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Firefox Community, Sickly Out of Control

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the how-to-promote-yourself dept.

darlingbuddy writes "After users started reporting Firefox's 150 million+ downloads, this article mentions why it's a bad move on the community's part. The author writes, "I'm proud of the community that pitched in enough donations for Firefox to get a full-page advertisement in The New York Times print edition, and I'm delighted to see them think of creative ideas for promotion, but reporting total downloads every so often and immaturely degrading Internet Explorer is ridiculous. The thing with these numbers is that they are misleading at best, and the only thing they accomplish is immature fanboyism. It's a fact that Internet Explorer is inferior to Firefox with its extensive collection of extensions and ability to support qualified web standards, but does the community need to resort to using third-class promotional tactics with total downloads number?"

2 of 339 comments (clear)

  1. The only relevant measure by trifish · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The only relevant measurement that matters is the percentage of visitors using Firefox at big sites like google.com. Someone should ask Google to reveal their stats about browser usage among their visitors. Number of downloads is indeed misleading (I downloaded Firefox but don't use it).

  2. Media: Sickly out of control by iabervon · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The Firefox community says plenty of stuff beyond reporting the number of downloads. The Times ad had distinct names of individuals. The Firefox page reports a bunch of important features. However, the media keeps picking up the download count. You can't really blame Mozilla for the press's focus on meaningless statistics.