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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.'"
1) Speed
I am running IE 7 RC1 now and it is slow. Dog slow. It makes molasses look like freaking Speedy Gonzales on meth. Firefox starts up quick and doesn't chew up as much CPU time when running.
2) Greasemonkey
If IE 7 has anything like Greasemonkey, I haven't found it.
On the other hand, Firefox still uses up memory like it's got some birthright to as much as it can horde. And it doesn't have as large a viewing area as IE 7.
I'm guessing people don't care about the 'free' aspect of it, because nobody is used to paying (directly) for Internet Explorer, Netscape, AOL's keywords or anything else that mainstream public use to find their way around the inter-web.
I'll agree with you, except that the largest portion of the market isn't going to enable those functions, or go through the bother of downloading and installing extensions. They'll end up thinking that FF is inferior only because they don't have the ability or knowledge to take full advantage of what it has to offer.
Why not offer a few different builds with pre-installed extensions so that Mom & Pop can just download a version with the features they want?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Firefox is fine the ay it is but it's biggest selling point is that it is a plain jane browser that can be customised... and that isn't very sexy.
Maybe, and here you're echoing a point in the OP:
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.
The trouble with this is that they effectively killed off the original Mozilla suite because it was getting too bloated, and hence Firefox was born. Now it seems they want to add new cruft into Firefox. I guess it all goes to show that the one thing we learn from history is that nobody ever learns anything from history.