Slashdot Mirror
Speakeasy Embraces Firefox
xdavexxx writes "
Speakeasy, one of
the largest DSL providers in the United States,
recently announced that it will begin offering a specialized version of Mozilla Firefox to its customers. In
doing so, they are one of the first internet companies to offer an official
customized version of Firefox to its customers. This custom version of Firefox will
keep the Firefox
Google home page, but have the Speakeasy logo and feature a Speakeasy
toolbar filled with links recommended by Speakeasy. No money was exchanged
between the Mozilla Foundation
and Speakeasy, as Firefox is open
source and is freely available for use by anyone. Speakeasy's reasoning for this is simple;
to increase the reliability and speed of its internet service." It should be pointed that Slashdot (and OSTG) have a partnership with Speakeasy.
hope more companies start doing that
Lets just hope they keep the name Firefox somewhere on the program so they can tell their friends.
Fewer Malware programs target FireFox, less security vulnerabilities, means less bandwidth is used by said malware and more by the actual customers.
Kudos, Speakeasy.
This isn't exactly new. When I signed up for dialup service through Southwestern Bell back around 1996 or so, I was mailed a CD with Netscape Communicator 4 branded with SWBell logos. I wonder what took so long to have this done with Firefox. After all, Firefox can trace its roots to Netscape. It is good to see Firefox being embraced by a rather large ISP, however.
Many ISP customers just do exactly what their ISP tells them to. If this ISP starts shoving Firefox down customers' throats, Firefox market share could drastically increase over IE's.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
Weenie: Good morning, Speakeasy Help Desk. How may I help you?
User: Slashdot renders wrong in your ghey browser~()@*!@!(*
Weenie: Ah, just ctrl-minus ctrl-plus.
User: Woot! Thanks, mang!
Trolling is a art,
Links that Speakeasy chooses?
As in their paid advertisers? What's next? Companies integrating spyware into Firefox and redistributing it?
wdd
What we need is sort of what AOL was rumored to be doing with the next version of Netscape - IE integration. Before the flames start, hear me out.
Some websites require IE right now. It would be nice for n00bs if they could use Firefox or any alternative browser without this worry. With an IE integration feature, we could amass a list of the websites that need IE rendering and Firefox could automatically render them with IE, if needed. Everything else gets Gecko. And maybe "the community" could put together an action team to help those on the list get off of the list.
Perhaps there could be job creation involved, to boot.
More
The name, speakeasy, was used 7 times in 6 sentences on this post. Try some shorter pronouns, I hope we don't charge by the letter.
And by that, I mean the security holes creaping in.
That very well could be.
The difference between IE and Firefox will be in how well they respond to the bugs that are found.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Anyway, we should commend them greatly. Now we can say that ISP's even recommend it.
How they have modified it? Have they simply added their own set of extensions, sort of an "extension distribution", including a theme extension for branding purposes? Or, have they embedded part of the code in another "shell" of sorts? If so, what is the container technology, i.e. MFC/Java/C++, etc. Also, does this mean that it will be incompatible with Firefox, or at least not compatible with its extensions?
...Microsoft has asked the BSA to investigate claims that Speakeasy is using software without proper licensing and in violation of several patents.
Stay tuned for more on this story as it develops.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
This probably makes a lot of sense from a support perspective. I've got to believe that most of the calls that support people get are related to the 397 spyware apps competing for keystrokes on the customer's computer.
It problably also has to potential to cut down on spambots & other zombies residing on their network.
Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/
If that's not in the slashdot FAQ, it should be.
Back to the topic at hand, if pc venders such as HP or Dell would bulk it with their OS, and hide the Internet Explorer icon from the desktop, numbers might increase.
I can see the average user wondering where the "internet" went, though...
Mercy was given to me by Christ...I must give the same to others.
I used to have DSL with them up in Minnesota. pricaes were pretty good and the plans were pretty flexible. Speed was pretty nice too (I lived like 1000 feet from the CO). But I tought their hosting plans were way overpriced.
So far they've been too adaptive for that.
They *were* adaptive until they had control of the marketplace. Now they dictate the standards and have very little incentive to innovate.
Until people embrace another OS in both the corporate environment and in the home, we're stuck with 'em.
That is correct. But large organizations that reach maturity in their marketplace get lethargic and develop so much bureaucratic momentum that when the change comes, it is usually fatal for the corporation. Only those with a good management structure can survive to keep themselves in the game (ala IBM).
Back to the topic at hand, if pc venders such as HP or Dell would bulk it with their OS, and hide the Internet Explorer icon from the desktop, numbers might increase.
I agree, but what do you think the odds are for that happening?
I can see the average user wondering where the "internet" went, though...
I think people who have been using the internet for more than 10 years are already saying that. Those who enter the system 2 years from now probably won't miss a thing.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Actually by replacing IE they are pretty much ending the use of ActiveX over their network. Less 0wn3ed machines == less spam/zombies/what have you. It is proactive on their part.
Trolling is a art,
Speakeasy is wonderful because it's nice to have an option for DSL. If it wasn't for them, there would be no alternatives to Bellsouth other than cable in the area I live in. Now they're supporting Firefox. That just makes it all the better.
Aero
Please stop hurting America -- Jon Stewart
No money was exchanged between the Mozilla Foundation and Speakeasy, as Firefox is open source and is freely available for use by anyone
Although presumably they will have entered into some arrangement with the Foundation (or The Charlton Company), seeing as Firefox is a registered trademark. This is a good thing as it can prevent people spreading bastardized versions of firefox, such as Firefox Claria edition..
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
I love speakeasy. Since I switched to their service from AT&T, I have almost no unexplained downtime and no problems with customer support. Their support reps actually speak fluent English without annoying Indian accents and so far all my issues were resolved within a day and no support reps ever mislead me or gave me wrong info (happened with Verizon and AT&T quite often).
Based on the packages that they offer and on cool things like wi-fi resell and open-server policies, it looks like the ISP is definitely for geeks. Also, I believe that if more ISPs provide users with free software that actually works, IE share will be reduced. 99% of non-techie users that I know use software provided by their ISPs. Anything from browsers to anti-virus programs. If things continue going this way, we'll see more open source products distributed to customers.
I hope Speakeasy continues to do what it is doing and keep its level of customer support along with other innovative ideas that many companies seem to forget as soon as they become profitable.
Well, I'll show them if they do! I'll move to Mozilla...
Oh, wait...
Mercy was given to me by Christ...I must give the same to others.
Sounds to me that calls to Tech Support will end up being a huge promotion effort for Mozilla Firefox. I'm sure Speakeasy will recommend many of it's troubled customers to download their customized version of Firefox.
How many customers does this promotion extend to? I'm sure Firefox will be much closer to that 10% Internet usage mark.
This is fun.
Brandon Petersen
Yes, I actaully followed one of the links. It's a plugin. The FF download it right from mozilla.org
http://www.speakeasy.net/software/firefox/
jeff
sdg
Your opinion is in complete disregard to the other 90% of users on the internet. There spigot is going to be spewing toxic waste into their house in no time at all. In turn, we all suffer.
By recommended, I'd assume sponsered links. But after checking they were actually legit links. I have seen other extensions that set their affliate codes, the last one i saw was the amazon search tool which tags all the search results with their affliate code.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
I'd be all over their offerings. $39.95 is just too much for low-end ADSL these days. Everyone else is offering it for $29.95. They should at least throw in a fixed IP into the deal to make it attractive.
Wouldn't it be nice to answer all spyware calls with "I'm sorry, but we don't support Internet Explorer. Have you tried the firefox software that was bundled with your dsl?"
Mercy was given to me by Christ...I must give the same to others.
As it is unless you are willing to tweak the code and recompile you don't have a lot of options for customizing Firefox (at least not that I have found, I'd LOVE to be shown that it's doable). I think that corporations, that are struggling with spyware on a regular basis would be willing to switch to Firefox more readliy if they could easily tailor it to their needs, choosing default home page, links, install internal CA root certificates etc. For it's faults IE makes it pretty easy to do this, with the IEAK you can customize just about everything.
Does that include:
"This custom version of Firefox will have the Speakeasy logo and feature a Speakeasy toolbar filled with links recommended by Speakeasy. No money was exchanged between the Mozilla Foundation and Speakeasy, as Firefox is open source and is freely available for use by anyone."
I know I'm old-fashioned, but I think coders should be paid for their work.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
I have personally converted both my wife (fairly tech-savvy but resistent to change) and mother-in-law (pretty low-tech), and both prefer Firefox hands down. The trick is:
On the converting bad corporate citizens front, I am pleased to say that the last IE Only site I regularly visit (epost.ca) has re-coded to be standards compliant and now works fine in Firefox. When I complained to them 6 months ago, their initial response was "We code IE cuz 97% of our traffic uses it", but they eventually saw the light.
Karma: Excellent (Mainly due to Bill & Ted's Karma Adventure)
I would like to see ActiveX in FF only if it could be treated like extensions; .e.g. you only can download from trusted sites.
They are paid for their work, in various ways, not the least of which is free code from their fellow developers.
With luck Speakeasy will pay them with some free code as well.
Thanks for disclosing the fact that OSTG has a relationship with the vendor it's promoting.
If you had RTFA, you would see that all Speakeasy has done is created a plugin. You still have to install the regular version of Firefox.
And the Plugin just adds some bookmarks and change an icon or two (at least that is what they tell us).
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
Instead of using JS (which can be turned off), maybe consider using IE's conditional comments? If you're just targetting IE anyway, that's ideal - no way to turn it off (AFAIK), and only works for IE-based browsers.
Yeah... write a letter to RMS, see if he'll put something that insures that in the next version of the GPL.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
http://pctech.invisibill.net.nyud.net:8090/MySpeak easy.xpi/ has a copy of the XPI (http://www.speakeasy.net/software/MySpeakeasy.xpi ), all extracted out. http://pctech.invisibill.net.nyud.net:8090/MySpeak easy.xpi/chrome/speakeasy.jar/content/menu.xul seems to have all the new links, if that's what you want to check out. ThinkGeek, Fark, Snopes, Homestar Runner, AnandTech... Quite a variety.
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=2062 13/
Interestingly enough, some of the sites that made the cut are OSTG, DistroWatch, ThinkGeek, and Newegg. Kinda odd for a plugin they're targeting at average users...
Others include Wikipedia, Babelfish, an entire section of gameing sites, and some shopping sites.
No Slashdot though...
The logical answer is yes. Assuming they do so, Speakeasy is doing two important things for the Firefox devs.
From what I understand, this is good for the Mozilla foundation.
I for one would like to see an open source video streaming format that works well in all the major browsers. There doesnt seem to be one ATM considering that whereever there is streaming content there is either Quicktime, Real or Windows Media. Perhaps this is an area where open source just cannot compete?
I think coders should be paid for their work.
Fortunately the coders for Firefox disagree with you.