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Firefox-Based Start-Up Gets Off The Ground
rudy_wayne writes "ZDNet is reporting that a new version of the Firefox Web browser is coming your way, but not from the Mozilla Foundation. 'When we launch our own services, in about a month or so, we'll be looking to offer the must-have companion to Firefox,' said Bart Decrem, Round Two CEO and a former staffer at the Mozilla Foundation. 'We see tremendous room for innovating on top of the Mozilla and Firefox platform, and we see ourselves as the first company outside of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation that's fully dedicated to serving Firefox users.'
Round Two planned a corporate launch Monday night with the promise of bringing 'a new crop of products and services that will enhance your Firefox experience.'"
But if it's a company, won't there be drawbacks? (Ads, etc...)
1/1, Rakh it up.
Want to bet that this "company" won't be around for long?
These people will find out the hard way that the types of people that thinks FireFox is just the most absolutely, unbelieveable, best thing EVER, are the same types of people that believe they should get everything for free. Good luck trying to get 1 penny out of any of them. So unless they are funded by their mothers and live in their basement, they won't survive for long. It's the harsh reality of going the open source way.
I sincerely hope for thousands of browsers in the market so that you have to code for a standard not for a browser.
is it? it must be if they think browser extensions are going to make money. people aren't going to shell out for things they don't really need.
what's the business plan?
i wish i was but oh well
I RTFA, and don't see how they are providing a new version of Firefox. They're just providing more extensions for it. Also, I have an issue with reporting "to swipe considerable market share from Microsoft." The link in that sentance links to a page that reports Firefox has 8.3% marketshare. When Firefox reaches 20% I'll call it considerable. But 8.3% is small. Personally, I hope they reach 40%+ with other non-IE browsers taking up enough to knock IE under 50%
Free MacMini
... or I missed their business model completely.
While I understand that you may base a business on for instance ZOPE, here I have trouble to imagine how they want to earn from whom.
In a comment to a German version of the note (at best), someone thought they would later consult with respect to mass migration from IE to FF. Maybe.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
This story has no information about the "product" this "company" will soon be selling. It sounds like a company without any outstanding products attempting to get a little advertising. A search for "round two mozilla" on google doesn't seem to find anything either. What gives?
I got on the web when Mosaic was the way to do it. In all that time, I've never bought a single web browser (you could download Netscape for free from their site, yet it was sold in the store). I've never bought a plugin. I've always considered web browsers free. I think most people see the web that way. I don't see how these guys are going to make a profit.
Anything they come up with for Firefox will be copied by the OSS community and offered as a free download.
Good luck
Burn Hollywood Burn
I think it's Round Over for Round Two.
They must be aiming towards OEMs.
Smaller computer makers, who can't get a good deal with Microsoft, would love to be able to customize the browser well beyond what they can do with IE. They must also be considering selling their stuff to the likes of Linspire, who have no problem with including proprietary extensions with their products.
The end-user is way below their radar.
And, if I were them, I would stay away from that layer.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
People will also pay for "fill dirt", or dirt taken from a construction site where they dug a big hole in the building process.
But the thing is, there's a reason that people will pay for dirt or manure or whatever. Dirt and turds have legitimate uses. If you have a big hole in your yard after tearing down the old shed out back, you need some fill dirt to fill in that hole. If you need to fertilize a field, go buy yourself some animal feces. People pay money for these because making enough dirt or crap themselves is prohibitively inconvenient (do you really feel like raising chickens or cows yourself just for their excrement?).
On the other hand, browser extensions - which appear to be all this new company offers - are much easier either to create by oneself or to find a free version that someone else has created. Yes, the usefulness might still be there in some cases, but when you eliminate the prohibitive inconvenience of self-production, it reduces the value of the commodity tremendously.
The only way I can see this company succeeding is if they have a lot of capital available to buy the extensions that other people have created in order to lock down the market, as well as to tie people up in farcical legal battles over patents and copyrights.
Come to think of it, maybe they could hit Microsoft up for some investment prospects.
Like this one. Imagine if AmEx wanted a XUL app for their customers to check their statements etc. etc., but dont want to pay to skill up a dev team to write the XUL app...
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
Oohhh, bandwagon!! Everyone jump on, quick! There's a buck to be made!
Make a corporate-friendly, highly manageable release of Firefox: an MSI installer, so it can be easily deployed via Active Directory; management via Group Policy; default settings that don't make a mess of your roaming profile.
If Round Two did this, I imagine that they could make a decent income from organizations that are tired of IE but want something easier to deploy and maintain than Firefox.
Mozilla bug #74085, comment 113 expresses these shortcomings of Firefox better than I did and provides more information on the above issues.
Isn't there a risk for their company that anything they implement will be replicated by the open source community?
:)
Yes. And that's good. It's called "competition". Something forgotten on desktop computing world
Cesar Cardoso can be found at cesar at zyakannazio dot eti dot br (or at least I believe so)
I think that this is not a big issue, just an announcement that they are planning on doing something. Just a preemptive tactic, probably to generate financing.
As for all the 'End of Microsoft Monopoly', I am not sure this is really a "Good Thing". Yes, the Benevolent Microsoft Monopoly has not been that Benevolent at times, but I view this as the 'Protestant Reformation' for the Consumer IT Service Industry [CITSI] (New useless acronym), where you end up with thousands (actually hundreds) of versions of LINUX because there is always someone who thinks they know better.
In God we trust, all others require data.
Actually, there are various small Pacific islands where bird shit has been a mainstay of the economy for a long time. Due to its isolated location, Tuvalu has been a staging post for migrating birds for an awfully long time, leading to the islands being covered in several feet of bird shit. Over the last decades, this has been mined and sold as fertiliser. Now it's running out, and those .tv domain names are propping up the local economy instead...
Let's wait till release before passing judgement on a product.
.Net, I beg to disagree with your comments. The .Net IDE is substantially robust, and not least because it automates many of the mundane tasks we have gotten used to (e.g. opening/maintaining a db connect, window class, etc.) allowing someone to focus on the real problems at hand.
As for
Indeed. Perhaps they want to emulate bdeonline's work with Black Diamond Firefox.
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
There are far bigger problems with using things like Firefox and Thunderbird in large organisations than just the (mostly phantom) CYA aspect.
As much as I love the apps, I'm considering switching back to IE and Outlook at work, mostly for the following reasons:
Added to all of these are the current lack of tools for the corporate sysadmins to deploy, configure and patch Moz family apps centrally, and avoid changes by lusers who don't know what they're doing that might break their carefully maintained system. Just moving all the profile data from the Windows-standard-that-hardly-anyone-really-uses location to something that fits in with a corporate back-up strategy is likely to be a chore.
Most of these aren't serious problems (if problems at all) for home users or small businesses where things are done informally. In a megacorp, things work differently, and until basics like the above are addressed, I'm afraid Firefox's chance of becoming the preferred browser is approximately negative regardless of any technical and usability advantages it may have over IE.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
> These people are in it to get acquired.
Hired. These people are in it to get hired.
What is there to be acquired when the source code is open?
Seems pretty clear to me that the patch is a derivative work of the original.
It wont be long and Fire Fox will be as bloated as Netscape