Firefox Seeks Full Page Ad in New York Times

blakeross writes "Join us over at Spread Firefox as we raise funds for the most ambitious launch campaign in open source history. A portion of each donation will go towards taking out a full-page ad in the New York Times celebrating the release. All donors will be listed in the ad, the signatories of a declaration of independence from a monopolized and stagnant web."

Sheesh...

the signatories of a declaration of independence from a monopolized and stagnant web

That type of hyperbole does nothing to help spread free software. I certainly hope the print-ad doesn't lower itself to these levels.

Re:Sheesh...

All the Ad needs is a "Take back the web" picture and some writing underneath saying "Safer and faster than Internet Explorer" then the URL.

Screw the politics, stick to the facts.

Why not advertize for FREE on Slashdot?

Disguising it as a news story? Oh, wait... Ooops, never mind...

Re:Why not advertize for FREE on Slashdot?

Because everyone on Slashdot already KNOWS about Firefox. They're targeting average Joe who thinks Internet Explorer is "The Internet".

math...

so, a full-page add with the names of all the donors. how do they expect to have anything on that page but people's names? maybe that's what they have in mind, but i would hope for something a little better than

"...all these people use firefox! switch!"

nonetheless, it should be interesting to see...

Portion of the donations

The poster mentioned that a "portion" of each donation will go towards taking out the add. This made me curious as to what the rest of the donation was going towards and I found this in the FAQ.

This effort will fund not just the full-page ad, but also a large portion of other launch-related expenses and thus make an important contribution to the Mozilla Foundation's bottom line.

I also thought it would have been interesting to see a mock-up of what they are intending to submit.

Is Firefox ready?

Firefox will only get a single shot with most users. If they download Firefox and have any problems with it at all they will go back to IE and never consider Firefox again.

Firefox is still gaining ground against IE. It may be better to wait a little longer and let Firefox muture a bit more before trying to convert the general masses with this type of advertising campaign.

Dan East

Re:Is Firefox ready?

If they download Firefox and have any problems with it at all they will go back to IE and never consider Firefox again.

why? Almost ALL people have problems with windows constantly, yet they do not switch to a Mac and never consider Microsoft again...

you overestimate people.

Grassroots Marketing

In this case, the grass roots are doing the marketing...

It's quite ironic, actually incredibly ironic, that a process that is almost entirely driven by word of mouth would aim for promotion using above the line advertising.

Personally, and this is just an opinion, I reckon that money would be better spent on wining and dining journalists and trying to get Firefox on the cover of Times Magazine.

Or, alternatively, try to get Firefox banned for violating obscenity laws. That is usually excellent for publicity.

But a full-page advert? Seems kind of boring.

Mostly go ignored..

How many people are going to look at that and go "why would I use this Firefox 1.0 when I have Internet Explorer* 6

* - replace Internet Explorer with "the internet" for most users.

WSJ would be better

that is read heavy by the business community.

Am I missing something?

Why is a list of names good marketing for Firefox?

I can just see it now...

Firefox browser 1.0 released
Mario "Lightfingers" Frazetti
Dane "the Gimp" Rostenkowski
Michael "Code Monkey" Miller
Peter "Frodo" Fry
etc...

Why the Times?

Why not USA TODAY? If the purpose of the ad is to spread awareness AND educate-USA today or the Wall Street Journal would be a better choice. Not to get into an argument about the political leanings of the paper, the Times readership tends to be more informed and better educated about this topic.

Re:Public needs to change to make the change...

Apart from Slashdot, I can't find a page that doesn't render just fine in Firefox

Ironically enough...

I work in a DoD installation which uses Common Access Cards to sign in to webpages. Some pages require use of the CAC when I bring them up in IE, but let me straight through with FireFox. Then again, FireFox is the only one that warns me that the sites' security certificates are incorrect or obsolete.

For now, I've got our IT guy's blessing on running FireFox on my computer, but if they find out that it bypasses their fancy card-based security system...

Re:Public needs to change to make the change...

BS.

I login to citibank.com at least once a month. I click the "Sign on to"->credit cards button.
I login, pay my bill surf, and leave.
I login to usbank constantly, as well as my local credit union. None bicker about the browser.

Re:Public needs to change to make the change...

The web is definitely stagnant.

Have you seen the amount of scum you find in most http://www.* links? Scum like that only forms on stagnant water.

And much like cream, it always rises to the top.

Re:Public needs to change to make the change...

I can't RTFA (/.'d) but for all but the odd website here or there, I find firefox renders as the author intended. I won't say correctly since I believe in most cases, firefox is rendering correctly, just the author/site deesigner wrote for a broken browser (IE).
I can browse slashdot, do my banking, pay my bills, hit a few of the forums sites I frequent, use several different webmail programs, order flowers for my wife, buy plane tickets, book a rental car, etc. etc. all through Firefox. The odd site that breaks when I browser to it, gets ignored, and I move to the next google result.

Re:Public needs to change to make the change...

Wow, talk about pessimism.

Every single person I've converted to Firefox from IE has been more than pleased. All the techies I know have already converted, and the newbies appreciate Firefox's clean-cut, easy-to-use interface just as much if not more than IE's. It's also been shown by numerous studies across the web that Firefox/Mozilla has sizable market share now, making it force to drive the web. For example, w3Schools reports 17% for October of this year.

In other words, I already see the public making the change you think isn't happening. I also believe that it's only going to get better from here.

The advertisers might want to tone it down a bit..

I've been using Mozilla and later Firefox for quite a while now - I like it - but the bitter partisan political stuff is just a big turn off for many people. If you assault them with all sorts of insults to their PC, their OS, and even the web browser that works at least acceptably well for many of them, they'll probably write it off as some zealous partisan attack.

The people who hate hate hate MS and/or IE have already moved on. I'm sure they'll cheer the ad, but that's a big waste of money.

SFF's site is /.ed right now, and they didn't seem to have the ad up anyways, but I hope it's a bit more subdued than the summary.

Re:Public needs to change to make the change...

Actually, unlike IE, pages render correctly in Firefox, including Slashdot. Just because a site isn't done properly and thus isn't displayed in Firefox as it is IE (which apparently will accept horseshit for HTML), doesn't mean that there is anything wrong with Firefox. I understand that this is not exactly what you implied, but it is a common misconception nonetheless.

On the other hand, there are VERY few pages that display weird in Firefox, with Slashdot being the only prominent example that I can come up with. However, many people are still only developing for IE, which is shit, and thus their pages are shit, and look like shit when rendered correctly in Firefox (though this is rare).

The bottom line is that you can't wait for the web to change. You have to make it change. Go download Firefox [mozilla.org] and at some point when browser usage is no longer 95% IE (and it already is much less on some sites), the web will change.

Re:Public needs to change to make the change...

I know there was that slahdot article recently about malformed HTML crashing browsers, but claiming it crahses every sixth pages is an over exageration of staerring proportions.

I use firefox all the time, and I've not found any actual web page that crashes the 0.9 - 1.0PR versions.

The only page I've found with rendering gliches is Gamespot, that flickers all over the place while loading, but is OK once done. My Slashdot problems have stopped since 1.0PR.

It already can properly render most of the web. Also if a web page is actually broken, there is no way to properly render it. At best you can best guess what maybe it is supposed to be.

Re:Ummmm....

It's called marketing, better something than nothing. If you've got some better ideas send them to the Moz Marketing mailing list.

http://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/marketing-public

Re:Watch out!

It's nice that they're taking out an ad for FireFox, but let me know when they manage to get a full page spread of Samantha Fox

Re:Marketing for Open Source?

The newspaper campaign is not entirely about switching instanatly. Its about 'recognition'.

Next time the executives are playing golf and one of us techies who was lucky to be there mentions Firefox in some offtopic conversation, the exeucutive might respond: "Right. Right. I remember something like that in NYT a couple of weeks ago. Remind me again in the office tomorrow".

And then you know that you have made a breakthrough.
Remember the golden mantra of marketing: Its all about brand recognition.