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.'"
Two things (Score:5, Interesting)
I am running IE 7 RC1 now and it is slow. Dog slow. It makes molasses look like freaking Speedy Gonzales on meth. Firefox starts up quick and doesn't chew up as much CPU time when running.
2) Greasemonkey
If IE 7 has anything like Greasemonkey, I haven't found it.
On the other hand, Firefox still uses up memory like it's got some birthright to as much as it can horde. And it doesn't have as large a viewing area as IE 7.
Re:Keep Mozilla Simple (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunatly no one outside of IT gets this. They want to use one utility to do everything and I mean everything even if it doesn't do anything particularly well.
Take AOL... there biggest selling point is that by paying for the service you get the program suite which does a number of things and provides a number of services that could be had free or for little cost. Non technical people see this as presenting value.
IF you want to market to the computer illiterate public you need to tell them about all the neat stuff you can do to justify taking the risk of downloading something (it's funny users will download spyware at the drop of a hat but get nervous around legit software). Firefox is fine the ay it is but it's biggest selling point is that it is a plain jane browser that can be customised... and that isn't very sexy.
Re:How about the free software aspect? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Keep Mozilla Simple (Score:5, Interesting)
Why not offer a few different builds with pre-installed extensions so that Mom & Pop can just download a version with the features they want?
Re:Bloatware? (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a W2K system at home with only a 1/2 gig of ram and I have never, EVER, had any memory issues. And yes, I do leave my browser open for days on end.
Maybe people should look at things like Flash, Shockwave and extensions for memory leaks rather than complaining it is the browser which is the issue.
Re:Keep Mozilla Simple (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe, and here you're echoing a point in the OP:
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.
The trouble with this is that they effectively killed off the original Mozilla suite because it was getting too bloated, and hence Firefox was born. Now it seems they want to add new cruft into Firefox. I guess it all goes to show that the one thing we learn from history is that nobody ever learns anything from history.
KISS (Score:2, Interesting)
Firefox and usemap (Score:3, Interesting)
Until then, I'll stick with Opera, thanks.
Re:How about the free software aspect? (Score:3, Interesting)