Slashdot Mirror
World Firefox Day
kbrosnan writes "Are you a fan of Firefox? Want to spread the word to a friend who hasn't heard of it yet? If you can convince just one person to switch to Firefox before September 15th, you'll both be immortalized in Firefox 2.0's source code."
How about fixing some bugs, or shrinking that memory footprint. Then you can be immortalized in the code *and* you don't have to be a nuisance to your friends.
...is a good idea, it gets people like us who like firefox, and would secretly like to have their names in the code, to go out and really try to get other prople to use Firefox in a way that costs nothing for them (well, almost nothing). So everyone wins... I'm going to do it now.
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
Firefox has reached sufficient popularity and code maturity that it doesn't need to encourage evangelism. Sure, I use Firefox and I'd recommend it to most Explorer users, and I've already converted those close to me. However, I'm not going to go on a Firefox Crusade as that would stink of zealotry and probably hurt the cause. As other posters have said, Mozilla should put their efforts into bug fixes and usability issues. Yes, I know this isn't a zero-sum game, but we'd all be more likely to recommend Firefox if they could clear up the excessive memory usage 'feature' and the odd keyboard scrolling problem that took me ages to figure out.
Phoenix, Boston, Little Rock, see a pattern?
...as if firefox wasn't already bloated enough! :D
One thing that makes me uncomfortable is being asked to proselytize. If someone wants FF, great. but it is not my job to convince them. I learned a meditation technique and was turned off when the class teachers asked to get my friends to do it. World FF day makes me feel the same way. People can make their own decisions.
San Francisco Photographers
How is that insightful?
Funny perhaps, but not insightful.
The names will be commented out, therefore will not be complied in any binary that sees the light of day.
*** For a better tommorow, change your life today ***
I have no idea how the parent post got modded as "interesting". Or perhaps since it's posted anonymously the person modded his or herself.
This quote is funny because it's retarded: "I am also forced to download kilobytes (megabytes?) of useless information embedded in comments." News flash, this is slashdot. You download useless information embedded in comments every day. And this is one of them!
I gotta hand it to the Firefox team though... They do a good job marketing Firefox. In this day and age, it no longer is enough to have a superior product or have a better mousetrap especially if the competion has the desktop monopolized... every opportunity to spread the word helps.
It's called Marketing. They probably hired an individual or an agency with marketing experience. One ultimate goal of this type of marketing is to get people to use your product and/or "make the switch" over.
Don't worry about the man-hours...this was not a hugely difficult thing to code, and if they didn't outsource it, the programmer involved might even have been glad to break away from his/her normal routine, and perhaps increase the popularity of the project.
Don't worry about the "bloat"...we're talking about plain-text, and while it's potentially a lot, it isn't going to kill RAM usage, create incredible download sizes, or introduce more vulnerabilities into the Firefox suite.
And don't worry about your name being in there, because if you think it's a dumb idea, you're not going to go over and fill it out, and you might even have told friends and family about it already via email (complete with a handy link to the Windows self-extracting installation binary).
But for the world's non-nerdy Internet users, this might catch a few in the "net" (no pun intended). The target audience (of the IE persuasion) may take a "recommendation from a trusted computer-knowing friend" + the attractive-yet-gimmicky-to-nerds chance to be written into "source code" and say "why not, I'll try it!"
There's good (switch to Firefox) and bad (marketing has your email) implications to this. But if you consider the minimal effort this will take to give it a try...this really isn't a bad idea folks.
I'm starting to be afraid that PR is crushing what dare I say, used to be, a geek browser.
Firefox 2.0 gives us, what:
- Builtin spellchecking. Woohoo! I don't want that in Firefox. There is already an extension to do just exactly what this feature does. If someone wants spellchecking, go install the extension. - Firefox friends. I don't want this much evangelisation. I will most likely never look at the thousands of names listed. Why would I? I want a technological masterpiece not a PR one.
This PR push makes my approval towards FF dwindle, what do you think an average people would say? "Geez, it's just a friggin browser...". Separate PR from the browser. That is why spreadfirefox.com, NY time ads and stuff like that aren't totally useless, but as soon as you touch the maximalist geek perfection idea of mine how a browser should be like, you lose the rubber stamp of geek approval.
I want a secure, fast, technically elegant, standards supporting browser with a flexible extension system. That's it. Stop the bloat. Stop the PR. I don't even need extra special tabbing, just some basic one, if it doesn't suck ram like a madman.
I know feature creep is tempting. It gives you a nice feeling that you've implemented something, etc. BUT IT LEADS TO BLOAT. I think inevitably the Netscape -> Mozilla -> Firefox cycle will start again soon. "Hey, let's create a new fast , slim browser and let's call it firebird!" What an innovative idea...
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
If you go to the site it says you can access it from Firefox. If the names are comments, you won't be able to access it from code, because like you said, they won't be compiled. So they have to be part of the code.
ummm - news flash - firefox is a web browser/b>. All they have to do is include a link on the toolbar to a web site, some AJAX, and there is your "interactive access from firefox".
Text can be easily compressed by 80-90% by bzip2. Suppose that there are 100.000 names in the code, and the average length of a name is 15 characters. Counting newlines and comment prefixes (in the form of " * [name here]"), the space taken will be 100000 * (15 + 4) = 1900000 bytes, or 1855 KB. If the file is compressed by 85% then it'll become 278 KB. In comparison, the current Firefox 2.0b1 source tar.bz2 is 32 MB. 278 KB is about 0.8% of that. Hardly significant comparing that you as a Slashdotter probably has a broadband connection.
There are many things to worry about but worrying about wasting bandwidth on names is just rediculous.
Besides, marketing is important! You as a geek may not realize it, but crappy products can be more popular than your oh-so-mighty technically correct ones if the former is marketed better than the latter. While you're screaming on forums about the technical superiority of product B, everybody else is using the 'inferior' product A and couldn't care less what you moan about.
Remember how IE is tied directly into the Windows core? "iexplore.exe" says it's using 32MB, but remember that any memory used by SHDOCVW is being handily rolled into another process like "explorer.exe" or "System." Firefox doesn't live by those shady tactics, and shows you its actual memory usage all in one process.