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Firefox Commercial Contest
Robbyboy writes "Mozilla announced an advertisment contest for the Firefox web browser, according to Information Week. They are asking Mozilla Fans to send them samples and the winners will receive prizes. The Contest is hosted at the Spread Firefox site" From the article: "Earlier this month, Mozilla launched the first phase of its Firefox Flicks campaign, which was a testimonial Web site in which fans could sing the browser's praise in short videos. To date, several dozen of the amateur clips, which vary widely in quality and have been submitted from more than 20 countries, have been posted on the site."
seriously guys. how do you make something as arcane as auto insurance rates funny? you do it like Geico does. fact is, most people don't find what web browser they're using a terribly fascinating subject either. it might be hard for a lot of slashdotters to swallow, but one of the best ways to get people talking about Firefox is not throwing statistics at them or preaching about open source software. it's proper marketing. this is one of the reasons why Firefox has succeeded reasonably well so far versus, say, Opera. webmasters have 'get firefox' buttons on the bottoms of their web pages. taking it more mainstream would just be easiest, in my opinion, if a bit of humour was thrown in. i can't imagine what exactly it would be, but if you can make car insurance funny, you can make web standards funny too.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
> preaching about open source software
I agree that preaching must be avoided, but not mentioning that it is free software is a false economy.
People who don't value their freedom will let it slip through their fingers. i.e. they will install a bunch of proprietary plug-ins, and over time, Firefox will become a platform for a set of non-free plug-ins for browsing the non-free WWW.
...but the preaching has to be removed. Freedom and community could be mentioned without an explanation, and at least the user would then have the option of investigating for themself.
In business terms, freedom is the software's "unique selling point".
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
I'm going to momentarily set aside the fact that this guy is a total nitwit, and pretend that an enlightened and rational person has raised that objection. Why do people care? Why would anyone spend time shilling for a free product, when doing so cuts into their porn-browsing time? In short, who gives a rat?
To answer the question, look back just a couple of years. IE had around 95% marketshare, despite not having done anything terribly interesting to improve the browser since it killed Netscape. Microsoft wasn't working towards supporting new, useful standards like CSS, XML, SVG, RSS, etc., because the incentives just weren't there. MSHTML was the standard, because there was no market for anything else. Security was awful, but the people who made the software just didn't care. Seriously, how much pride can you take in "doing things the right way," when you know for certain that the people developing for your browser will whine, complain, then find whatever dirty hack it takes to get things looking right on your browser?
Times have changed, and it's thanks in large part to the creation of Firefox and the Evangelical Geek Hordes swarming behind it. IE has lost a good chunk of marketshare, lazy webmasters are starting to understand that their website needs to work on multiple browsers. There is renewed interest in web standards.
Even IE is starting to improve its security and standards-compliance, while adding new features.
Before Firefox arrived, Internet Explorer was well on its way to becoming the MSWeb. Microsoft could decide which standards they thought were relevant to the user experience they wanted us to have, and to what extent they would be implemented. But since this power didn't translate well to revenue streams, they gave us the half-baked, annoying web browsing experience that they couldn't get us to pay for.
So long as alternative browsers have double-digit usage, the web will continue to be a more standards-friendly place. Standards don't sound terribly exciting at first, but they allow for all sorts of exciting niftiness that simply wouldn't be possible under a MS monoculture.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
A recent article elsewhere listed a number of problems reported by several hundred users of 1.5 - many of which I have experienced first hand.
While 1.5 doesn't slow down as quickly as the 1.07 when downloading images off the Net, it DOES slow down eventually and eat up all of Windows' virtual memory. Eventually it starts issuing "picture cannot be displayed due to errors" messages. In other words, severe memory leaks. These were supposed to be fixed in 1,5, but clearly have not been, although some may have been ameliorated somewhat.
It also seems to be slightly less stable than 1.07, with a slightly higher incidence of crashes (still thankfully relatively rare.)
If they start trying to add features to this code base, they'll get a rep for having a crappy browser on a par with IE 5. They need to fix these problems and fix them fast.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Good products need advertising to make them known. I like and use Firefox, but I don't feel I have to push it to anyone even though I consider myself "technically clued-in". When people have problems with eg. malware after surfing in suspicious parts of the web, I tell them about problems with IE and if they ask for alternatives, I might direct them to Firefox. I don't push it to people that have no problems with IE and are not looking for alternatives.
Having ads in mainstream media makes a product more known and makes the product (in some cases at least) more credible to your average consumer. This might make a new population of people that realise that they have a choice and may become interested. For those I am willing to tell that in my experience it's actually a very functional browser.