Marketing Mozilla 263
garzpacho writes "Despite a 10% market share, Firefox isn't quite mainstream, especially with fairly flat growth after its initial explosion. With the approaching October release of Firefox 2, the team is looking for ways to gain greater mainstream acceptance — and adoption. This article and slideshow look at some of the company's unusual marketing efforts to date and speculate on the future. From the article: '[T]o widen its current user base, Mozilla will need more than elaborate marketing events. Because the new version of Internet Explorer is expected to be more competitive with Firefox, Firefox may need to evolve into more than just a browser. Seth Godin, author of several books on the Internet, including Small Is the New Big, says Mozilla needs to incorporate tools like tagging or... [linking] to eBay's Skype calling service that will help keep friends connected. The idea being, the browser becomes more valuable the more your friends use it, so you've got a reason to become a Firefox evangelist. Mozilla isn't giving many details on the soon-to-be-launched Firefox 2, but... there will be new features not found in current browsers.'"
Uhm (Score:3, Informative)
development in the dark? (Score:1, Informative)
Can the author really not realize this is an open-source project and that the developers make it a point to open this project up? This link demonstrates the beauty of open source projects -- here is as much (probably more) as you want to know about the development work.
http://developer.mozilla.org/ [mozilla.org]
Re:Who are they hiding the features from? (Score:5, Informative)
They're not hiding details from anybody, although they're also not widely publicising details to those who aren't interested in trying out pre-release software – the beta 1 release notes [mozilla.org] include a summary of new features, and there's more information for developers [mozilla.org] on how to use the features. (Beta 2 is expected [mozilla.org] for tomorrow and is primarily bug fixes; there won't be any significant changes to the feature set until Firefox 3, which seems to be the real major release.)
From the release notes:
Features like phishing protection were actually announced for IE7 over a year ago, but it seems that Firefox will be the first to ship with them. (Firefox also defaults to an implementation that better protects your privacy than IE [msdn.com], using an automatically-updated blacklist of sites instead of sending every URL you visit to a web service run by a company you may or may not trust.)
Re:Keep it the way it is... but... (Score:1, Informative)