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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'"
Why an ad if they make a good article for free ?
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.
By RANDALL STROSS
Published: December 19, 2004
IREFOX is a classic overnight success, many years in the making.
Published by the Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit group supporting open-source software that draws upon the skills of hundreds of volunteer programmers, Firefox is a Web browser that is fast and filled with features that Microsoft's stodgy Internet Explorer lacks. Firefox installs in a snap, and it's free.
Firefox 1.0 was released on Nov. 9. Just over a month later, the foundation celebrated a remarkable milestone: 10 million downloads. Donations from Firefox's appreciative fans paid for a two-page advertisement in The New York Times on Thursday.
Until now, the Linux operating system was the best-known success among the hundreds of open-source projects that challenge Microsoft with technically strong, free software that improves as the population of bug-reporting and bug-fixing users grows. But unless you oversee purchases for a corporate data center, it's unlikely that you've felt the need to try Linux yourself.
With Firefox, open-source software moves from back-office obscurity to your home, and to your parents', too. (Your children in college are already using it.) It is polished, as easy to use as Internet Explorer and, most compelling, much better defended against viruses, worms and snoops.
Microsoft has always viewed Internet Explorer's tight integration with Windows to be an attractive feature. That, however, was before security became the unmet need of the day. Firefox sits lightly on top of Windows, in a separation from the underlying operating system that the Mozilla Foundation's president, Mitchell Baker, calls a "natural defense."
For the first time, Internet Explorer has been losing market share. According to a worldwide survey conducted in late November by OneStat.com, a company in Amsterdam that analyzes the Web, Internet Explorer's share dropped to less than 89 percent, 5 percentage points less than in May. Firefox now has almost 5 percent of the market, and it is growing.
Gary Schare, Microsoft's director of product management for Windows, has been assigned the unenviable task of explaining how Microsoft plans to respond to the Firefox challenge with a product whose features were last updated three years ago. He has said that current users of Internet Explorer will stick with it once they take into account "all the factors that led them to choose I.E. in the first place." Beg your pardon. Choose? Doesn't I.E. come bundled with Windows?
Mr. Schare has said that Mozilla's Firefox must prove it can smoothly move from version 1.0 to 2.0, and has thus far enjoyed "a bit of a free ride." If I were the spokesman for the software company that included the company's browser free on every Windows PC, I'd be more careful about using the phrase "free ride."
Trying to strike a conciliatory note, Mr. Schare has also declared that he and his company were happy to have Firefox as "part of the large ecosystem" of software that runs on Windows. In fact, Firefox is ecumenically neutral, being available also for both the Mac and for Linux.
Mr. Schare may be the official spokesman, but he does not use Internet Explorer himself. Instead he uses Maxthon, published by a little company of the same name. It uses the Internet Explorer engine but provides loads of features that Internet Explorer does not. "Tabs are what hooked me," he told me, referring to the ability to open within a single window many different Web sites and move easily among them, rather than open separate windows for each one and tax the computer's memory. Firefox has tabs. Other browsers do, too. But fundamental design decisions for Internet Explorer prevent the addition of this and other desiderata without a thorough update of Windows, which will not be complete until 2006 at the earliest.
How fitting that Microsoft finds itself in this predicament. In late 1995, at a time when Netscape Na
...microsoft wasn't fair with themselves.
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'"
They're shooting themselves in the foot here. Open source does not require you to 'buy a new personal computer'. Oh, the market does tho, and Microsoft is there for the market, not for the consumer. That's sad.
That said, the article itself is a brilliant advert for FireFox and gives an excellent overview of the circumstances in which Internet Explorer overtook Netscape and how that compares to what is happening in the browser market right now.
And assuming NYTimes is not a technical journal (which I don't think it is) it doesn't have the problem of "preaching to the choir" as so many articles have had in the past.
Long live Firefox.
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
found here: http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=blog/1742
IAAL
Yeah, Firefox, great and all. But we're missing the big picture here. This is an article on NYT and the "horrid blood sucking registration required" phrase was absent from the description.
My world has just turned upside down. Is the NYT now on the slashdot buddy list?
Firefox is getting alot of well deserved hype these days. Everything revolves around Firefox being new which gives it a great marketing advantage (the small non-profit organization against the goliath, microsoft). But for how long will the hype last? Although I personally belive a large milestone was reached with the release of Firefox 1.0 we must be careful not to enter the "comfort zone" and expect that this is how things will continue to be.
This was the first step, now it's time to plan for the next.
Thanks for browsing at -1
Please vistit my blog: www.framtiden.nu
This is like getting a letter from Ford saying they forgot to put in the airbag and if you want one, buy a new Mustang.
Bleh, it contains nudity
To be fair, the fox in the original FireFox logo was also naked.
Actually, most foxes are naked for that matter...
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Well I thank the author for addressing that quote which we've seen in other articles regarding Microsoft's comments towards Firefox. The reply was exactly what I (and many more) thought of the original quote.
Height: 38U, Weight: 0 Newtons, Eyes: #0000FF, OS: Gray Matter 1.0 (Alpha)
...Mr. Schare then went on to claim that the susceptibility to attack is a feature Microsoft's customers demand. "Every day we get millions of emails from Internet Explorer users thanking us for our design and also offering us great deals on herbal viagra and free porn."
It will if you buy it from Apple. :-)
/me ducks
Stick Men
It is nice to see FireFox getting some well deserved press. It needs as much as it can get because it has a huge hurdle to overcome. It isn't pre-installed on computers. This means that it requires people to do something. /. readers enjoy improving their computers with great software, where as your average computer user wants to point and click with as little extra effort as possible. Some how the average pperson needs to be convinced that there is a greater benefit in installing FireFox than in taking no action at all.
Along with this hurdle, sit down with an IE user and install FireFox.....then watch them use it. They have no idea how to use tabbed browsing and will open browser window after browser window, because they don't know any better. And the extensions are great, but well beyond 90% of users ability to understand.
So....Remember....Don't just tell your family and friends about FireFox. Istall it for them(along with Flash, Shockwave and Java} and show them how to open multiple tabs. Install a couple extensions for them. This will take maybe 30 minutes, but it will create a FireFox user. Don't just spread the word...Show people first hand!
"We will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. " Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Ok, point by point.
Ive heard from others it has fewer features and options,
resulting in smaller memory footprint, less overhead and generally faster and "lighter" code - shorter load times, shorter page rendering times etc.
and a more dumbed down UI. Dumbed down UI != ease of use.
That's what you got wrong. The UI is task-oriented, not feature-oriented. In this way it's "dumbed down" - the user doesn't have to care X is a component of Y and Y belongs to Z. "Advanced"? "Security&Privacy"? "Tools"? Where is it? User cares only that X does task of type A and so it can be found in the "A". Associating downloaded file type - "downloads". Easy and simple. The navigation routes don't correspond to the program internal structure but to user requirements. The options are all there, only the less used ones are dug in deeper to expose the frequently used ones.
I think the less customisability software has the harder it becomes to use, for newbies and experienced users alike.
Another thing you get wrong. While Mozilla is a combine with kitchen sink and hardly anything to add, Firefox is meant to be "bare bones to be extended". Plugins for Firefox may change its face totally and they aren't meant as "some extra fancy" but as an essential component. You build your browser to be what you want it to be by adding what you need, not by switching off what you don't want. In this respect Firefox is way more customizable than Mozilla - just not "out of the box".
It becomes more difficult for the user to customise the software for their preferences and usage pattern, and more difficult to accomplish certian tasks.
Straight opposite. First - "reasonable defaults" so there's no thing like in MSIE prefs where I run a line of checkboxes and toggle all, on to off, off to on, because -all- of them are against my preference. And then flexiblity to add any extras you desire.
The trick with useability is not to remove customisbility, but rather make software as customisable as possible but simply design a good configuration user interface that places more commonly used options more prominantly than advanced one, such as through placing the more advanced options on advanced options screens or other such techniques, thus keeping the more advanced options from confusing newbies but allowing people to gradually begin using them and discover them (and making it easy to discover them by making them all avialable through a good UI) as they become familiar with software. People often start out using software by using a subset of its features and then gradually add to their knowledge of the software and use a more complete set of its features, and different users have different needs and will use different features sets. This is why software should be as customisable as possible and not try to restrict features and functionality, but rather allow the user to customise the software to their tastes. One feature that seems useless to one person is likely essential to someone else.
You just summed up an essential part of Firefox philosophy.
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Best line from the article:
Beg your pardon. Choose? Doesn't I.E. come bundled with Windows?
Ah, so refreshing to see a mainstream journalist hit the nail on the head in a single line.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
As far as I can see the only thing that is stopping a mass migration to Linux is a lack of software, especially games and business software. Joe User can't upgrade his graphics card under Linux, true; but he can't upgrade his graphics card under Windows either. What Joe User *can* do under Windows is go to the store, buy a prepackaged piece of software, pop in the disk and click "next" until its installed.
Also, we have to admit that some of the critical software for Linux isn't as good as the software for Windows. Last night I discovered that KOffice's KSpread program won't let me make a non-contiguous selection. KWord doesn't feature paragraph grouping or widow and orphan control. I *want* to use the free software programs, but I find myself using Crossover Office to run MS Office because MS Office works. Its expensive, but it does the job.
Linux is ready for the desktop, we just need software to run there.
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
You're confusing "works" with "always works." Microsoft's major advantage is that, at least at first, the interface is fairly intuitive for basic tasks, the software install process is idiot proof, and the applications "just work"
Sure, if it breaks you still need a fairly sophisticated idea of how everything works to fix it, but the computer is fast becoming a home applicance. Like any other appliance, it goes to a specialist for repair.
Linux needs the following
1 - An installation standard that is every bit as idiot proof as installing a self executing binary with microsoft.
2 - An out of the box user interface that has the polished look and feel users have come to expect form Apple and MS.
3 - Application suites competitive with pay products like Office.
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
Right HERE ;)
-j
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.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
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.
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.
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.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I don't mind using 3rd-party technology to "enhance" your site, but I'd better be able to navigate and perform all the basic functions on your site without flash, shockwave, javascript, and ActveX enabled. You want to add cool effects with flash? Great!, but don't do your menus in flash without having a fall-back method for basic navigation! The same goes for any such technology.
What needs to happen, is for the browser market to get so diverse that ALL browsers must be conscientious about accurately following standards and by the same token all web-sites/designers would be forced to actually USE those standards.
"terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution