Firefox Seeks Full Page Ad in New York Times 753
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... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
math... (Score:5, Insightful)
"...all these people use firefox! switch!"
nonetheless, it should be interesting to see...
Great work! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Public needs to change to make the change... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Is Firefox ready? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Public needs to change to make the change... (Score:3, Insightful)
After all, the W3C standards are effectively recommendations. We're all using something that isn't fully-conformant. So it's really up to the Firefox team to put together something that can properly interpret what's out there rather than to wait for what's out there to become perfect or at least not crash their browser at every sixth page.
Grassroots Marketing (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
For the computer illiterate (Score:3, Insightful)
MS IE has had its day in the sun... (Score:1, Insightful)
I have also been using Internet Explorer since about 1996, when it came pre-loaded on a computer I bought. I found it to be adequate, and certainly seemed to be on the cutting edge (anybody remember "push technology"?). But increasingly over time it came to be an annoyance, and may represent the worst of what Microsoft is accused of: arrogance (openly flaunting internet standards and creating new ones on its own), monopolistic aggression (folding IE into Windows, virtually destroying the independent browser market overnight), and outright carelessness (creating a browser with a seemingly endless number of security holes). IE is relatively slow and clunky, has a sub-par user interface, and seems to be an ideal breeding ground for adware, malware, spyware, worms, you name it.
Great Idea (Score:1, Insightful)
kudos!
Re:Sheesh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Screw the politics, stick to the facts.
Mostly go ignored.. (Score:5, Insightful)
* - replace Internet Explorer with "the internet" for most users.
The advertisers might want to tone it down a bit.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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
WSJ would be better (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Public needs to change to make the change... (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Public needs to change to make the change... (Score:5, Insightful)
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... (Score:3, Insightful)
It has to be said, mod redundant if you want. (Score:4, Insightful)
Why the Times? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How much? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:there are lot of pages.. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:OT: About your sig (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Slashdot not Adage? (Score:3, Insightful)
However, seeing as many
Not to be off-topic but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sheesh... (Score:3, Insightful)
yet they complain that they get mysterious popups and computer slowdowns they don't want.
Re:Is Firefox ready? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:For the computer illiterate (Score:2, Insightful)
Although people are aware there are security problems due to news reports in the mass media, they are rarely attributed to Internet Explorer vulnerabilities. Usually the culprit is a "dangerous worm" or it sometimes gets as specific as "Windows".
The ad isn't going to change any minds unless it plainly spells out in plain language the dangers inherent in Internet Explorer. It might be helpful to provide a URL to a site which exploits some of these vulnerabilities, as well as provide a download link for Firefox.
Unfortunately, without the capacity for centralized management, corporate IT will stick to IE, and that's a least as big of a problem to get Firefox implemented as lack of brand recognition.
Stagnant browser? Idiocy at its finest, eh (Score:3, Insightful)
Now viruses, buffer overflows, bad security design, ok, IE is guilty as charged of those. But stagnant? Here I was thinking that's a damn good thing.
It reeks of the old dot-com thinking that surfing the web should be "an experience", or other such bullshit. Except while everyone wanted to _offer_ some unique experience, but noone wanted to _have_ it. Even the very same PHBs that preached about how their site will be an unique experience, you never heard them say "I visit this other site daily for the unique flashing hard-to-navigate experience."
Noone really wants a web page to be a unique life-changing experience, and noone really wants a browser that is more than a window into the web.
And in that picture, you really don't need more than the current browsers offer. They already do their job just fine, and the plethora of sites are doing a fine job with those browser features already. And whatever job they don't do directly, there are plugins for that. Time to move on already.
Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
The percentage of all web sites that are designed for Internet Explorer's bugs is tiny and shrinking. Serious companies that depend on their websites for business (banks, Amazon, online stockbrokers) got the message long ago; I haven't found a website that I need that I can't use with Mozilla or Firefox, in quite a long time.
Cutting-edge web designers, like Eric Meyer, have been leading the way to standards-based pages for years.
Is Firefox ready? Yes, but the old web isn't! (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
That's correct, but if we don't try to change that, it'll remain like that forever. If more people are aware of Firefox and actually using it for their daily webbrowising experience, it'll lead to more open-standards complient pages and more awareness of what open-standards mean: no single vendor is able to lock you into their proprietary tools.
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.
Firefox won't ever "muture" to the point of supporting the old IE proprietary "standards of on e vendor alone", so it won't ever handle old pages designed specifically for IE quite right.
So please, don't come with this "let's wait and see" while Microsoft tries to lock the web with XAML and other sickness...
The time is now to change that. We have a kick-ass modern, slick web browser which is open-standards compliant and comes shock-full of great usability appliances and is also secretely comes with a fine smart-client technology which futurely will see much better use: XUL GUIs.
Re:Public needs to change to make the change... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the wrong market. (Score:4, Insightful)
The advert should be in computer magazines frequented by "power users" and/or windows administrators. Actually, this is also the market that the Linux distributions should be pointing at, there's no point trying to sell or even give Linux to end users, they don't understand what it does.
Re:Public needs to change to make the change... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wow nice incenvitve. (Score:4, Insightful)
And other serious journalists? They often read the New York Times too.
As for the question of how to design and present this ad, and whether Firefox is ready for this ad, I am less certain. I love Firefox, but it still misrenders my favorite Internet time-suck, Slashdot. This is a pretty major and obvious rendering bug, and the stubborn-ass Mozilla people seem to think that this or it's dependencies shouldn't be listed as an Aviary-1.0 blocker. Utterly inconceivable - and yes, that word does mean what I think it means. How can I recommend a browser to my friends, family, and now the entire Western world that I still find annoying to use on a daily basis and whose drivers refuse to acknowledge a critical 1.0 bug?
Furthermore, what is this shit about putting everybody's name in the NY Times? Nobody wants to see an ad with a thousand names across the bottom. If you want to put names on it, put some names and quotes that will at least sound like they have credibility to the generally-intelligent-but-non-technical-elite audience. This sounds like an ego exercise instead of a real advertising campaign. I don't want MY name on a tiny corner of a full page ad, I'd rather just have an acknowledgement somewhere on the Mozilla.org webpage thanking me for supporting their launch. Furthermore, if I am helping finance this launch, I want to see what I'm buying. Show me the money... err.. the ad copy, and I'll consider helping to fund it. I sure hope if you are going to put this much money into it, you did actually get somebody who understands how to design impactful print ads for this audience to design it, right? Right?
this is why you fail (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ironically enough... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Is Firefox ready? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's of questionable legality. If it isn't right now, it will be made illegal in the future, because it undermines the industry's DRM efforts.
We need open content in open formats. Content that you can legally view on your computer, no matter what software the computer is running. We don't need content that can be viewed only because law enforcement, copyright holders, and patent owners seem to look the other way.
Re:For the computer illiterate (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Public needs to change to make the change... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, first off, the notion that the underdog that actually complies with standards is somehow the badguy is completely misguided. It's IE that doesn't conform to the standards, and contrary to many MS'ers, the standards are not measured by who's winning the marketshare battle.
Secondly, install Firefox and use it exclusively on a fresh, patched XP box and then come back and tell me about how the Mozilla team needs to learn more about Spyware.
Re:Portion of the donations (Score:2, Insightful)
I quick whois of the domain shows it's not owned or hosted on the Mozilla servers, so it just makes me suspicious...
Re:It's the wrong market. (Score:2, Insightful)
After all, it seems that most of them have no problem installing p2p tools (for example).
Re:Is Firefox ready? (Score:3, Insightful)
My primary machine can't run Firefox 1.0PR. Previous versions of Firefox ran, but were extremely unreliable, and 1.0PR won't even start up - Yes, I've nuked my profile, etc... It's some sort of compatibility issue. I've had similar problems with Firefox on other machines, albeit rarely. Mozilla Suite still works fine, however, so I use that.
So, my point? I think Firefox might not be ready for a marketing campaign like this. It might be wise to wait until reaching maybe version 1.1, so that people's first impression is a good one, instead of people getting the same impression about 1.0PR that I got - the impression that it's buggy, incomplete, and hacked together. (I know it's not, but it sure looked that way - I couldn't even close it, it required an End Process in my task manager).
Re:Public needs to change to make the change... (Score:3, Insightful)
Kind of pointless... (Score:3, Insightful)
And most of the ad just be a list of names, which will consume most of the space best used to plug Firefox itself.
A better donation strategy would be:
$100 for your name to be added, limit of N names
$anything if you just want to chip in and help out.
This allows those who don't have $30 to spend to contribute (I'd love to contribute a couple of bucks if it were a well-designed advertisement), while giving the big donaters a reward for their donation without making the ad nothing more than a list of names.
Re:WSJ would be better (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally, I would go with the targeted, simple approach. Make people think about Firefox - forget a list of names, 1.0 version, or the MS monopoly. Communicate for your audience, not for yourself.
I don't get it - Firefox is free.. why advertise?! (Score:0, Insightful)
Why advertise? Especially in the times? Are you guys nuts?
Fools. Try raising money for homless people or those without food or running water. That's more admirable that getting me to switch from IE to FireFox because IE enables Active-X by default..
Geezus.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not.
Donate to both.
Problem solved.
BRILLIANT!!! HERE'S WHY, NO JOKES... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Public needs to change to make the change... (Score:2, Insightful)
IE development is dead, anyway. You can wait all you want.
Does it have update functionalitty now? (Score:3, Insightful)
This has been discussed a couple of times, especially in the latest
Not concerned about the Mac world (Score:3, Insightful)
OTOH, if you really mean by saying that 'Safari already won that battle' is that there's no need to use anything but Safari, then you're thinking down the same path that led us to our current predicament. By the same token, too high a usage rate for Firefox (above 70%) is also a bad thing, but considering that scenario is rather far-fetched, no one worries about it today.
Why the NYT? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:...and adopts other proprietary business practi (Score:3, Insightful)
The "artwork" problem you mention stemmed from the fact that MF is protecting its trademarks. The code itself is free and available, but as you may remember from
Plus, what bug # are you referring to? You link to an attachment, but an attachment means nothing without the discussion and context of the actual bug. Not to mention the attachment has a revision date of June 2004.
Right now, you're making a mountain out of a molehill. Marketing and brand recognition is one of the categories where OSS suffers, simply because everyone is busy coding and resources are scarce. Even recently, most of the major marketing efforts on *behalf of* Linux are coming from major corporations (with cash), such as IBM, Novell, and RedHat. Linus is too busy to be worried about TV ads (rightfully so). It's good to see that Mozilla recognizes this is a weakness, and continues to address it.
Don't forget that because this is all open source, if something really truly bad starts to happen, nothing stops you from branching and starting your own project. See xorg if you need an example.
None? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:...and adopts other proprietary business practi (Score:3, Insightful)
The *real* *question* is whether Firefox is free or open-source?
No, that's not the *real* question. Hate to break it to you, but only a very very tiny minority even worries about that question. Real questions that matter to the success of Mozilla are things like: is it easy to use? Is it standards compliant? Is it easy to install?
This is an example of why copyleft is superior to less-restrictive licenses
I disagree. Oh, you mean, the GPL is superior because is restricts what I can do with the code.
Re:Public needs to change to make the change... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Well, that depends on your goals. If your goals are to conform to standards, congratulations, you've succeeded and the rest is a rather moot point.
If your goal is to take market share away from IE, you might run into problems. I doubt the average Internet user will see a page broken in Firefox, which works (or worked) in IE, and go "damn those Microsoft bitches and their crappy implementation!!" They will likely blame Firefox, even if that's wrong. Or more likely, they simply won't give a crap whose fault it is. They had a browser that worked for them and now they have one that isn't working. Back to IE they go.
We're in our own little slashworld here, where people care about standards and implementations and who's somehow right versus who's somehow wrong. There's nothing wrong with that, but we can't assume it is widely true outside of our little world. Most people are going to use what they perceive works better for them. Pages that only render in IE, or pages that downright REQUIRE IE, might be all the impetus some people need to switch back or avoid switching altogether. Maybe they can be overwhelmed by the other better features (I have no idea how I used the Internet without tabs!), but your task just become more difficult.
Re:Public needs to change to make the change... (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because so many people use IE that doesn't mean we (or Firefox or anyone else) should drop the following of standards just to render broken code like IE does.
Broken code should be rendered broken, so the coders who put up shitty pages realize that their skills are reasonably flawed.
It's the same old MS poliy that everyone can click their way thourgh anything. Joe Anybody sits down, produces 2 megs of frontpage generated crap which is 10 k's in clean source and css, and thinks (s)he's a genius, because IE renderes it ok.
I can but hope the day will finally come when not only linux people and real coders will produce compliant page sources, but everyone. Utopia.
Re:there are lot of pages.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmm....maybe this is a feature? Email is supposed to be plain text....
Re:Sheesh... (Score:2, Insightful)
- Kevin
Re:Sheesh... (Score:3, Insightful)
You enjoy being a trojan magnet?
I presume you see no real benefit to buckling up your seatbelt either.
Re:Am I missing something? (Score:1, Insightful)
Waste of $ for ad. Use the $ on the browser! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Public needs to change to make the change... (Score:1, Insightful)
As we know, computing continues to live by de facto standards. IE is the de facto standard for web browsers, and pages that render in IE must also render in other browsers. The computing industry sets its own standards, for better or for worse. Other industries have real standards that they must apply (ex: basic OBD-II functionality on automotive engine control systems in the US), but that's not how it works in the computing industry.
The goal of the web is not to form all content into a generic standard. The goal is to make information available to the most people and the current way to do that is to support IE. What behavior would you propose for an ideal standards-compliant browser? Not rendering pages that have poor markup? I think some people would love that, but fortunately for the public it will never happen (and should never happen as that would defeat the purpose of the web).
Re:Watch out! (Score:4, Insightful)
before they advertise (Score:3, Insightful)
Safari tabs, OS X user accounts, add-ons. (Score:3, Insightful)
And personally, I use Saft [dnsalias.com] and PithHelmet [culater.net] to address your other concerns.
Re:Safari and Firefox both scale tabs in the same (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's Firefox with 25 tabs open [opinionstick.com] -- each tab only has a favicon listed, which makes it difficult to determine what each tab is. Additionally, you can't access all the tabs at once -- it doesn't even offer a pull-down menu to access tabs past the edge.
Safari manages to keep the visible tabs at a useable size, and provides a simple way to access the rest. Firefox shrinks tabs to the point of uselessness, and prevents you from accessing the overflow.