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.
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?
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.