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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.'"
Isn't there a risk for their company that anything they implement will be replicated by the open source community?
I sincerely hope for thousands of browsers in the market so that you have to code for a standard not for a browser.
"'a new crop of products and services that will enhance your Firefox experience.'"
;-)
That sounds a lot like Ads and spyware toolbars!
If that happens, I will be returning to IE!
Well his last company, eazel (who developed nautilus) didn't last long either
I hope they have some good ideas for innovations. But if they do, MS will eat them into their `free' browser and subsequently shut down this start up.
i agree with you, not many people are willing to pay a dime for firefox.... and anything that they can add as a feature will be reversed engineered in zero flat, unless they have business specific needs that they meet for other clients, which they very well might *shrug*
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
Now let me get back to my Bonzai Buddy.
Top 10 Reasons To Procrastinate
10.
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
Want to bet that this "company" won't be around for long?
I know that nothing is as easy as getting money from humans. You can sell shit to them and they will buy it. (There is at least one company in Finland which been selling chicken shit for years.)
So, how much money did you want to bet?
... 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)
I know I'm not paying for any of those.
Machine9dotNet
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?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you were looking for an "enhanced" browsing experience, what would you want?
Perhaps if we post some ideas of what we want, this company could do something useful
personally for me, I'd like a button up in the toolbar that when clicked, opens every link in the current window in a new tab.
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
Really? Because I see a huge need in the enterprise arena for some sophisticated permissions in firefox along with a central managemnet application for enterprises who want to deploy firefox. As long as the price is right I think it'd be huge. There are plenty of other things that I can think of that would sell well as additions to firefox's base. And as far as Open Source not being able to make any money... please go tell that to Red Hat and Novell and come back to me when your worth even just 1 thousandth what they are. I hate responding to trolls but sometimes it must be done.
Regards,
Steve
Hey, Got any Chicken Shit? It is really good for the garden, and not so easy to come by any more around here. It is considered such a potent fertilizer that one should not use too much of it, or it will "burn" the roots of your more delicate plants....
With Microsoft expected by many to offer antivirus software for free with windows, could they be beating them to the punch? I know that there are a lot of free antivirus packages (I use AVG myself) but if they can leverage Firefox's large user base then they might be on to something. I personally think that its a bad move to play Microsoft's game, which is effectivly making antivirus software worthless in the market.
Except for enterprise solutions, Symantec and McAffee could be in for a big hit in the personal antivirus protection department. Competition is an engine for innovation, but the most efficient engines for R&D come from within the firms that are actually selling the products and getting the most feeback. Something to think about, perhaps Symantec and Mcafee will continue to innovate and stay ahead of the curve.
Well, now that I opened the can of worms at both ends...proceed
I don't keep a lid on my coffee so when I walk around I look busy -me
How about doing the same with the Segway IT?
That way we could all get a Round Two IT.
Not to say that I agree with that attitude, but it is reality. There has to be someone standing behind the software, so that if some disaster happens, the suit who recommended the app has some CYA ammunition for himself.
All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
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
Funny, I couldn't discern any actual product amidst all that vapor :)
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
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.
Bart Decrem was actually one of the founders/maintainers of SpreadFirefox.com. He left a week ago or so.
Somehow, I don't think this product is targetted towards most geeks. It seems to me that they should be aiming at people who are starting to hear about Firefox. People have heard that Firefox is supposed to solve their security problems and introduce new features to make browsing easy. It's supposed to come with all sorts of cool extentions that you can download and customise your browsing experience.
Most of the cool stuff that geeks do with Firefox is free and easy; we install extensions at a whim, customise the security settings, and tweak about:config to our liking. The problem is, most people find these activties confusing and time consuming.
Extensions: Which one do I choose? How do I know which one has bugs? What do I do if it breaks the browser?
Geeks know that you: a) Try them all! b) Read up on some forums for past experince. c) Backup your settyings and do a quick re-istall!
Well, there you go. People think you need to be a super computer genius to do all of those things.
Perhaps this company could be useful as the AOL of the open source community.
...is get acquired by a large-pocketed firm that sees a demand for Moz coding experience. I mean, come on, do you think Flickr would have survived the next recession on photo sharing? These people are in it to get acquired.
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
Not having an added layer or two of bloated advertising crapware between me and my web browsing.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Why is everyone saying "I'm not paying for that". Unless I RTFA wrong, it doesn't say anything about paying. As far as we know, they could just advertise on the site, as they seem to be a *support* place. I know it's not that likely, but it doesn't say anything about charging.
C17H21NO4
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.
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.
Well, it has, but you have to _read_ the whole article...
;)
Mozilla development ecosystem. While Round Two--formerly known as MozSource--puts the finishing touches on its own products, the company is sponsoring development of several other Firefox extensions.
Ok, what do we have here? Aight, a companys name, even two since it has renamed itself..
These include FlashGot, which lets Firefox work with third-party download managers; Bandwidth Tester, which lets people determine their connection speed; and SwitchProxy, which lets people surf anonymously with Firefox by configuring Firefox to work with multiple Web proxy servers
Yay! Products!!!111!11!
Round Two also said it was supporting StockTicker, TinyURL Creator, Copy Plain Text, Extension Uninstaller, Lorem Ipsum Content Generator, OpenDownload, Open Long URLs, Search Plugins and Secure Password Generator.
w00t? Even more of them! o_O
As for Round Two's own extensions, Decrem said the company was considering antivirus software to integrate with Firefox.
Oops? Future Plans omgwtfbbq!
So, ask again where the content is
And, to give you some more reading...
http://www.google.com/search?q=MozSource
Press Release:
Take Two based startup, Take Three, has just announced that they will be offering innovative enhancements to the community of Take Two users, who are themselves a small subset of the community of Firefox users, who are themselves a small subset of the community of Mozilla based browser users.
Take Three is currently seeking venture funding based on highly optimistic projections of a high percentage of signups from a subset of the Take Two subset of the Firefox subset of the Mozilla user base.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
You mean like this?
A publicly traded company exists solely to make profits for shareholders.
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
Disclaimer: I'm one of the mods on The Extensions Mirror, which is now hosted by RoundTwo.
Folks, from what I have read on their site, RoundTwo is not appealing to geeks. They're not trying to force geeks to pay for stuff that they can get themselves, i.e. extensions and support and the like. I get the impression that they are offering extension support and bundling for corporations which want to adopt Firefox but also want a centralized entity that they can moan at when it doesn't work.
Their stance of 'adopting' extensions and providing infrastructure for the developers to leverage for that purpose is genius, IMO - it gives the extension authors the resources to improve and maintain their extensions, and it gives RoundTwo a direct line to the authors, which makes it far easier to get the author's attention if something is broken, which is critical if they really intend on creating Firefox 'distributions' with extensions bundled in, like what bdeonline is doing with Black Diamond Firefox.
Sure, they've got the usual amount of marketing jargon out there right now, but considering that they've been supporting Mozilla software for a while now, I suspect that this is going to be the core of their business model.
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
Basically, clone Netscape 8's one remarkable feature: Allow Firefox to use the Internet Explorer rendering engine already built into windows. Optionally, of course, and only on webpages chosen by the user. But the mere ability to view a few pages with ActiveX and IE rendering is amazingly helpful for those few sites that still don't work in Gecko.
Don't get me wrong - I love Firefox, and especially the standards compliance and power of the Gecko rendering engine. But if Firefox is to true beat IE, it needs to be strictly superior, or pretty damn close. Firefox has already adopted this method in terms of much of the Firefox interface, but it can go even further. Remove the big reason not to switch, that some sites -- important websites like banks or internal company webpages, not to mention windows update -- just don't work in Firefox. Remove every reason to boot up Internet Explorer.
Those reasons still exist, as demonstrated by the popularity of the simple "IE View" extension. But why make it so I need to bother to keep the IE shortcut on my Desktop, too or install the extension? Not everyone is willing to go to that effort. This one feature, in a simple, easy to use interface (I can't imagine it would be THAT hard to program, as it's already been done many times) would be guarenteed to be astronomically popular and more importantly, USEFUL, to almost every one of the millions of Firefox users.
It's the proven method that Netscape and Microsoft fought the original browser wars with, adding additional features, being matched and then one upped by the competition. It's not glorious and new, but whatever the Gecko/standards evangelicals say, it's absolutely the pragmatic way to do things. Nobody else cares about the philosophical and moral implications of including the option for rendering pages with the engine behind "that evil corporation" or the fact that this could only work on Windows. We just want someting works, and works well.
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.
When was the last time you bought a bottle of water?
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1) add extra step to 3 step busness plan
2) ???
3) profit!
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
It wont be long and Fire Fox will be as bloated as Netscape