Journal: News & Comment

Blake Ross of the Firefox project at Gnomedex

Permalinks to this entry: individual page or in monthly context. For more material from my journal, visit my home page or the archive.

Blake is going to talk about how Firefox went from zero to 12-15% browser share.

• Okay, if you think Firefox uses too much memory, we know that, we're not talking about that.
• There are a couple of misconceptions about it: is it about sticking it to the man (Bill Gates), or liberating the world from proprietary software?
• No. It's just supposed to be an easy-to-use browser that anyone can work with.
• It was an open source project for the masses—not just scratching our personal itches.
• Wanted to do legwork to make a good product AND to get people to use it.
• What do mom and dad want in their browsing experience?
• Antisocial developers can't build social software.
• Can't do much about the fact that Firefox competes with IE.
• How to motivate earliest users to spread the product?
• Your persoal experience doesn't improve if your friends use Firefox.
• Thought they only had a year before Vista and IE7 came out for the spread to happen.
• Firefox emerged in an open-source culture that, in general, ridicules regular users ("lusers").
• That culture also doesn't like marketing because of its perceived insincerity and dishonesty.
• In 2004, the image of Mozilla was revolutionary socialist realism, which didn't really work for mainstream.
• There were passionate early adopters who weren't developers, whom Firefox needed to bring into the process.
• Spread Firefox was the result.
• Now those users feel like part of the project: buttons, clicks, NYT ad.
• Extensions exist because the basic product doesn't need and shouldn't have those fringe features.
• They also motivate developers to build things.
• The legal arrangement to have a profit-oriented subsidiary was necessary because of partnership corporate income etc.
• How many of the downloads orginated in anti-Microsoft feeling?
• "Take back the web" was definitely about that.
• For the last four years, IE6 was stagnating as viruses and spyware were taking over.
• Don't forget that.
• How can you trust your Internet experience to a company that abandoned you four years ago?
• Firefox Flicks had some very popular videos like "Whee!"
• But those don't convince anyone who isn't already a fan.
• Dave Winer: you're talking about yourself, not about your users.
• How is Firefox going to improve to be there in the long term?
• Could there be a Firefox OS?
• Not looking to scale up to the size of the IE team.
• A bit of an argument with Dave Winer, Blake Ross, and Steve Gillmor, but Chris wisely cut it off on time.

 |