> 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!
> 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
You mentioned getfirefox.com and while that was and is the official site, I remember a time (maybe?) when that was registered to a third-party fan of Firefox to promote it who handed it over to Mozilla. That said… I cannot find any evidence to back up this claim after a small bit of Google searching, so I might be wrong. I definitely remember a time after the rebranding was announced but before the full 1.0 launch where the moz website didn’t have an easy or obvious landing page for Firefox because so much website energy was still reserved for the open sourced Mozilla communications suite ;-) It always felt a bit new and edgy to recommend Firefox (Phoenix? Firebird?) back in the old days. Weirdly, there was a time when it was new and edgy to recommend Chrome too. Now it’s probably new and edgy to recommend… ad-blocking? Edge Read Aloud? It was easier when IE provided a common enemy and when Chrome wasn’t the only choice for low performance Android devices, or Safari on iOS.
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. :)
If I recall correctly, getfirefox.com was the de-facto site because an individual blogger had owned and been using firefox.com. Mozilla was finally able to acquire the firefox.com domain and for a time, offered a free redirect to the original blog. I also tried to find a link to corroborate the history but was unable to do so, just the WHOIS data below. Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
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.
You might be right. I remember a domain handover, but maybe it was firefox.com rather than getfirefox.com … I vaguely recall the opposite though, that somebody ended up redirecting to the Mozilla site pre-acquisition as a way of promoting Firefox. I vaguely recall knowing that the ownsership transfer took place because suddenly the URL that the domain redirected you to had some extra tracking query parameters added to it.
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...
Wait… based on my previous lookups, I think it was SpreadFirefox.com or something related to that. https://web.archive.org/web/20040929012122/http://www.spread... I think the idea started as a quick webpage to download Firefox and turned into a Mozilla site to promote the browser…? It sounds right though I’ve forgotten some of the details. I definitely remember linking to some site off spreadfirefox.com because it was easier to find the download link there than to find it at the official site…
> Surprised the getfirefox.com domain from the ad still works!
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.
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.
Maybe "not being able to search" is a deliberate choice?
I'm in there, I think. I won't mind showing up that much. Firefox is still OK. But I like how they don't presume I still want to show up there.
In Germany, Firefox was the most commonly used browser by a huge margin until 2016, when it was overtaken by Chrome[1] - it still has 11% market share (20% on the desktop) compared to the ~3% in the US or world-wide.
Those German ad campaigns were quite effective, apparently. :D
You have to consider the target audience. People who read the FAZ are fine with lots of text and probably prefer that style over something flashy. (But I also don't think it is a perfect ad)
Can anyone who was kinda close tell a story about Netscape and Firefox? I was just a kid back then and it would be nice to hear a story from the olden days about the before of Navigator and the after of Firefox
Out of my memory: we were using a number of different browsers in the early 90s, mainly Mosaic. All of them basically shared a little problem: their HTTP call were blocking. So they first downloaded the HTML code, then one image per time (no CSS, no JS back then). And nothing appeared on screen until they finished to download everything.
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 believe the UI of Chrome is noticeably more snappy, which largely contributes to the feeling of it being speedier. The PR was about how their Javascript engine was faster, but I doubt that was what really made any difference for most people.
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’m in there. Paid $100 and even got a printed version that is framed and on the wall in my office.
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.
Google does not want to pay Mozilla less. They don't care about Firefox's market share, it's virtually 0. But in the moment Firefox disappears, Chrome will be undeniably a monopoly. As long as Firefox exists, Google can easily deflect such monopoly claims - they even "encourage and foster" competition on the browser market.
This argument is silly. Google buying the default search is currently being used as evidence in an antitrust case over Google search being a monopoly.
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.
It is all for show. Everything companies do is for show. They will always do what makes them look best and make sure to do all the needed covering-their-butt tactics at the same time as to ensure no problems. Nothing anyone does or says is going to change things much. Even if the company were to break up, I doubt that would hinder them much. Look at other big companies that had to break up, they aren't sweating it out.
If they wouldn't pay Mozilla, Firefox simply wouldn't exist - there would be no other browser where Google would have to buy the default search position. It would be one less problem for Google, if the goal of their payment would be really only to be the default search engine in Firefox. If that would be true, it would be silliest waste of money from them - worse than Google Glass.
Don't try to build a house out of this argument, because the wolves are going to blow it away.
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.
>Don't try to build a house out of this argument, because the wolves are going to blow it away
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."
I upvoted your comment for the comprehensive reply, but I think @marginalia_nu[0] would laugh at you for putting him in the same category as Yahoo/MSFT...
From my understanding he's very much indie just like Marginalia is.
I've got to believe this is the phone call that saved Apple in the 90's too.
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.
I get that and probably should’ve clarified. What I mean is they can hold up Chromium and say “we made it so that literally anyone can take what we made and make their own copy without our branding and talking to our services, for free”. That’s an incredibly strong defence against being a monopoly.
it used to exist in windows and it can exist again, would be trivial for google to pay for slight development costs to port safari to windows again if they really needed it to.
I can't use Safari on my HP Linux laptop and on my Android phone. Apple doesn't make it for those OSes. That's a choice like any other one. What I don't like is that deny other companies to run their own browser engines on iOS. They have to reskin Safari. Luckily this is going to change soon at least in the EU.
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)
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