Firefox 1.0 New York Times ad (2004)(scribd.com) |
Firefox 1.0 New York Times ad (2004)(scribd.com) |
New York Times runs Firefox ad https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/new-york-tim...
> The first page of the two-page ad--which is twice as large as originally planned--features the Firefox symbol superimposed over the names of the 10,000 donors
My name is somewhere in that mix. I lost the physical newspaper copy at some point in the last 19 years. but it's cool the PDF is still around.
Surprised the getfirefox.com domain from the ad still works!
In the Battle of the Browsers '04, Firefox Aims at Microsoft https://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/15/technology/in-the-battle-...
> the early enthusiasm for the preview version of Firefox is a big reason that Internet Explorer's market share has slipped more than 2.5 percentage points in the last five months, to 92.9 percent at the end of October, its first decline since 1999
Re third party sites, it’s likely getfirefox was actually always Mozilla’s (they would have known about the name first, of course) so maybe I’m thinking of “getfirebird.com” or something else like that. It’s even possible that I just assumed it was third-party because it redirected to the main Mozilla site for the longest time. And it really probably doesn’t matter anyway, just a digression. :)
WHOIS data for firefox.com says it was created in October 1998, four years before the Firefox project was started in 2002, and six years before the 1.0 release in 2004.
WHOIS data for getfirefox.com says it was created in April 2004, seven months before the 1.0 release.
I remember this too. Could have been a rumor but I definitely thought about this when I saw the domain.
This domain is still in my muscle-memory from the Windows days. Just used it yesterday for my wifes laptop reinstall, and I was surprised too it still works.
Looks like the http equivalent is still up with all releases since 0.1! (Not sure what happened between 0.2 and 0.7)
And why do I only get � when I try to copy names in that PDF? It's like it's not real text, makes it impossible to search for names I think should be there.
Sometimes it’s done deliberately to prevent easy copying, though in this case it might be more by accident than by design.
Those German ad campaigns were quite effective, apparently. :D
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/germany/...
The team came out with several releases. In the first release my name was quite prominent in the nose of the fox but on the second or third release I got moved into the big white area. I wonder if those early releases are still available.
https://stackdiary.com/mozilla-usage-decline-from-2022-to-20...
30% of users lost in the last 4+ years and very little work being done on things like the latest CSS properties.
Makes me wonder if Google uses this as a means to pay them less. The last contract was in 2020 to this year I think?
https://www.zdnet.com/article/sources-mozilla-extends-its-go...
Scribd is the Pinterest of PDF files.
You may find other interesting articles linked from here:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski, eg https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html
Netscape Navigator started to render the text of the page and add images when they became available. That was an instant success and everybody was using Netscape in a few days. I don't remember if it also made parallel requests or if that came with a later release.
Netscape also had a bundled email client, which I used as my main client (is Brave doing something like that now? Opera did have one), and a Usenet news reader. Version 2 added the first version of JavaScript.
Then Microsoft started to put some effort into Internet Explorer but it took them at least version 4.0 to reach feature parity. I remember a Microsoft evangelist wondering at an event why everybody was still using Netscape when IE was so good. They didn't say that about IE 3.0. Version 5 was definitely better than Netscape and won't the browser wars. All of that with the help of the behaviors that were subject of the anti trusts trial in the late 90s.
They didn't know it yet but IE 5 made the history because it introduced XMLHttpRequest, that is Ajax calls. That transformed the web more than anything else.
Then IE 6 came, an improvement over IE 5 and nothing happened for a while. Feature wise it was stagnation as Microsoft probably had no competitors to fend off anymore.
Then the early versions of Firefox were released between 2002 and 2003. It had tabs and it was so much faster than IE 6 that whoever could switch, did switch. Corporate users often had to stick to IE 6 because of certifications of web apps, impossibility to install software except what mandated by their IT support, etc, so IE 6 made it through at least another 10 years well, despite new versions from Microsoft.
Mozilla was created by Netscape before selling to AOL so in a way it's a successor of Netscape but I doubt there was some shared code. They extracted Netscape's email client to a different program, Thunderbird.
Then Google Chrome happened and it was faster than Firefox, especially for large JavaScript sites. Not that Firefox was so slow not to be able to use those sites (I kept using Firefox for all those years) but it was faster, it was advertised on Google's search results page so people switched in mass. As a result we had a few years of huge improvements in the speed of JavaScript engines, Chrome, Firefox and every other browser.
I think you know what happened next.
The Firefox suite was written in XUL, which is Electron-like but faster and especially tailored for desktop software. It's fast, but not as fast as native UI. Given the choice, almost everyone went with the speedier UI. At least that was my completely unscientific feeling back then. There's probably something to learn about UX here that very few people care about.
I discovered Opera in 2000 and it always drove me nuts how Firefox was praised for being the first browser with tabs.
Chrome only exists to make more money for Google search, there's no way that Google would risk their (alleged) search monopoly just to prevent a browser monopoly. Google genuinely believes the money they pay Mozilla and Apple is worth it.
For all the different interpretations of history and motivations that happened at that time it was clear to everyone that Microsoft stepped in because of the anti-trust investigations already happening and couldn't afford to have them expand beyond Internet Explorer, which would have definitely happened if the Mac disappeared.
Google's in a much safer place with Chrome (its open-source and other browsers are actively using the engine in the market), but why risk it? It's cheap insurance.
Isn't Safari by existing at whatever market share still a counterexample to Chrome being a monopoly?
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/08/firef...
They still have the funds, but if they continue to get left behind, they will also run out of money eventually with no more market share to profit from.
The only thing firefox has in favour is a) they are not google and slightly more trustworthy b) ad blockers still work (also on mobile)
Not sure what effect these have, but I wonder how many people don't know about Firefox at all.
https://www.mclaren.com/racing/partners/chrome/
And F1 gets hundreds of millions of viewers each year.
The earliest version of getfirefox.com redirects to Mozilla’s Firefox homepage which while it sells the browser does not have a clear Download link. I remember one of the earliest fan-made Firefox sites having a prominent download link as a way of helping people install the browser and switch to Firefox before there was a switch campaign site. https://web.archive.org/web/20040619171818/http://mozilla.or...
At the time the download page looked something like this: https://web.archive.org/web/20040619111818/http://www.mozill... and it was easier to download the old Communicator suite still.
The Firefox.com site obviously gained in popularity in 2004 as Firefox started gaining traction, based on how often The Wayback Machine was crawling it… https://web.archive.org/web/20040601000000*/Firefox.com
The site was transferred by mid-September of 2004: https://web.archive.org/web/20040914022408/http://www.firefo... and later that month a note was added about a different Firefox company: https://web.archive.org/web/20040922075506/http://www.firefo...
I should add, I think the tracking codes I’m remembering were part of https://wiki.mozilla.org/Spreadfirefox_affiliates
> Thanks for the Domain Name, Kevin!
https://web.archive.org/web/20030805180640/http://www.firefo...
It's a shame that all of the other domains are offline now.
Only for Apple users.
Just like how office exists in macos
Except Safari, which they already spend far more money on then Firefox.
And if Google wouldn't pay, some other search engine would. We've seen it before, when Yahoo offered more money than Google.
If the top search engine spot in Firefox would be so valuable, than there would be real bidding wars. $400M/year is nothing when it comes to BigTech. Frankly, anyone could pitch a business plan for an investment bank to get a few billions and outbid Google. If anyone cared... but being the default search engine in a browser that virtually nobody uses isn't worth a lot. But it's a fantastic decoy, if you have nothing better.
(Also, Yahoo offered more when both Firefox and Yahoo still mattered. Which is not the case anymore. The only viable search engine today is Bing, who stopped caring about search, as AI seems to be more lucrative for them. Marginalia is also here, but that guy has less money than MS, prolly)
Safari exists exclusively on iOS and MacOS. On Android, Windows and Linux Chrome has virtually 100% market share. Do you know why Google spends more money on Safari? Because on that platform they want to be the default browser. Safari doesn't depend on Google at all. Not like Firefox.
Firefox dies in 2 minutes once Google decides that it has outlived their usefulness, at which point all their users default to Chrome, where they don't have to pay to be the default search engine. And at the point they would have to pay only Safari, without any negative impact on their search traffic. But as it stands today, they would have no competitor on the vast majority of the consumer computing systems.
The core of my argument is that Google isn't stupid enough to risk their search monopoly just to prevent a browser monopoly, and you haven't even addressed that.
>If the top search engine spot in Firefox would be so valuable, than there would be real bidding wars.
There is a real bidding war, that's where the price Google pays comes from. The reason they don't get more is as you say, virtually no one uses Firefox.
>Also, Yahoo offered more when both Firefox and Yahoo still mattered
Really? In 2015 both Firefox and Yahoo probably had double their current user base, but that would still make them fairly insignificant players. Yahoo search had already been powered by Bing for years.
>Do you know why Google spends more money on Safari?
Because Safari has at least ten times more users than Firefox.
I don't know why you think there needs to be more to this than "a person's default search engine is a valuable commodity that Google will pay even their competitors for."
From my understanding he's very much indie just like Marginalia is.
