Marketing Mozilla

garzpacho writes "Despite a 10% market share, Firefox isn't quite mainstream, especially with fairly flat growth after its initial explosion. With the approaching October release of Firefox 2, the team is looking for ways to gain greater mainstream acceptance — and adoption. This article and slideshow look at some of the company's unusual marketing efforts to date and speculate on the future. From the article: '[T]o widen its current user base, Mozilla will need more than elaborate marketing events. Because the new version of Internet Explorer is expected to be more competitive with Firefox, Firefox may need to evolve into more than just a browser. Seth Godin, author of several books on the Internet, including Small Is the New Big, says Mozilla needs to incorporate tools like tagging or... [linking] to eBay's Skype calling service that will help keep friends connected. The idea being, the browser becomes more valuable the more your friends use it, so you've got a reason to become a Firefox evangelist. Mozilla isn't giving many details on the soon-to-be-launched Firefox 2, but... there will be new features not found in current browsers.'"

Comments

Uhm

[taskforce]

Mozilla isn't giving many details on the soon-to-be-launched Firefox 2, but Dotzler says there will be new features not found in current browsers.'" Is it just me, or has there been an RC out for FF2 for a while now? And we even have a FF3 alpha, Minefield?

development in the dark?

[harr2969]

"Mozilla isn't giving many details on the soon-to-be-launched Firefox 2"

Can the author really not realize this is an open-source project and that the developers make it a point to open this project up? This link demonstrates the beauty of open source projects -- here is as much (probably more) as you want to know about the development work.

http://developer.mozilla.org/

Re:Who are they hiding the features from?

[Excors]

They're not hiding details from anybody, although they're also not widely publicising details to those who aren't interested in trying out pre-release software – the beta 1 release notes include a summary of new features, and there's more information for developers on how to use the features. (Beta 2 is expected for tomorrow and is primarily bug fixes; there won't be any significant changes to the feature set until Firefox 3, which seems to be the real major release.)

From the release notes:

• Built in Phishing Protection.
• Search suggestions now appear with search history in the search box for Google, Yahoo! and Answers.com
• Changes to tabbed browsing behavior
• Ability to re-open accidentally closed tabs
• Better support for previewing and subscribing to web feeds
• Inline spell checking in text boxes
• Search plugin manager for removing and re-ordering search engines
• New microsummaries feature for bookmarks
• Automatic restoration of your browsing session if there is a crash
• New combined and improved Add-Ons manager for extensions and themes
• New Windows installer based on Nullsoft Scriptable Install System
• Support for JavaScript 1.7
• Support for client-side session and persistent storage
• Extended search plugin format
• Updates to the extension system to provide enhanced security and to allow for easier localization of extensions
• Support for SVG text using svg:textPath

Features like phishing protection were actually announced for IE7 over a year ago, but it seems that Firefox will be the first to ship with them. (Firefox also defaults to an implementation that better protects your privacy than IE, using an automatically-updated blacklist of sites instead of sending every URL you visit to a web service run by a company you may or may not trust.)

Re:Keep it the way it is... but...

[TheWoozle]

So tell them to use the IETab (http://ietab.mozdev.org/) extension. They can set it to use IE just for the intranet sites, and Firefox for everything else. Seamlessly.