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Download Firefox, Feed a Red Panda
KenW writes "Mozilla has launched a new marketing campaign to promote Firefox: adopting red pandas and putting them on live webcams. The company wants to underline the fact that the red panda is the mascot for its open source browser via a new section on its site called Firefox Live. It's clear that Mozilla is trying to think of new ways to promote its browser ahead of the launch of Firefox 4. The company has been struggling recently as Firefox steadily loses share to Google Chrome."
Chrome, god kills another red panda?
Oh wait, they mean feed the Red Panda, not feed me. Pity, they look delicious.
The company has been struggling? It seems to me they're doing very well. Perhaps they've lost 1-2% usage share over the past two years, but Chrome is mostly stealing share from IE, not Firefox. Firefox share is holding steady at between 20 to 30%.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I think one of the reasons Chrome is affecting Firefox is the "Shiny new toy syndrome" and FF lack of willingness to support business needs.
If using Chrome becomes as "cool" as it was when Firefox started, then Firefox will be in trouble.
On the business needs side, Firefox is still stalling on:
-an official MSI package for Windows platform (BTW: If FF MSI cannot auto-update, corps will love it more. It's a control thing...)
-official, built-in, GPO support
-official, built-in automated add-on installation
On the JavaScript side, however, FF is doing pretty good lately: http://arewefastyet.com/
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
The company has been struggling recently as Firefox steadily loses share to Google Chrome.
Near as I can tell, Firefox market share has been at a standstill. Chrome has grown at around the pace IE has dropped. Whether that means users have gone IE -> Chrome or IE -> Firefox and Firefox -> Chrome is a bit open, but they're not losing. However with Chrome in the 10-15% range you have to ask how long they'll keep backing Firefox and just go all out on developing Chrome.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
No, it isn't. The first literal translation of the Chinese glyphs for red panda (in a dialect that doesn't distinguish the red fox from the red panda) to "fire fox" was done long after Firefox came about.
It was called Firefox because the earlier name, Firebird, had too many well-defended trademarks. From Ben Goodger's log in 2004, courtesy of the wayback machine:
"The process began in late November. Mozilla's Chief Architect Brendan Eich had made a commitment to resolve the dispute over Firebird's code name (which was being widely adopted as the browser's actual name) by the 0.8 milestone. Over the span of about 2 weeks a small group at The Mozilla Foundation including Catherine Corre, Bart Decrem, Brendan Eich, Chris Hofmann and myself pored over lists of over two hundred names, many gleaned from the Phoenix to Firebird transition. We reached a point where we had a handful that were the best of that lot, but none of us was entirely satisfied. Searches of the United States Patent and Trademark Office website showed that all of the options we had picked up were potential minefields from a trademark point of view. We refocused our energy on names beginning with "Fire-" in an attempt to preserve the link with the past, and so that we could retain some of our evocative flame imagery.
Ultimately it was Jason Kersey of MozillaZine that came up with the winner. I don't think he was serious with his suggestion, but the naming group liked it well enough. A scan of the USPTO database was positive. We filed for a trademark registration in the United States in December 2003."
Note that from the start of using the name Firefox, the logo has always been of a fox, not a panda. The panda is a backport, possibly to distance themselves from the foxfire culture.
Red panda - eats, shoots, and leaves.
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
Bah, that's probably another urban legend.
I mean like back when they told me that each time I masturbate Jesus kills a kitten. Let me tell you I put some serious effort into it, and the stray cat situation around here seemed entirely unaffected ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I'm sticking with Firefox. I trust the Mozilla Foundation more than I trust Google.
He only needs a kitty or two a day
Ironically, Opera has lost me to Chrome recently, and that after 9 years of being an avid Opera users. I just got sick of seeing too many broken websites (especially AJAX-enabled ones), and too many crashes. As it is, Chrome dev releases crash less on me than Opera stable I've been using.
The other issue is their interaction with the community. Opera does not have a public bug tracker at all - there is a form to fill, and it assigns a ticket number, but there's no way to track what is going on about it after you post it. The only way to know that it's fixed is to track the posts on Opera team blog and grep the changelogs. After seeing major layout and rendering bugs from others go unfixed for several major releases, and some of my minor but exceedingly annoying bugs completely ignored, I figured enough is enough.