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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.
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.