Firefox Plans Mass Marketing Drive

Ivan Mark writes "Christopher Beard, the VP of products at Mozilla Corporation, told ZDNet UK on Monday that there is a 'strong likelihood' that Firefox 1.5, the next major version of the open source browser, will be released on 29 November. Beard said they are planning a 'big marketing push.' 'You will have real people telling you about Firefox's features-- what's cool and great,' said Beard. 'People can create the video and upload it to the Mozilla site. The video will then be reviewed and put on our Web site, with a link from their location.'"

Re:Yeah but will it compensate for this?

[MrP-(at work)]

I dont use firefox (I use opera), but how many times does this happen to people who use IE? I bet a lot more than firefox

For me, marketing will not "cut it!"

[bogaboga]

While I appreciate Firefox's achievements, marketing will not persuade me that much if I still have to tweak it to have sites with streaming media work properly. The popular URL http://zdnet.com.com/1606-2_2-5967129.html [com.com] comes to mind. Heck, it might not be Firefox's fault but if the other browser on the other platform works, then Firefox should work in a lay man's view.

Do not tell me I'll need a Media Player installed because I have Linux media players of all colors installed on my system.

Marketing

[HawkingMattress]

Am i the only one to thing that a corporation like Mozilla should put money into developpers or bounties instead of marketing campaigns ? I don't remember exactly how many cost the Times ad, but it was way too much...
Marketing is a necessary evil for those companies which must have a return on their money. Mozilla just want market shares, and would probably be better served by paying coders to make the browser better instead of hyping it.

Firefox, Please Tame Your Memory Hunger

[ServaL]

The 1.5 release has some nice new features, but there is one constant in every release: Firefox gets an augmenting chunk of memory.
After a couple of hours, it is getting some 100 Mb of memory.

And counting.

I hate it to restart with all those tabs open.

Re:Yeah but will it compensate for this?

[Xenna]

I bet it doesn't. Website designers try to make sure that IE users don't get confronted with browser crashes because of bugs. FF still doesn't have the market position to ensure that they do the same for it.

I'm sure there are lots of bugs in IE, but everyone tries to steer around them.

It's extremely rare to find a site that works better in FF than IE, it's still too common to find the reverse situation.

X.

To do what, exactly?

[lpangelrob]

Okay. I'm confused.

To an end user, what is there to tout so that they can be 'more convinced' than when the 1.0 marketing first came around? Automatic updates? A better preference menu? Works more with sites than the last time around? Less bugs?

Don't get me wrong — these are good, useful features for those of us intimately familiar with browsers. But I'm not sure what marketing can say to Joe User that they didn't say the first time in order to get him to switch.

Re:Marketing

[Bungopolis]

A good point, but do consider that increasing the user base must surely have a positive effect on development as well. Somebody who uses Firefox is more likely to think about contributing to it than somebody who doesn't -- whether that be simply via bug reporting, plug-in development, or even direct source contribution.

But Marketing Does Work

[dwandy]

Well ... maybe you're the exception then, because there is plenty of evidence that marketing works. People are susceptible to the advertisements that they see, and people do respond to them.
If marketing didn't work, and products really had to stand on their own merits the world would be a whole lot different than it is today.

Personally I think that what the open-source community needs in general terms is more marketing. The closed-source guys get it -- they get it because they didn't win market share by writing a better product (not even better than the other closed-source guy). The closed-source companys won market share by MARKETING.
Plain and simple.
And now that they face a new competitor (open source) they respond in a time-tested manner: marketing.
It should be plain and obvious by now that the steady stream of "articles" (c|net [com.com], zdnet [zdnet.com] etc) are just part of a marketing campaign; hidden under the umbrella of 'news'.

Re:Going to have to do better than that I'm afraid

[Andrewkov]

I disagree .. The average user I talk to is sick of pop-ups, spywayre, browser hijacks and other nusances that come with IE. When I tell them about Firefox, they are interested and some even download it.

Why is this acceptable?

[NineNine]

A 3rd party program to make Firefox work correctly? Why, exactly, do you see this as acceptable? I certainly don't.

Re:Yeah but will it compensate for this?

[dkf]

I must say though, that a plugin shouldn'be able to crash Firefox itself, although it does.

Don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen. Plugins are inherently a potential source of trouble since they're "plugging in" extra code into the browser (which is how they support their functionality, of course) and if they've got a bug the crash can take out the browser itself. While it is possible to write plugins such that virtually all the plugin code actually runs in another process (some plugins work this way) they cannot run entirely in a separate process, and so cannot be totally isolated.

FWIW, this isn't a Firefox issue. It's just a fundamental problem with all plugin-based architectures (Windows is particularly infested with this sort of trouble, given that it's all founded on COM, which is itself the same sort of thing as a plugin arch...)

Extensions...

[xtracto]

Web Developer toolbar, GreaseMonkey, they all cause havoc when closing the browser.

I used to have a lot of extensions installed on Firefox (it is my primary browser on Win2k) but I think it is what makes it unestable. Nowadays I just have adblock, and I am thinking in changing that for Privoxy.

I think for a "stripped" browser, firefox is quite big on memory (125,468K virtual size, 59,156K private) against a Mozilla.exe with 65,204K virtual size 12,216K private. What is exactly what they "stripped" ?

Too much hype

[Viol8]

Am I the only one getting tired of all the hypoe surrounding browsers?
"New and cool"? I don't think so. Theres little thats "cool" (unless you've
just returned from a 15 year trip to another planet and have just found out
about the WWW) about a web browser , which is little more than an HTML
renderer with extra bits. Is a new RSS or HTML or Style sheet engine
cool? Yaaaaawwwwn. Hardly. A true 3D holographic browser with touch
interface , now THAT would be cool , but a few new features and bug fixes
on a web browser? Errr , no.

Re:Mod parent up

[trogdor8667]

I love my FireFox. I really do. But I completely agree. Every browser has problems. Internet Explorer causes vulnerabilities, FireFox isn't compatible, Opera has ads, etc etc etc.

I'm a diehard FireFox fan. I have it installed on every computer I touch (except work), and use it 99% of the time. Unfortunately, since I still have to open IE to use anything related to work (Java problems with FireFox), or open IE to listen to musical content (WMP is not compatible with FireFox, yet), I still use IE sometimes. This is honestly why I'm waiting on IE7. From what I've seen, Microsoft is making sincere efforts at becoming the best again. If IE7 is better than FireFox, I'll use it. Otherwise, I'll stick with Firefox. But unfortunately, even once 1.5 comes out, and 7 comes out, we'll still have problems, and neither one will be perfect.

How about less features...

[bradleyland]

...and more bug fixes. I push Firefox to a lot of my clients, but the infamous memory leak [google.com] issue pops up on occasion, forcing certain users back to IE. Also, plug-in support for Firefox flat sucks. Plug-ins are the #1 complaint I get from users. The WMP plug-in blows chunks, and there's no readily available alternative that the user can get to without jumping through hoops. To them, it's easier to open IE where it "just works". How about when Firefox randomly deletes a user's bookmarks? They love that too.

It's a great browser. It's got awesome features, and I don't think it lacks in that department, but I do think it needs some polishing if market share is to grow much beyond what it is today.

Re:Yeah but will it compensate for this?

[GetHimHesDifferent]

It's extremely rare to find a site that works better in FF than IE, it's still too common to find the reverse situation. Websites which look better in IE are made by "designers" who are either lazy (pressured?) or ignorant of web standards. They conform to the largest user base only - IE. As IE loses market share to proper browsers (FF, Opera, Safari, Konqueror...), this approach will no longer be good enough. A designer who knows about web standards will likely know that it's better to keep the poor Internet Explorerites happy with IE hacks (as they make up what, 80%?). If they don't then IE visitors will see the website as "broken", when really the website is fine, it's just IE that's broken.

Re:Qwantz

[Astatine]

I hope I'm remembering this correctly, I _think_ it's the "title" tag I'm thinking of (can't be bothered to go to the effort of checking...)

I used to develop a big scary web application. This web application used title tags to include descriptions of things which were sometimes quite long. After being localized into French they came out very long, and Firefox truncated them. The testers duly filed a bug report. It was assigned to me and I researched and discovered that apparently "title" is meant for short summary text only and should not include an essay; Firefox is behaving correctly. I removed the descriptions from the title tags and put them somewhere else; bug resolved.

Qwantz should use something else instead. I believe "alt" might be considered correct, except the browser doesn't have to display it unless you disable images...

Re:Recently downloaded Opera!

[Anonymous Coward]

At least Firefox is getting security updates, unlike "the other browser" which is full of holes and as such being taken advantage of by phishers. Anyone using Internet Explorer needs a handful of spyware tools close to hand because be assured, your system will be absolutely chock full of spyware as a result of IEs lack of security.

Re:Yeah but will it compensate for this?

[tomhudson]

My question is how the fuck you can make a web site conform to IE, when IE can't even conform to itself?

IE is like Word - different versions, different patch levels, don't work the same. Stuff that works in XP sp2 doesn't work a few months later.

I gave up. Fuck Microsoft. They can't be bothered to fix their crap, I'm not going to be bothered working with it. I code to firefox, and when people tell me something doesn't work, I just tell them "Gee, your browser must have a virus", and to go to getfirefox.com. Tehy ALL buy it. After all, b0rked, virus-laden software is synonymous with Microsoft.

I spent a couple of hours last night checking because someone was saying that a cretai feature wasn't working properly on my site - IE was giving them an "error in line 597" which is a laugh, because there IS NO LINE 597! Once they see that, they become much more receptive to switching browsers.

It took a couple of weeks for someone to complain. Why? Because everyone else has a copy of firefox already on their computer, and is either using it as their main browser, or, when something doesn't work in IE, fires up firefox. This was unheard of a couple of years ago, but its fast becoming the norm.

Don't think Microsoft doesn't know they've lost the browser market. They know. What they want to do is replace the browser as the future platform with .NET, which is another piece of bloatware designed to keep another generation of MCSEs under thrall.

And before you mod this as troll or flamebait - think about it ... why did Microsoft publicly declare that there would be no IE7? Because they don't want the browser to be the next platform, because they don't have a good-enough product, and can't compete, and they know it. That they're now going to produce an IE7 means nothing - the browser is no longer a major part of their long-term survival strategy. They can't lock you in with it, its gone, baby!

Just switch to firefox and get over it, already!

And while you're at it, if you have a domain, throw some firefox banner ads on it. They get more clicks than anything else you can put up there (except banners for free pr0n, of course).

Re:Why is this acceptable?

[Hugonz]

MMMMM I'll bite.

First of all, it is not a "3rd party program", it is an extension. In Firefox, pretty much all beavior is written using ECMAScript and XUL, so everything is in the same level of hierarchy. The issue that this is not included in the mainstream installer is an entirely different matter.

It happens that this one extension gives you the behavior *you* are expecting. And what you expect the browser to do isn't necessarily the right thing.