Re:FireFox needs a 'killer extension'!
on
Marketing Mozilla
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· Score: 1
I don't know about the killer extension, it seems to me that the fact that FF can be whatever you want it to be is more of a compelling reason to use it. Look at the diversity of the sites and extensions you mentioned, a small portion of what FF is currently capable of. If you have one killer extension that the browser is renowned for, the competition simply copy that one extension and they instantly remove the primary reason people have for switching. Case in point, so much has been made of tabbed browsing in FF, sometimes you'd think that tabbed browsing is pretty much all FF has over IE. Now IE7 will have tabbed browsing and suddenly there's no reason to switch. Far better to have much more targeted uses for specific users, if you ask me (the only problem is getting the message across to those users, of course).
Yes they will lsoe you but they will get a lot of other users instead.
Yes and no... If they implement lots of whizzy new features, they stand to gain a lot of new users, true... however, if they alienate their existing users, who will tell all the potential new users what a great browser it is? Because without some form of marketing (traditional, viral, whatever) no browser will ever displace IE. This is already the case, that until FF started heavily marketing, no other browser had made a dent in the IE share - even with the appalling IE6 as the flagship browser.
That's the point of the article, that FF got so big in the first place because of the passion of its users. Kill that passion and who is going to spread the word? IE will simply go back to winning by default. That's why Mozilla now face a tricky compromise, stuffing in enough new features to win new market share without killing everything that the existing market share like about the browser.
Unfortunately I doubt that would work with the current model. The middle men would just increase the price until that 10-20% was equal to what they're currently earning, which would mean higher prices for everyone. The only way for artists and consumers to win here is to get rid of the middle men, and the internet is a huge asset if that's your goal. Which explains why the middle men are now squirming like crazy and litigating anything that moves.
Beep NO ITS NOT! Ask a BMW driver if you could take their car for a spin because 1) you don't have the money, 2) don't want to buy it because you prefer Lexus. Most likely the BMW driver would tell you to bugger off.
That's an asinine analogy - the two things aren't even vaguely comparable. By driving his physical BMW you are devaluing his property (by adding wear and tear and mileage) and incurring a risk of damage. How does this even begin to compare to making a digital copy, which leaves the original intact and unharmed?
A better analogy would be if you asked the BMW driver if you could use your Super-Duper Cloning Machine to make an exact copy of his car and you drive the copy - but even that isn't entirely accurate as the BMW owner may perceive that the value of his expensive car will go down the more people there are driving it. The opposite seems true for music - the more popular it becomes the more money is generated by the artist. Maybe a better analogy would be if you copied his BMW without his knowledge, in the middle of the night, then the next day, without explaining why, ask him if he feels any better or worse than he did yesterday.
Imagine if Microsoft took this lax attitude to Open Source. Imagine if Microsoft said, "Hey let's borrow that threading code" and not follow the GPL. I am betting you and your brother would be the first in line to demand Steve Ballmer's head! Yet you think its ok to "borrow" movies.
Again this analogy is badly flawed. The reason being that a good percentage of people who download (especially the "hoarders" who just download for the sake of it) argue that they wouldn't have bought the CD anyway, so it has lost the artist no sales. In your analogy, on the other hand, if MS had not "borrowed the code" they would have had to have paid for it (either with cash, or by accepting the GPL). It would be impossible for them to put up a case that they simply wouldn't have included the functionality if it weren't there for the taking - because they would have gone through lengthy business processes identifying that the functionality was required and would generate benefit to the business.
The other difference, of course, is that MS would have taken the code fully intending to make money from it by selling it on, and I don't think even the most hardcore downloader (that is, a downloader who is hardcore, rather than a downloader of hardcore) would condone selling on someone else's work for personal profit (this is what I would define as a true "pirate"). This blatantly does cost the copyright owner a sale (because it proves the person buying the copy was willing to pay some price for it). If, on the other hand, some guy just stuck a chunk of the code into his personal copy of windows to make some tasks at home less onerous, then nobody gets hurt.
I'm all for differences of opinion and I can respect that you have your own opinions on copyright, but if you so strongly believe in what you're saying, at least be prepared to have some valid reasons for saying it. Otherwise you just muddy the waters.
Fans should understand that this is not about them and that it's ok not to like it. If it's done reasonably well we might end up with something better.
I agree totally. The problem is, it won't be done reasonably well, because it can't be done reasonably well without pouring an enormous amount of money into it, and that won't happen because by the time you've got a budget large enough to do the project justice, you could have funded several original projects.
The problem is always going to be the juxtaposition of state of the art space scenes with shaky 60's interior/planet-side scenes. The only way to do this properly would be to CGI the non-space scenes, which would be a total money-sink (probably cheaper to just remake the originals).
I remember when they re-did Red Dwarf with CGI effects, it just didn't sit well at all. Not only did the CGI add nothing to the show, it just served to make the non-CGI parts look dated and shaky and you instantly lost all the charm of the plastic models. No matter how sympathetic the graphics guys are to the original ST, the effect will only be the same as with RD (probably worse, since the show is so much older the differences will be even more pronounced).
Not sure about the US, but over here the police aren't "obliged" to go after anyone. It's entirely down to internal policy whether or not they go after anyone (some forces seem to prosecute everyone, others only go after speeders at certain times or on certain roads, or only if they exceed the limit by X MPH).
Even more so for the likes of RIAA/MPAA - since they aren't even legal bodies enforcing laws, they're wholly private entities bringing civil law suits against users. They can happily pick and choose who they want to sue. The "protection" offered is that of safety in numbers - they RIAA/MPAA can't sue everyone, so if you throw enough users into the mix the proportion who do get sued is statistically tiny. It's a bit like little fish staying in huge groups so that the sharks make less of an impact.
I would guess the reason they don't include the figures is that, as stated, the trends database is currently running off a subset of the main database. Therefore, even if they did throw in the figures, they'd likely still be misleading in relation to search as a whole. By not including any y-axis figures they mitigate this a little - people can't get carried away by numbers if there aren't any, but at the same time it's enough to identify broad trends.
I think it's more like MS is the thorn in Sony's side at the moment, Sony have such a dominant position of the console market. And based on recent behaviour, if I had to choose one to be the winner, I don't think I'd be coming down on the side of Sony.
All MS are doing is helping the Firefox guys to get the browser running and stable under the new Vista OS. That won't make one iota of difference to the "IE required" websites. The reason websites require users to have IE is either because the sites use proprietary technology or they rely on the browser's (poor) implementation of CSS which breaks in other browsers. This co-operation won't fix either of those problems.
I'm glad MS are improving CSS support in IE7, and by the sounds of it it's a hell of a lot better than IE6 (which was worse than IE5.5, how'd they manage that?). However, I don't think it's enough to just say MS are adding the most requested features and they can fix the rest in a future version - they've had six years to get this right.
The problem seems to be that every time they release a new browser, it breaks everything that used to work in their other browsers - IE6 broke stuff for IE5.5, IE7 will break stuff for both of them, and no it seems IE8 will be doing the same to IE7. That is the reason why they need to get this stuff right. We shouldn't have to re-code the entire interweb every time MS releases something new.
If they can't manage to get this working, I'm sure it would be a million times easier to acquire a working browser from elsewhere, add their security to that and rebadge it MS rather than trying to fix IE as it exists now.
Hurrah the parent. If it's not bad enough people excusing their not even bothering to read the summary on the basis of a misleading title, we now have people not even bothering to understand a technically correct title and instead jumping to their own wild conclusions based on their interpretation, then trying to blame the article writer for not predicting that they would misunderstand.
1. I don't know about you, but I personally wouldn't want this kid "filtering" (i.e. reading) my personal emails as a punishment. What's to stop him nuking legitimate mails, or stealing all your personal details?
2. If you can't stretch to RTFA (and let's face it, who can?), at least try and RTFS. He was sending death threats to his former employer, stating that the recipient would die in 7 days... Now if he's somehow making money out of that, not only is he a spammer, he's a prime candidate for joining the RIAA.
The basis for the claim that the car is wholly designed by computer seems to be that it was all created using CAD, etc - no non-computer design processes were employed at all.
For the claim to be true, I imagine it would mean that at no point during the design process did any of the designers pick up a pen and doodle out a solution to a sticky problem, or to quickly compare a couple of different ideas without having to fire up CAD. At no point did they wake up at 2am with that "Eureka" moment and quickly jot down their idea before it went out of their head.
I'm not saying that's not possible, of course, but if it's true then it's very impressive. My job is almost entirely computer based and yet even I have a notepad and pen by me all the time for sketching stuff out quickly, or working on ideas while I'm waiting for stuff to boot, load, deploy, etc. Or is there some kind of input threshold below which you can discount that input - i.e. if less than 5% of the car was designed on paper, are you allowed to say the car was not designed on paper at all?
That's the whole point of places like Slashdot - not necessarily to get there first every time, but to aggregate together a whole bunch of articles that we might find interesting. These days I just don't have the time to track down hundreds of little blogs just so that I can feel like I'm on the bleeding edge of tech news. I'm more than happy to let other people do that for me and read the articles a few days later, all in one place.
Just what I was thinking. Having always driven using my right hand to steer and left hand to switch gears, even the thought of doing it the other way around seems alien (plus, if you ever have to drive without power steering I have to imagine it's a lot more comfortable to use your strong arm for the wheel and your weaker arm for the easy task of gearing) - I don't think I've ever thought "Damn those Americans, they have it so easy with their reverse driving posture!"...
I still don't understand why people claim that you couldn't have a swordfighting game for the Wiimote because people would just flail around. This is easily countered with decent game design, just like button-mashing in fighting games was. Honestly, I don't understand your comment at all, because a limitation on the speed of the in-game sword movement doesn't create a situation where "nothing is happening".
I can see what he means - with a standard controller there is a kind of detachment when the user hits a button and a sword swings, or even when a user moves the analog pad in a certain direction at a certain speed to vary the speed/strength/direction of the on-screen attack. The detachment means the user doesn't instantly notice that the on-screen attack may be slightly differently paced or aimed than their own attack.
Now consider your example - if you have a limitation on the speed of the in-game sword, it's going to be much more noticable if the user swings their wiimote and even a fraction of a second later the sword completes its own arc. Similarly if a player makes a lightning-fast jab with the wiimote and their character executes a painfully slow version on-screen, you lose the instant, rewarding feedback of using the wiimote as a real sword.
Another route may be to mimic the movements and actions of the wiimote on-screen in real time, but implement the fatigue bar the other way round. In other words, you can swing away like a madman and the sword will track your movements and speed, but the on-screen opponent will become faster in relation to you, until you reach a point where your character is exhausted and the opponent is relatively so fast that your attacks have no chance.
This would mean the user can have their instant feedback and make the occasion quick, opportunistic attack, but it would also force them to play more strategically and not wear out their character, to play defensively and conserve energy and look for openings in the opponent's attack. Might work?
Maybe that's why they're so annoyed - perhaps they were consulted and they forgot about the ol' pluton, and now they've gone and made themselves look silly.
One person can be discredited - doubt can be cast on the credentials of ten or even a hundred people. If this really works the way they say it does (and even if their sole, driving motive is to make tons of cash) then why not protect the technology and put the details online so thousands of people can verify its authenticity? I can't think of a better marketing strategy than having the entire physics elite say your theory works but I can think of a few reasons why you might not want that kind of exposure...
You may scoff, but this kind of lark can seriously damage opium dealers' profit margins. Porsches don't grow on trees, you know (but they can grow from the humble poppy).
Go sit around the table of any family where the main bread-winner's business is not making enough money and you'll see the same. The only difference is that everyone else doesn't then receive massive subsidies from the government to keep their failing business ticking over. If the business is failing, get out of it and into something else.
It might actually benefit the economy to not be pouring so much money into a huge sink - sure the result may be some short-term job losses, but more money in circulation will eventually balance that out. The need to heavily subsidise farmers existed in the past, it no longer exists, and while helping out third world farmers might not be top of your list of priorities, if you can do that as a side effect of fixing your own economy, everyone wins.
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I don't know about the killer extension, it seems to me that the fact that FF can be whatever you want it to be is more of a compelling reason to use it. Look at the diversity of the sites and extensions you mentioned, a small portion of what FF is currently capable of. If you have one killer extension that the browser is renowned for, the competition simply copy that one extension and they instantly remove the primary reason people have for switching. Case in point, so much has been made of tabbed browsing in FF, sometimes you'd think that tabbed browsing is pretty much all FF has over IE. Now IE7 will have tabbed browsing and suddenly there's no reason to switch. Far better to have much more targeted uses for specific users, if you ask me (the only problem is getting the message across to those users, of course).
keep it simple or you'll lose me as a fanboy.
Yes they will lsoe you but they will get a lot of other users instead.
Yes and no... If they implement lots of whizzy new features, they stand to gain a lot of new users, true... however, if they alienate their existing users, who will tell all the potential new users what a great browser it is? Because without some form of marketing (traditional, viral, whatever) no browser will ever displace IE. This is already the case, that until FF started heavily marketing, no other browser had made a dent in the IE share - even with the appalling IE6 as the flagship browser.
That's the point of the article, that FF got so big in the first place because of the passion of its users. Kill that passion and who is going to spread the word? IE will simply go back to winning by default. That's why Mozilla now face a tricky compromise, stuffing in enough new features to win new market share without killing everything that the existing market share like about the browser.
Unfortunately I doubt that would work with the current model. The middle men would just increase the price until that 10-20% was equal to what they're currently earning, which would mean higher prices for everyone. The only way for artists and consumers to win here is to get rid of the middle men, and the internet is a huge asset if that's your goal. Which explains why the middle men are now squirming like crazy and litigating anything that moves.
Beep NO ITS NOT! Ask a BMW driver if you could take their car for a spin because 1) you don't have the money, 2) don't want to buy it because you prefer Lexus. Most likely the BMW driver would tell you to bugger off.
That's an asinine analogy - the two things aren't even vaguely comparable. By driving his physical BMW you are devaluing his property (by adding wear and tear and mileage) and incurring a risk of damage. How does this even begin to compare to making a digital copy, which leaves the original intact and unharmed?
A better analogy would be if you asked the BMW driver if you could use your Super-Duper Cloning Machine to make an exact copy of his car and you drive the copy - but even that isn't entirely accurate as the BMW owner may perceive that the value of his expensive car will go down the more people there are driving it. The opposite seems true for music - the more popular it becomes the more money is generated by the artist. Maybe a better analogy would be if you copied his BMW without his knowledge, in the middle of the night, then the next day, without explaining why, ask him if he feels any better or worse than he did yesterday.
Imagine if Microsoft took this lax attitude to Open Source. Imagine if Microsoft said, "Hey let's borrow that threading code" and not follow the GPL. I am betting you and your brother would be the first in line to demand Steve Ballmer's head! Yet you think its ok to "borrow" movies.
Again this analogy is badly flawed. The reason being that a good percentage of people who download (especially the "hoarders" who just download for the sake of it) argue that they wouldn't have bought the CD anyway, so it has lost the artist no sales. In your analogy, on the other hand, if MS had not "borrowed the code" they would have had to have paid for it (either with cash, or by accepting the GPL). It would be impossible for them to put up a case that they simply wouldn't have included the functionality if it weren't there for the taking - because they would have gone through lengthy business processes identifying that the functionality was required and would generate benefit to the business.
The other difference, of course, is that MS would have taken the code fully intending to make money from it by selling it on, and I don't think even the most hardcore downloader (that is, a downloader who is hardcore, rather than a downloader of hardcore) would condone selling on someone else's work for personal profit (this is what I would define as a true "pirate"). This blatantly does cost the copyright owner a sale (because it proves the person buying the copy was willing to pay some price for it). If, on the other hand, some guy just stuck a chunk of the code into his personal copy of windows to make some tasks at home less onerous, then nobody gets hurt.
I'm all for differences of opinion and I can respect that you have your own opinions on copyright, but if you so strongly believe in what you're saying, at least be prepared to have some valid reasons for saying it. Otherwise you just muddy the waters.
Fans should understand that this is not about them and that it's ok not to like it. If it's done reasonably well we might end up with something better.
I agree totally. The problem is, it won't be done reasonably well, because it can't be done reasonably well without pouring an enormous amount of money into it, and that won't happen because by the time you've got a budget large enough to do the project justice, you could have funded several original projects.
The problem is always going to be the juxtaposition of state of the art space scenes with shaky 60's interior/planet-side scenes. The only way to do this properly would be to CGI the non-space scenes, which would be a total money-sink (probably cheaper to just remake the originals).
I remember when they re-did Red Dwarf with CGI effects, it just didn't sit well at all. Not only did the CGI add nothing to the show, it just served to make the non-CGI parts look dated and shaky and you instantly lost all the charm of the plastic models. No matter how sympathetic the graphics guys are to the original ST, the effect will only be the same as with RD (probably worse, since the show is so much older the differences will be even more pronounced).
Not sure about the US, but over here the police aren't "obliged" to go after anyone. It's entirely down to internal policy whether or not they go after anyone (some forces seem to prosecute everyone, others only go after speeders at certain times or on certain roads, or only if they exceed the limit by X MPH).
Even more so for the likes of RIAA/MPAA - since they aren't even legal bodies enforcing laws, they're wholly private entities bringing civil law suits against users. They can happily pick and choose who they want to sue. The "protection" offered is that of safety in numbers - they RIAA/MPAA can't sue everyone, so if you throw enough users into the mix the proportion who do get sued is statistically tiny. It's a bit like little fish staying in huge groups so that the sharks make less of an impact.
Somehow I don't feel at all threatened by the MPAA, the RIAA and the like. I have nothing whatsoever to worry about from them.
Yes, of course, because we all know that if you're doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about.
I would guess the reason they don't include the figures is that, as stated, the trends database is currently running off a subset of the main database. Therefore, even if they did throw in the figures, they'd likely still be misleading in relation to search as a whole. By not including any y-axis figures they mitigate this a little - people can't get carried away by numbers if there aren't any, but at the same time it's enough to identify broad trends.
I think it's more like MS is the thorn in Sony's side at the moment, Sony have such a dominant position of the console market. And based on recent behaviour, if I had to choose one to be the winner, I don't think I'd be coming down on the side of Sony.
All MS are doing is helping the Firefox guys to get the browser running and stable under the new Vista OS. That won't make one iota of difference to the "IE required" websites. The reason websites require users to have IE is either because the sites use proprietary technology or they rely on the browser's (poor) implementation of CSS which breaks in other browsers. This co-operation won't fix either of those problems.
I'm glad MS are improving CSS support in IE7, and by the sounds of it it's a hell of a lot better than IE6 (which was worse than IE5.5, how'd they manage that?). However, I don't think it's enough to just say MS are adding the most requested features and they can fix the rest in a future version - they've had six years to get this right.
The problem seems to be that every time they release a new browser, it breaks everything that used to work in their other browsers - IE6 broke stuff for IE5.5, IE7 will break stuff for both of them, and no it seems IE8 will be doing the same to IE7. That is the reason why they need to get this stuff right. We shouldn't have to re-code the entire interweb every time MS releases something new.
If they can't manage to get this working, I'm sure it would be a million times easier to acquire a working browser from elsewhere, add their security to that and rebadge it MS rather than trying to fix IE as it exists now.
Hurrah the parent. If it's not bad enough people excusing their not even bothering to read the summary on the basis of a misleading title, we now have people not even bothering to understand a technically correct title and instead jumping to their own wild conclusions based on their interpretation, then trying to blame the article writer for not predicting that they would misunderstand.
Just a couple of things...
1. I don't know about you, but I personally wouldn't want this kid "filtering" (i.e. reading) my personal emails as a punishment. What's to stop him nuking legitimate mails, or stealing all your personal details?
2. If you can't stretch to RTFA (and let's face it, who can?), at least try and RTFS. He was sending death threats to his former employer, stating that the recipient would die in 7 days... Now if he's somehow making money out of that, not only is he a spammer, he's a prime candidate for joining the RIAA.
No, it's okay, I saw that too. All you have to do is put your thumb in your mouth and blow, you pop back into your normal shape right away!
Okay, so if we kill them all within six days, the spammers lose. Grab an axe. It's your civic duty.
The basis for the claim that the car is wholly designed by computer seems to be that it was all created using CAD, etc - no non-computer design processes were employed at all.
For the claim to be true, I imagine it would mean that at no point during the design process did any of the designers pick up a pen and doodle out a solution to a sticky problem, or to quickly compare a couple of different ideas without having to fire up CAD. At no point did they wake up at 2am with that "Eureka" moment and quickly jot down their idea before it went out of their head.
I'm not saying that's not possible, of course, but if it's true then it's very impressive. My job is almost entirely computer based and yet even I have a notepad and pen by me all the time for sketching stuff out quickly, or working on ideas while I'm waiting for stuff to boot, load, deploy, etc. Or is there some kind of input threshold below which you can discount that input - i.e. if less than 5% of the car was designed on paper, are you allowed to say the car was not designed on paper at all?
That's the whole point of places like Slashdot - not necessarily to get there first every time, but to aggregate together a whole bunch of articles that we might find interesting. These days I just don't have the time to track down hundreds of little blogs just so that I can feel like I'm on the bleeding edge of tech news. I'm more than happy to let other people do that for me and read the articles a few days later, all in one place.
Just what I was thinking. Having always driven using my right hand to steer and left hand to switch gears, even the thought of doing it the other way around seems alien (plus, if you ever have to drive without power steering I have to imagine it's a lot more comfortable to use your strong arm for the wheel and your weaker arm for the easy task of gearing) - I don't think I've ever thought "Damn those Americans, they have it so easy with their reverse driving posture!"...
I still don't understand why people claim that you couldn't have a swordfighting game for the Wiimote because people would just flail around. This is easily countered with decent game design, just like button-mashing in fighting games was. Honestly, I don't understand your comment at all, because a limitation on the speed of the in-game sword movement doesn't create a situation where "nothing is happening".
I can see what he means - with a standard controller there is a kind of detachment when the user hits a button and a sword swings, or even when a user moves the analog pad in a certain direction at a certain speed to vary the speed/strength/direction of the on-screen attack. The detachment means the user doesn't instantly notice that the on-screen attack may be slightly differently paced or aimed than their own attack.
Now consider your example - if you have a limitation on the speed of the in-game sword, it's going to be much more noticable if the user swings their wiimote and even a fraction of a second later the sword completes its own arc. Similarly if a player makes a lightning-fast jab with the wiimote and their character executes a painfully slow version on-screen, you lose the instant, rewarding feedback of using the wiimote as a real sword.
Another route may be to mimic the movements and actions of the wiimote on-screen in real time, but implement the fatigue bar the other way round. In other words, you can swing away like a madman and the sword will track your movements and speed, but the on-screen opponent will become faster in relation to you, until you reach a point where your character is exhausted and the opponent is relatively so fast that your attacks have no chance.
This would mean the user can have their instant feedback and make the occasion quick, opportunistic attack, but it would also force them to play more strategically and not wear out their character, to play defensively and conserve energy and look for openings in the opponent's attack. Might work?
Maybe that's why they're so annoyed - perhaps they were consulted and they forgot about the ol' pluton, and now they've gone and made themselves look silly.
And if it's free, so much the better.
One person can be discredited - doubt can be cast on the credentials of ten or even a hundred people. If this really works the way they say it does (and even if their sole, driving motive is to make tons of cash) then why not protect the technology and put the details online so thousands of people can verify its authenticity? I can't think of a better marketing strategy than having the entire physics elite say your theory works but I can think of a few reasons why you might not want that kind of exposure...
You may scoff, but this kind of lark can seriously damage opium dealers' profit margins. Porsches don't grow on trees, you know (but they can grow from the humble poppy).
No wonder they switched to OSS. It's great for publicity, but we're screwed in the next invasion...
Go sit around the table of any family where the main bread-winner's business is not making enough money and you'll see the same. The only difference is that everyone else doesn't then receive massive subsidies from the government to keep their failing business ticking over. If the business is failing, get out of it and into something else.
It might actually benefit the economy to not be pouring so much money into a huge sink - sure the result may be some short-term job losses, but more money in circulation will eventually balance that out. The need to heavily subsidise farmers existed in the past, it no longer exists, and while helping out third world farmers might not be top of your list of priorities, if you can do that as a side effect of fixing your own economy, everyone wins.