On Sunday 23 December 2007, Nicholas Clark wrote: > On Sun, Dec 23, 2007 at 11:39:06AM +0200, Gabor Szabo wrote: > > http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/article.php/3718191 > > > > Can the Perl community learn somthing form them? > > Firefox the browser took off in a way that Mozilla the browser never did?
Yes. Firefox now has about 16% of the browser market, while Mozilla never had more than 5%. > What changed with Firefox? > I can think of several things: 1. Firefox was trimmed down and a lot of extraenous functionality was moved to plugins. This made it easier to learn and use. 2. The plugins mechanism was enhanced to easily allow removing plugins, which I don't recall was possible in SeaMonkey. 3. The profiles dialog at startup was eliminated. Profiles are very useful for the power user (see http://allium.zgp.org/pipermail/linux-elitists/2007-November/012370.html ), but would confuse and annoy a great deal of users. 4. The homepage of Firefox was redesigned to make it easier to use and more marketing-oriented. 5. The spreadfirefox campaign ( http://www.spreadfirefox.com/ ) did several activities to help promote and publicise Firefox. 6. More compatibility was added with MSIE, and they made it easier to import your settings from it. > Also, how much advertising revenue do they get from Google and the like? Quite a lot. A few tens of millions dollars. > And how do they spend it? From what I know, they spend very little of it, at present. They are still looking for ways to spend it properly, and sorting out the legal details. Meanwhile, the money is just accumulating. :-) > And does that help explain their success? > I don't think it does. The success of Firefox started shortly after the departure from AOL, when Mozilla was not sponsored by Google. Most of the rise of Firefox happened in a short time frame, when the Mozilla Foundation recevied only a fraction of the advertising revenue they got from Google. And the spreadfirefox campaign was from what I know, sponsored and done by volunteers, who even pooled the money to sponsor a 250K USD (AFAIR) ad in the New York Times. Regards, Shlomi Fish (who has placed Firefox buttons on several of his sites, and who maintains an anti-MSIE page - http://www.shlomifish.org/no-ie/ ). --------------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED] Homepage: http://www.shlomifish.org/ I'm not an actor - I just play one on T.V.
