Firefox has received a lot of visibility in the press, and this is contributing to the rapid conversion rates in our user population. In order to support our customer's efforts to better control their online experiences (through the use of browser choice, security related issues and speed) we need to ensure that all pages will successfully render in this tool. To fail to do so would be a conflict with our Total Customer Experience (TCE) goals. Effective immediately, HP.com will formally adopt the Firefox browser as a standard browser.

found here: http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=blog/1742

What you can do (Re:Word of mouth)

[rseuhs]

is complain to webmasters who haven't heard of it yet.

For example take this, they support Netscape7, but lock out Mozilla and Firefox.

The webmaster did not want to believe me when I told him those browsers are essentially the same (I had a rather lenghty email conversation with him), but he will when he gets enough complaints from enough different people.

Geez, if only I had mod points...

[rah1420]

This bears repeating:

Joe User can't fix a Windows problem any more than he can fix a Linux problem.

To drive home the point, how about this very reference from this morning? It took a sysadmin with VERY MUCH clue 5 hours to nuke all the stuff off a Wintel machine, and all it takes for it to come undone is one little click on the IE icon.

I cleaned up a friend's machine last month. The father was sure the kids were surfing pr0n sites and nasty bits that he didn't want them to go into. To prove it wasn't their fault I logged on and I opened IE. We waited about 5 minutes with my hands off of the keyboard while we chatted about this 'n that. I logged off and re-ran the spyware and malware scanners. 50 hits in 5 minutes. He was stunned.

I couldn't get him to go to Linux, but at least he's running Firefox now.

Re:a new definition of being fair?

[peebeejay]

I don't see how that wasn't being fair. Here's the paragraph in question:

Mr. Schare of Microsoft does have one suggestion for those who cannot use the latest patches in Service Pack 2: buy a new personal computer. By the same reasoning, the security problems created by a car's broken door lock could be solved by buying an entirely new automobile. The analogy comes straight from Mr. Schare. "It's like buying a car," he said. "If you want to get the latest safety features, you have to buy the latest model."

Where exactly is the reporter not being fair? The Microsoft PR guy said something breathtakingly stupid, and the reporter caught him on it. In fact, nearly everything Mr. Schare said was stunningly dumb. I mean, can he tell us what were the "factors" that led people to "choose" IE in the first place? Hmmm...where does "included in the computer I bought" come on that list?
If you're complaining that Slashdotters like to pick on MS a little too much, you're right. But in this case, it's MS unwittingly picking on itself.

Re:Firefox and Active X - not necessary on Win32

[markdowling]

Rather than introduce ActiveX to default Firefox builds, you could just leave IE installed on max security (block all ActiveX, among other things) and only certain trusted sites enforced by IEAK, while deploying Mozilla 1.7 for mainline use. That's what we do.

And it's not just ActX now, we had to check all of our PCs for JRE when the recent vulnerability was announced, and installing JRE5 does not uninstall the defective JREs, annoyingly.

Corporate installs of FF 1.1 and/or Moz 2 would be nice with MSIs and options to retain trusted plugins like Flash, Acrobat and dictionaries. It's very annoying having to reinstall dictionaries when upgrading Mozilla.

Re:What a friggin moron.

[ScrewMaster]

I had the same XPerience. I had installed XP SP1 on a system and deliberately turned OFF Windows Updates because I DID NOT WANT SP2 on that box. I noticed a couple of hours later that Internet access was kind of slow on my network, and when I went downstairs I saw that the cable modem light was on solid. At first I thought I'd been cracked and was running someone's DDOS attack, but then I looked at that XP machine ... sure enough, it was downloading Service Pack 2 even though I'd explicitly told it not to. They really want SP2 out there regardless of whether users want it. No need to slam the parent poster for Microsoft's arrogant (or ignorant, who knows) behavior. All I know is it pissed me off pretty thoroughly too.