Firefox Community, Sickly Out of Control

darlingbuddy writes "After users started reporting Firefox's 150 million+ downloads, this article mentions why it's a bad move on the community's part. The author writes, "I'm proud of the community that pitched in enough donations for Firefox to get a full-page advertisement in The New York Times print edition, and I'm delighted to see them think of creative ideas for promotion, but reporting total downloads every so often and immaturely degrading Internet Explorer is ridiculous. The thing with these numbers is that they are misleading at best, and the only thing they accomplish is immature fanboyism. It's a fact that Internet Explorer is inferior to Firefox with its extensive collection of extensions and ability to support qualified web standards, but does the community need to resort to using third-class promotional tactics with total downloads number?"

The only relevant measure

[trifish]

The only relevant measurement that matters is the percentage of visitors using Firefox at big sites like google.com. Someone should ask Google to reveal their stats about browser usage among their visitors. Number of downloads is indeed misleading (I downloaded Firefox but don't use it).

Re:I call troll

[LiquidCoooled]

According to the slash tag beta [slashdot.org] thingy, we will be able to identify both articles and comments using our own tags.

Some will have meaning in the system:


We're going to build the next generation of moderation on top of tags. That means we're going to poach your namespace. Some tags will have a substantive effect on the system right from the start (or very soon). Our article tagger will know about tags like "dupe" or "typo". When we roll out tagging on comments, we will teach it "troll" and "informative". These tags can have a meaning in the system. And when you come up with ways of using tags that we haven't anticipated, we will bring them into the system.


Hopefully this will mean we can reduce troll/fud/dupe articles from full items down to identified mini ones or even removed completely.

Back ontopic, I agree with you that this article is complete FUD.

Sloppy statistics is the tool of the devil

[hey!]

incarnate of course in the persons of practicioners of marketing They indeed perform many useful and construction functions, but informing the public in the truest sense of the word is not one of them.

Unfortunately, since the devil makes such free use of out contextless "statistics", the side of the angels cannot forbear to use them as well. In most cases I detest this kind of reasoning, but since we're talking about counteracting one incomplete truth which functions as a lie with an equal and opposite incomplete truth, I'm inclined to give it a pass. A public holding two partial truths is more informed than a public holding only one; a public that is unsure of anything is better informed than a public that is sure of something that is untrue.

Re:I call troll

[Zeinfeld]

Good god, yes. I wish there was some wat to vote down these stories.

I wish that there was a way to eliminate the editors entirely and put everything on autopilot. Let the readers choose the stories, let the readers decide what topics are important.

But this is an example of the good side of having editors. Usually Slashdot is non-stop pumping for open source. It is the Fox News or the Air America of Open Source software. There may have been a point to that stance in the 1990s. Today it gets a little tiresome.

I think that it is a mistake for Firefox to mention IE for the same reason that the Oscars presenters should not have mentioned the word DVD all night [blogspot.com]: running down the competition makes you look cheap and scared.

I never ever mention my competition in an interview. If I am asked a direct question I tell the interviewer the competitor will have to speak for themselves, then I bridge to the positive message I want to get out.

I regularly attend meetings with firefox developers and IE developers in the same room. You would be amazed at how well everyone gets on. If you talk to Linus or any of the people at the center of the successful OSS projects of the past ten years it is amazing how reasonable everyone is in an industry which does not exactly have a reputation for reasonableness.

There are well known ultras of course, but they tend not to write code. I can only think of one well known ultra who produced a significant body of code and that was a long time ago.

Ultras are a problem for every political movement. People think that the way to get attention is to be as extreme and as uncompromising as possible. If you are a libertarian, a leftie, an environmentalist you soon learn how easy it is to play that particular game.

Re:Ordinary users don't know what web standards ar

[Lawmune]

Not so much the development team or Mozilla marketing fanboys but basically a pretentious, self-righteous, deluded few.

When browsing the web, I see "best viewed with Firefox" buttons quite frequently. Every once in awhile, I'll even run into a site that uses a browser detection script that either tells me to switch browsers (I currently use Opera) or deliberately prevents me from reading the content. Luckily, I can mask my browser, but it's still annoying and having to do that prevents accurate browser stats from being collected.

The official (and correct, IMO) stance of the Mozilla Foundation is that they do not support "best viewed with Firefox" buttons. Unfortunately, overenthusiastic fans need to be reminded of this far too often, even on spreadfirefox.com (which I generally think is a good site)

I've written about the "best viewed with" phenomenon here [cjas.org], with a comparative look (using Google) at how many people create sites that are "best viewed with Firefox" versus people who make sites that are "best viewed with Opera".

It could matter less....but doubtful.

[HotBBQ]

Does anyone else here have any idea why any reasonable person would care at all about how Mozilla advertises? I don't care if they say it cures cancer and has been downloaded primarily on Tuesdays between 2:17 PM and 4:52 PM. It's a free web broswer. Some people think it is better than IE. Some people think Joe Dirt drives it to work. In other words, not important.

Media: Sickly out of control

[iabervon]

The Firefox community says plenty of stuff beyond reporting the number of downloads. The Times ad had distinct names of individuals. The Firefox page reports a bunch of important features. However, the media keeps picking up the download count. You can't really blame Mozilla for the press's focus on meaningless statistics.