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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.'"
My work here is dung.
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.
It just needs to be installed with an icon on the desktop at a major computer manufacturer. HP, Dell, Compaq, whatever... All that other stuff is fluff/bloat. Users are not going to install Firefox to find out what it is unless they are either a nerd or have a nerd friend who puts it on.
The mozilla suite was replaced by discrete components because thats what people wanted - AND ITS WORKED.
I hope history doesn't repeat itself, use the KISS principle.
liqbase
That is what happend to Netscape and turned it into a bloated steaming pile that opened the door for Internet Explorer to gobble up all the marketshare in the first place. Please keep it what it is: a simple, elegant, feature-rich BROWSER.
that 10% ins't mainstream.
People who care about open source are already using it - if you want MORE people to adopt it, you need a better reason, or education programs, because the average user dosen't care.
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:
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.)
From the parent comment: "(it's funny users will download spyware at the drop of a hat but get nervous around legit software)"
That's because spyware is marketed in a more effective fashion. Yes, the spyware marketing is a lie, and a destructive lie. However, spyware is marketed as simple. If you investigate Firefox, you will find many, many articles with the general subject: "How to spend a day doing highly technical things that may or may not make Firefox work correctly". For example, Google "Firefox memory". Or, Google "Firefox unstable". Or, "Firefox Crash".
Sure, Firefox has extensions, but they often make Firefox unstable. The Firefox team thinks that it is entirely acceptable to market Firefox extensions, but when the extensions cause Firefox to be unstable, to excuse the instability by saying that it is caused by an extension.
From the Slashdot story: "With the approaching October release of Firefox 2, the team is looking for ways to gain greater mainstream acceptance - and adoption." This is nonsense, in my opinion. Firefox is, once again, the most unstable program in common use. If anyone on the Firefox team actually cared about Firefox acceptance, they would fix the bugs, which were first reported 3 years ago. Note that the main bug report linked is always marked invalid. That's not because anything has been done about the instability of Firefox; it's because people on the Firefox team don't want to, or don't know how to, fix the very, very serious bugs.
The 1.5.0.4 version of Firefox was quite stable, if the Flashblock extension was installed. The 1.5.0.6 version is unstable again. The CPU-hogging bug is back!
This comment posted from a copy of Firefox that is constantly using about 5% of the CPU, even when all pages have been loaded, and there is no active content. That's 2.8% on the way to 70% or more, which will soon make it necessary to close Firefox and reboot Windows XP.
The problem appears to be that Firefox does not allocate enough resources. If you open several Firefox windows and several tabs in each window, and leave them open for several days, or suspend or hibernate your computer a few times, you will find that Firefox has started to hog the CPU.
Apparently everyone on the Firefox team wants to add features or work on easy bugs. Apparently also, browser programmers are not necessarily heavy browser users. People who often do research on the internet are likely to cause Firefox to become unstable.