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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.'"
This might be a real good way for film student to get some real world pratice. Might even land them a job.
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
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Genetically-modified viral marketing...tastes great with chicken!
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
Do not tell me I'll need a Media Player installed because I have Linux media players of all colors installed on my system.
I've seen a crashing Firefox too recently, but most of the time, a plugin was directly involved while loading the page (Java, for example). I must say though, that a plugin shouldn'be able to crash Firefox itself, although it does. Couldn't firefox load the plugin somehow in an new thread which can die anytime it wants?
I hate when I try to resume firefox from sleep (i.e. it's been paged out) and it just hangs (both on Win2k, WInXP). I suspect Java is involved (or some other plugin) but its a nightmare.
/.
I've also had the same problem with Safari; however it just NEVER came back from paging and after 10 minutes I yanked the plug from the wall (I was that pissed off!).
And I hate that Opera has issues displaying
/unhappy with pretty much every browser
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
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 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.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
who would like to know what those "amazing new features and stuff" are?
How much work would it be to get Mozilla to display Open Document Format documents? Presumably it's already got 90% of what is required.
It would be a big boost for the format if anyone with Firefox could read it.
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.
'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.'"
Expose + Goatse, here I come!
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
Mine is stable, except for when an extension which modifies the rendering engine is loaded. Web Developer toolbar, GreaseMonkey, they all cause havoc when closing the browser.
And yes I have submitted a bug report.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
The Firemonger project is also boasting a lot of new features when it releases its FireFox & Thunderbird bundle. Just have a look at the cool new screenshots.
I've been a strong believe in Firefox since day 1 and I'm really glad to see that the browser is constantly making headway. The general rule of thumb is really that if a page isn't showing up right in Firefox, then it was either made by Microsoft or it just wasn't made right (almost the same thing). Firefox has always been rock solid for me and I love it's features. I also think that it's really important that the browser is made cross-platform; what good is the web anyways if everyone can't see it the way it was intended to be seen???
I'm going to go put on my Firefox t-shirt now that my girlfriend got me for my birthday last year ;-)
--Aaron Marks
>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.
I would not minimize thee importance of continuing heroic efforts of memory optimization, which I know they have spent a lot of work on in the past, and hope the continue to pursue fiercely, but here are some points you might consider:
1. "All those tabs" means all those pages active simultaneously. Presumably they are also not trivial pages containing only text, and the more-complex the pages, the more memory they consume.
2. What is the memory for, if not to be used by your active application that you are doing lots of things, opening lots of tabs, in. Would you rather have applications that are unable to use the memory that you have properly to your advantage in your active applications?
3. If you think the memory is really an effect of creeping memory leaks, try using the menu option "bookmark all tabs", closing Firefox, and reopening with the bookmark. This should restore all your tabs, and now go to each page and within a few minutes do something on each page to make sure they are active and see if your memory consumption is anywhere near where it was after 2 hours. If it is, then that would seem to be the memory required to support that many pages simultaneously active and is not some sort of creeping leak.
4. There are any number of tools to profile Mozilla for memory leaks and you can contribute.
5. Try a simpler browser that doesn't do nearly so much as Firefox does, but if the browser doesn't support tabs, do you really think memory consumption will be much less opening that many individual pages in seperate windows?
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'.
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
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.
A 3rd party program to make Firefox work correctly? Why, exactly, do you see this as acceptable? I certainly don't.
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...)
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
1.5 isn't out yet - you, like me, are using an RC. Many extension authors are lazy and will only update their extensions after 1.5 is *really* released.
The Tlog - a technology blog
Mozilla Corporation has revamped the concept of web services. We pride ourselves not only on our feature set, but our newbie-proof administration and user-proof use. The micro-CAE factor is web-enabled. If you architect intra-vertically, you may have to transition super-super-macro-nano-extensibly. What does it really mean to seize "wirelessly"? If all of this may seem dumbfounding to you, that's because it is! The project management factor is interactive. Do you have a plan of action to become innovative? Do you have a plan of action to become blog-based? We always redefine customer-directed branding. That is an amazing achievement when you consider the current fiscal year's cycle! The channels factor can be summed up in one word: intuitive. We have come to know that it is better to brand interactively than to reintermediate magnetically. If all of this may seem discombobulating to you, that's because it is!
The main reason I use Firefox on my Mac over the otherwise pretty good Safari is the adblocker plugin. Not having crap blink in my face on every second site, not having a little bit of text squeezed in between fat columns of ads for stuff I simply don't want, let alone need, has really changed my attitude towards the web in general. There is no way I am ever going back to a browser that doesn't support this feature. If you are thinking about testing Firefox -- get that plugin when you do.
Web Developer toolbar, GreaseMonkey, they all cause havoc when closing the browser.
I used to have a lot of extensions installed on Firefox (it is my primary browser on Win2k) but I think it is what makes it unestable. Nowadays I just have adblock, and I am thinking in changing that for Privoxy.
I think for a "stripped" browser, firefox is quite big on memory (125,468K virtual size, 59,156K private) against a Mozilla.exe with 65,204K virtual size 12,216K private. What is exactly what they "stripped" ?
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
fwiw, they've fixed an issue with the removal of plugins crashing ff. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31602 5#c6
appears to have been a popular issue.
oo
...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.
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.
IE shows me all the tag from just hovering over the image.
What's up with that?
Youre wrong! Opera doesnt have ads anymore.
It's been 100% free and Ad free since version 8.5
For me its just 1 annoying thing about it, it doesnt support rich text editing.
It will in version 9, but thats not coming before Christmas..
You, sir, have just written all you need to procure millions from venture capitalists. Congratulations! I recommend taking the money to buy yourself lots and lots of toys. Don't worry too much about actually putting out a product or generating any revenue. Those two paragraphs are worth MILLIONS!
In the (rare) occasions in which Firefox crashed on my Mac, Session Saver was a great helping hand (I don't use its automatic restore for every startup, just for browser crashes).
Don't know whether it restores data such as server-session-id cookies (which would be needed to salvage this insurance app incident, for example), but having such an option available as a plugin is what made me stick to Firefox in both Windows and Mac OS X.
What I would love to see is an actual television campaign of some sorts, although I know that it is cost prohibitive for them. When I think of Firefox advertisements, what I would love to see is a series of commercials similar to what Apple did. I don't remember the exact commercials, but they had a real person explaining why they switched to a Mac from a PC. Each commercial ending with a link to read about switching over. Granted, I don't use a Mac, but it was a very smart commercial. ;-)
You are in a maze of little twisting passages, all different.
If by free you mean a reference to price, that would be sad. I think you're right—that will almost certainly be the message people use to pitch Firefox. But that message is not unique. Another silly message has been used by the Mozilla Foundation in the past—browser "choice"—when they talk about either Firefox or the Mozilla Suite. This message fails to convince because it is not true.
What separates Firefox (and Mozilla Suite, but nobody is talking about that anymore) from the rest of the popular web browsers is software freedom. Firefox lets users run, inspect, share, and modify the program at any time for any reason. There are many great consequences of software freedom but the freedom itself is what makes the difference and the freedom itself should be celebrated by name. Plenty of proprietary browsers cost the users no money, so being available gratis is no big deal. If all one cares about is price, one has long had the choices of Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera, and Netscape Navigator. But if all one cares about is price, before the Mozilla Suite was available, no popular web browser would give the user software freedom.
The following message is still true, so many years after this essay was written:
I think a marketing drive around Firefox would be a perfect time to introduce users to software freedom, and in so doing, tell users why Firefox matters with a message that is unique, true, and compelling. Let's hope that the Mozilla Foundation's commitment to the Open Source movement is not so strong that they're willing to do as that movement advocates and dispense with talking about software freedom by name and championing software freedom for its own sake.
Digital Citizen
In konqueror, if the flash plugin freezes up, you can kill it and continue browsing the page, just without flash functionality.
It is a well known fact that if you can influence the purchasing decisions of a few dedicated users (enthusiasts) they'll market the product for you for free.
Sometimes its better not to try and sell a complicated product to non-techies who can't/won't understand the product without significant education.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
My question is how the fuck you can make a web site conform to IE, when IE can't even conform to itself?
IE is like Word - different versions, different patch levels, don't work the same. Stuff that works in XP sp2 doesn't work a few months later.
I gave up. Fuck Microsoft. They can't be bothered to fix their crap, I'm not going to be bothered working with it. I code to firefox, and when people tell me something doesn't work, I just tell them "Gee, your browser must have a virus", and to go to getfirefox.com. Tehy ALL buy it. After all, b0rked, virus-laden software is synonymous with Microsoft.
I spent a couple of hours last night checking because someone was saying that a cretai feature wasn't working properly on my site - IE was giving them an "error in line 597" which is a laugh, because there IS NO LINE 597! Once they see that, they become much more receptive to switching browsers.
It took a couple of weeks for someone to complain. Why? Because everyone else has a copy of firefox already on their computer, and is either using it as their main browser, or, when something doesn't work in IE, fires up firefox. This was unheard of a couple of years ago, but its fast becoming the norm.
Don't think Microsoft doesn't know they've lost the browser market. They know. What they want to do is replace the browser as the future platform with .NET, which is another piece of bloatware designed to keep another generation of MCSEs under thrall.
And before you mod this as troll or flamebait - think about it ... why did Microsoft publicly declare that there would be no IE7? Because they don't want the browser to be the next platform, because they don't have a good-enough product, and can't compete, and they know it. That they're now going to produce an IE7 means nothing - the browser is no longer a major part of their long-term survival strategy. They can't lock you in with it, its gone, baby!
Just switch to firefox and get over it, already!
And while you're at it, if you have a domain, throw some firefox banner ads on it. They get more clicks than anything else you can put up there (except banners for free pr0n, of course).
"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 personally (and across 3 or 4 machines over the years...) IE has been decidedly more stable than Opera or FireFox. I've found that visiting lots of image heavy sites wit Opera or FireFox will either crash or become so slow that they need to be restarted. I've never had this problem with IE 5 and newer. In FireFox's defense, though, I haven't updated in a few months, so I cannot say that problem exists today. Once in a great great while, IE will crash if it's been open for several days and I run across flash or a movie file. (I think that's happened a whopping 3 times in the last year.)
That said, neither are so unstable that I won't use them. Opera recovers nicely by bringing the pages I was on back up and FireFox takes considerably longer to give me any trouble. In either case, the browsers have to be open for days at a time. I honestly don't think the stability of either app will cause people to stay with IE.
"Derp de derp."
Well, there is nothing wrong with your css, it should work fine.
This is a incremental reflow bug in Mozilla, see:
http://wargers.org/mozilla/test/renderr.html
This uses a javascript hack to trigger the bug, compare it with javascript turned off.
You can easily circumvent this bug in Mozilla's rendering by instead of using this:
div.center > div {
margin-left:auto;
margin-right:auto;
display: table;
}
use this:
div.center > div {
text-align: center;
}
See here: http://wargers.org/mozilla/test/renderr2.html
This is probably already a known bug of Mozilla.
Simple, succinct, but it glosses over the downside. When I wake up in the morning, I want to shave, brush my teeth, and comb my hair, but integrating all those functions into one utensil wouldn't make for a better morning hygiene experience. A simple BitTorrent client might make sense in Firefox, but personally I want more control than a simple client would give me, especially in Firefox's environment (where the programmers will presumably want to make the experience similar to any other download).
At a minimum, I would want control over maximum download and upload speed, to decide when to stop seeding the file, and to be able to decide whether or not to download individual files within a directory. I just can't see a sane way to do that in Firefox's current download manager, and I can't see why I should want it to try.
I'm not aware of any other browsers that have such a thing integrated, so saying there isn't a reason to use Firefox until you get that particular feature seems a little silly. What are you using?
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
I think this is a really good reason not to use IE
The fact that gaping vulnerabilities like these are found in a closed source browser like IE all the time and yet remain unpatched is one of the most convincing arguments to lead people away from IE.