I guess shelling out big bucks for a New York Times ad is paying off. The New York Times has published an article about Firefox in their technology section, outlining its provenance, its recent rise in fortune, and the competitive landscape of the newly-competitive-again browser wars. (Firefox users can take advantage of the Bugmenot Extension to handle the NYT login).
did the ad do anything to increase the download rate?
probably didnt…
Even if the ad itself didn’t increase the download rate, the publicity generated by the ad does help:
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=firefox+%22new+york+…
Go Firefox! 🙂
probably didnt…
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on what basis do you assume that?. there has been a million downloads after the ads. how do you know what percentage the ad contributed to it?
Firefox is the total ritz, and the Bug-me-not extension is just the icing on the cake. Keep up the good work devs.
What would you expect the NYT to do… Firefox just paid a huge amount of money to publish an ad… Do you think that NYT would bash on FF?
I am a Firefox user, but come on… Be reasonable here… Open your eyes and see the propaganda!
Be reasonable here…
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exactly. do you think everybody else who wrote a positive review got paid too?
Actually, newspapers’ advertising and news organizations are generally kept strictly separate, so my insinuation that it was a payoff was squarely tongue-in-cheek. Additionally, the NYT knows that Firefox isn’t going to be a regular advertiser, unlike, say, Macy’s, so I don’t think they would have much to fear in the way of reprisals from the Firefox team if they were to give a negative review. I mean, come on! Now what did happen, I’m sure, is that all the hoopla about the NYT ad raised the Firefox profile, even among the NYT staff.
It would be nice if they fixed the memory leak,
some bugs with java, and focus on thier own
problems than bashing on someone else all
the time.
It is software, kinda like a used car saleman,
they make all sort of promises, but when it
comes down to service after the sale they
are long gone and nowhere to be found.
I never had any problems with IE in Windows
2000/XP Pro, but then again if you set a
box up correctly and run as a regualar
user the problems don’t happen. Also,
common sense comes in to play here to,
if a Administrator does not lock the
network down, it does not matter what
software, OS, or anything else they
run, it will all be trashed out.
I concur, Firefox 1.0 seems considerably less stable than some of the 0.9x releases, and I’ve experienced more crashes with Firefox than I have the 7.60 Opera prereleases…
Do you really think the New York Times can be bough for the price of a single full-page advertisement? I believe the total cost came to something around US$150,000. I sincerely believe that /if/ the Times can be bribed, that it will take a little bit more than that, and that Microsoft would be quite willing to place some ads of its own to “outbid” Firefox. So, sorry, but your assertion that a lousy (for them, not for me) hundred grand mean much in the scheme of things seems rather incredible to me.
Andreas
Any PR/publicity Firefox gets will be beneficial…
Many people look at Microsoft’s “Internet Explorer” as **THE INTERNET**… and that definitely needs to change before the ‘fox can surpass IE…
Having a full-page newspaper ad for firefox will helps target less technical users… (or even “hobbyists” who don’t know about the product; assuming there are any)….
On a side note, I find Firefox to be *hands-down* the BEST OSS, multi-platform product *ever* released. A BIG -Thank you- to the firefox and mozilla teams; you rock.
They don’t need to bribe anyone.Just follow the headlines from time to time and you will notices millions of people allready have downloaded FF,unless you claim they were bribed too.
Good apps like Firefox,Open Office (and many others) etc are the abassadors of the OSS movement.I hope many apps will follow.Remarkable to see propietary developers embrace some features,looks of equivalent OSS apps.
“The numbers indicate about a 40% spike in downloads following the ad in The New York Times, and it wasn’t a one day wonder. Yesterday over 200,000 people downloaded Firefox, which is extraordinary for a Saturday and, according to Asa, likely the first time that’s happened since the first Saturday after launch.”
http://www.blakeross.com/archives/000277.html
Useless to use this place instead of bugzilla.mozilla.org
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/19/business/yourmoney/19digi.html?ex…
What out for the wrapping and potential white spaces. But here is the article less the soul stealing registration.
The numbers indicate about a 40% spike in downloads following the ad in The New York Times
http://www.blakeross.com/archives/000277.html
…and the competitive landscape of the newly-competitive-again browser wars…
Not wanting to troll, but I must point out that a competitive landscape for browsers has continued to exist from the late 1990’s through to today on platforms other than Windows.
here’s some good PHP code for your websites to advertise Firefox to people who need it.
<?if (eregi(“msie”, $_SERVER[“HTTP_USER_AGENT”])) {?>
<a href=”http://www.getfirefox.com“>
<img src=”http://www.mozilla.org/images/product-firefox.png“ alt=”[Firefox]” />
<?}?>
Blah, OSNews really needs to make the Preview and Submit show up to be the same thing, the above thing looks pretty messed up
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The jist of it is is that the PHP will show the Firefox Button when the client is running IE
On a side note, I find Firefox to be *hands-down* the BEST OSS, multi-platform product *ever* released. A BIG -Thank you- to the firefox and mozilla teams; you rock.
I love firefox and I think that it is probably one of the best, if not the best OSS end user application. GCC is probably the most successful and the best OSS app ever released though. That’s just my opinion.
Useless to use this place instead of bugzilla.mozilla.org
I think the point is people shouldn’t be so zealous about a buggy product. Some of the friends I’ve tried to “convert” (since Opera is a bit beyond their ability to comprehend) have switched back to IE after complaining of Firefox’s instability.
“I think the point is people shouldn’t be so zealous about a buggy product.”
its in no way a buggy product. Nearly all of my company employees (85+) have been using firefox 1.0 around 12 hours each day on a variety of platforms with heavy browsing and it has never crashed or exhibited any bugs. period.
I have submitted about 5 crash reports to bugzilla,
in which in the 1.0 PreView release it did not
happen.
It seems that it has more errors in the 1.0 Final
release than the versions leading up to it.
I hope this is not a sign of things to come,
I have recently went back to Internet Explorer
since the problem has not been resolved.
Tim Reynolds
[email protected]
We have Firefox 1.0 running in 5 labs (~400 machines, 95% WinXP/5% Linux, 10hrs/day) and havent had a single crash.
For people who firefox crashes try to uninstall it and remove directory, configuration files and try to do a fresh install and the bugs would dissapear like miracle. I do this when 1.0 *final* came out and other people had the same problems and do this to solve de problem.
“We have Firefox 1.0 running in 5 labs (~400 machines, 95% WinXP/5% Linux, 10hrs/day) and havent had a single crash.”
No doubt. I’ve no idea what some of these people are doing to their machines to make Firefox crash so often. Only problem I ever had with Firefox was on BeOS, an old version that used to crash whenever you tried to save a bookmark.
The Times gives Firefox a good review, but for me the NYTimes site is the only one I visit regularly where Firefox doesn’t work well. It’s slow, slow, slow. Has anyone else had this experience?
its in no way a buggy product. Nearly all of my company employees (85+) have been using firefox 1.0 around 12 hours each day on a variety of platforms with heavy browsing and it has never crashed or exhibited any bugs. period.
That’s wonderful for you, if true, which I find unlikely considering you are one of the worst trolls I have ever seen on OSnews.
However, there are 200 currently open bugs which result in crashes in Firefox, and 5862 total:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=specific&order…
To say Firefox never crashes or is bug free is incredibly naive…
1. Official MSI distribution and tool for customising via MSTs.
2. Configuration via Group Policy.
3. Fix the damn copy-paste bug that’s been hanging around since Phoenix 0.6. At least half the time I go to copy & paste content either between firefox documents or from firefox to other applications, not only doesn’t the selected text/object get placed in the clipboard, but it also wipes out anything else that might be there. Unfortunately, while this happens frequenty it also appears to be completely random.
No crashes, no slow downs (including NY times), no bad stuff here. Been running since its release. This is a great product.
You can try filing RFE’s in bugzilla.mozilla.org. firefox 1.1 might turn up with these features then.. I know several people who would like that better
Maybe you’re just unlucky. I’ve got Firefox (0.9 through 1.0) running on several machines here, and they haven’t crashed yet. IE has crashed once on me this week already.
As for Firefox becoming mainstream, isn’t it already? I’m not exactly a Mozilla evangelist, but I’ve pointed a few friends at it after their computers were infested by spyware, and they’ve all liked it. Internet Explorer really is an awful piece of crap. It’s hard enough to keep Windows free of spyware and the like, but Internet Explorer just makes it too easy for online miscreants.
I did exactly that, I un-installed it for good.
Sick of the crashes, I have submitted the
crash logs and until they can fix it.
I am DONE with it.
2000 bugs, heck at least Internet Explorer
works and works well.
Many of those bugs were not opened on current Firefox (check the releases – several are on 0.9 releases or the 1.0PR). I haven’t had Firefox 1.0 crash on me yet, running on three systems. 0.9 crashed maybe once. 1.0PR and 1.0rc were a little less stable than either.
heh. And if Internet Explorer had a Bugzilla, you think it’d be empty?
Heck, one of the bugs on the list Bascule posted was basically ‘Firefox crashed while I was browsing the web’. If everyone who’d ever had Internet Explorer crash on them filed a bug in this hypothetical IE Bugzilla, I’m sure that’d get you well over 2,000 bugs right there. More like two million.
I have had all sorts of problems with FireFox 1.0 release, from what I was told by the community they ‘rushed’ out the final release. Hence, the fact there are so many bugs no associated with 1.0 version of FireFox. Being an avid programmer and software expert, I recommend they go fix the present problems before this cart wheel reaches critical mass and comes to a halt.
With my input, I am sure they will resolve these problems, or stop the next release.
JC
I don’t know how these people (you know who I’m talking about) have managed to produce so many bugs from Firefox. I’ve been running it on two Windows and two Linux installs since 0.6 sometime and I don’t recall crashing it yet.
And this is with a bunch of extensions, the Linux installs are compiled here and some pretty tough browsing habits.
Internet Explorer does not work well. It works, until it gets infected with something and won’t let you visit a site any more. We know it doesn’t render HTML properly, or do PNG’s as it should. And it’s been that way for years now.
Give me Firefox, with any bugs it might have. It’s still great.
In fact, I think Firefox is about the only decent computer product I’ve heard anyone recommending recently (“ooh look how pretty this HotBar program is” doesn’t count). It surprises me that the market share’s only at 5% so far.
“I concur, Firefox 1.0 seems considerably less stable than some of the 0.9x releases, and I’ve experienced more crashes with Firefox than I have the 7.60 Opera prereleases…”
Make sure to uninstall Firefox 0.9x before installing 1.0. Import bookmarks, though do *NOT* import other settings.
Yes, this is not ideal. It is the advice that seems to eliminate most of the ‘1.0 is not as stable as [some previous version]’ problems.
Most crashes I have had have been mplayer-plugin related (not really firefox’s fault).
Firefox works great on my machines using XP Pro, Windows 2000, and FC-3. It must be your hardware or something. Have you checked your ram to see if it’s not faulty ?
“Fix the damn copy-paste bug that’s been hanging around since Phoenix 0.6. At least half the time I go to copy & paste content either between firefox documents or from firefox to other applications, not only doesn’t the selected text/object get placed in the clipboard, but it also wipes out anything else that might be there. Unfortunately, while this happens frequenty it also appears to be completely random.
”
Wow, I thought it was just me!! Nice to know I’m not insane
It has bugs, it crashes on occasion. However it’s still lightyears beyond IE.
Of course, Opera is still beyond it but hey, as long as there are alternatives to IE…
The only big gotcha I had was a mis-labeled extension that installed but was meant as a PPC extension.
Apart from that it is fast, modern and stable. I love it.
OK there are some areas that need improving but come on, it is only v1.0 compared to say Opera 7.54 and IE 6.?, so give it some slack.
If the pace of development keeps up it could turn out to be the most used browser – although MS will try their hardest not to let IE slip too much.
They don’t need to bribe anyone.Just follow the headlines from time to time and you will notices millions of people allready have downloaded FF,unless you claim they were bribed too.
They didn’t bribe me, the just paid me one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to download it a million times.
Msft bashes Firefox security:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ptorr/archive/2004/12/20/327511.aspx
I don’t seem to have all those problems that other people are having. I used to get random crashes with releases before 1.0. I haven’t had a random crash since I started using 1.0. As another poster said, mplayerplug-in seems to be the only problem I have and in fact that has been pretty stable for me lately. I don’t ever recall having a copy/paste bug and I’ve been using firefox since 0.5.
To John Cunningham, the self desribed software expert, what “community” told you that Firefox was released early? I don’t remember the “community” rising up to give a statement that Firefox was released too early. From my reading of your statement you are suggesting that the Firefox team released their browser as 1.0 just to eliminate the association of some bugs with pre 1.0 releases. I thought only OSS evangelists were supposed to be conspiracy theorists.
certain “flash” animations in FF can really slow down my 1.8GHz computer a lot, I have seen this discussed before. Are there any good fixes (no removing the flash is IMO NOT a valid fix)?
On a side note, displaying the very same flash animations in IE works perfectly…
They didn’t bribe me, the just paid me one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to download it a million times.
heh