Firefox Plans Mass Marketing Drive

Ivan Mark writes "Christopher Beard, the VP of products at Mozilla Corporation, told ZDNet UK on Monday that there is a 'strong likelihood' that Firefox 1.5, the next major version of the open source browser, will be released on 29 November. Beard said they are planning a 'big marketing push.' 'You will have real people telling you about Firefox's features-- what's cool and great,' said Beard. 'People can create the video and upload it to the Mozilla site. The video will then be reviewed and put on our Web site, with a link from their location.'"

Comments

Re:Yeah but will it compensate for this?

[MrP-(at work)]

I dont use firefox (I use opera), but how many times does this happen to people who use IE? I bet a lot more than firefox

For me, marketing will not "cut it!"

[bogaboga]

While I appreciate Firefox's achievements, marketing will not persuade me that much if I still have to tweak it to have sites with streaming media work properly. The popular URL http://zdnet.com.com/1606-2_2-5967129.html comes to mind. Heck, it might not be Firefox's fault but if the other browser on the other platform works, then Firefox should work in a lay man's view.

Do not tell me I'll need a Media Player installed because I have Linux media players of all colors installed on my system.

Firefox, Please Tame Your Memory Hunger

[ServaL]

The 1.5 release has some nice new features, but there is one constant in every release: Firefox gets an augmenting chunk of memory.
After a couple of hours, it is getting some 100 Mb of memory.

And counting.

I hate it to restart with all those tabs open.

To do what, exactly?

[lpangelrob]

Okay. I'm confused.

To an end user, what is there to tout so that they can be 'more convinced' than when the 1.0 marketing first came around? Automatic updates? A better preference menu? Works more with sites than the last time around? Less bugs?

Don't get me wrong — these are good, useful features for those of us intimately familiar with browsers. But I'm not sure what marketing can say to Joe User that they didn't say the first time in order to get him to switch.

Re:Marketing

[Bungopolis]

A good point, but do consider that increasing the user base must surely have a positive effect on development as well. Somebody who uses Firefox is more likely to think about contributing to it than somebody who doesn't -- whether that be simply via bug reporting, plug-in development, or even direct source contribution.

But Marketing Does Work

[dwandy]

Well ... maybe you're the exception then, because there is plenty of evidence that marketing works. People are susceptible to the advertisements that they see, and people do respond to them.
If marketing didn't work, and products really had to stand on their own merits the world would be a whole lot different than it is today.

Personally I think that what the open-source community needs in general terms is more marketing. The closed-source guys get it -- they get it because they didn't win market share by writing a better product (not even better than the other closed-source guy). The closed-source companys won market share by MARKETING.
Plain and simple.
And now that they face a new competitor (open source) they respond in a time-tested manner: marketing.
It should be plain and obvious by now that the steady stream of "articles" (c|net, zdnet etc) are just part of a marketing campaign; hidden under the umbrella of 'news'.

Re:Going to have to do better than that I'm afraid

[Andrewkov]

I disagree .. The average user I talk to is sick of pop-ups, spywayre, browser hijacks and other nusances that come with IE. When I tell them about Firefox, they are interested and some even download it.

Re:Yeah but will it compensate for this?

[dkf]

I must say though, that a plugin shouldn'be able to crash Firefox itself, although it does.

Don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen. Plugins are inherently a potential source of trouble since they're "plugging in" extra code into the browser (which is how they support their functionality, of course) and if they've got a bug the crash can take out the browser itself. While it is possible to write plugins such that virtually all the plugin code actually runs in another process (some plugins work this way) they cannot run entirely in a separate process, and so cannot be totally isolated.

FWIW, this isn't a Firefox issue. It's just a fundamental problem with all plugin-based architectures (Windows is particularly infested with this sort of trouble, given that it's all founded on COM, which is itself the same sort of thing as a plugin arch...)

How about less features...

[bradleyland]

...and more bug fixes. I push Firefox to a lot of my clients, but the infamous memory leak issue pops up on occasion, forcing certain users back to IE. Also, plug-in support for Firefox flat sucks. Plug-ins are the #1 complaint I get from users. The WMP plug-in blows chunks, and there's no readily available alternative that the user can get to without jumping through hoops. To them, it's easier to open IE where it "just works". How about when Firefox randomly deletes a user's bookmarks? They love that too.

It's a great browser. It's got awesome features, and I don't think it lacks in that department, but I do think it needs some polishing if market share is to grow much beyond what it is today.

Re:Yeah but will it compensate for this?

[GetHimHesDifferent]

It's extremely rare to find a site that works better in FF than IE, it's still too common to find the reverse situation. Websites which look better in IE are made by "designers" who are either lazy (pressured?) or ignorant of web standards. They conform to the largest user base only - IE. As IE loses market share to proper browsers (FF, Opera, Safari, Konqueror...), this approach will no longer be good enough. A designer who knows about web standards will likely know that it's better to keep the poor Internet Explorerites happy with IE hacks (as they make up what, 80%?). If they don't then IE visitors will see the website as "broken", when really the website is fine, it's just IE that's broken.