Feed Sign in with OpenID OpenID

Simon Willison’s Weblog

Marketing Firebird

Blake Ross has published a page on Marketing Firebird. He makes an interesting comparison between Firebird and Kazaa, pointing out that Kazaa has over 3.1 million downloads a week with promotion only via word-of-mouth:

Kazaa is spreading like wildfire because it offers a killer app—music sharing—and everyone knows it. I have friends that can’t turn on their computer without help, but you’d better believe they’re on there getting songs. I see people coming up with all kinds of clever taglines to promote Firebird (“if you’re not using Firebird, you’re not surfing the web—you’re suffering it”) and that’s great, but the fact is that 100 million users find Internet Explorer “good enough.” The promise of an improved overall experience, without identifying how it improves on a working model, just isn’t going to grab people.

Blake also sets a challenge: Make it your goal to convert five friends, coworkers, family members or other acquaintances to Firebird. I’m happy to say I’ve done that already, but I don’t see it as any reason to stop. I’ve also joined the Mozilla marketing mailing list, which is pretty low traffic at the moment but will hopefully pick up as word about it gets out.

While I’m all for marketing Firebird, there is a pretty big fly in the ointment. If you take a look at the negative reviews on Downloads.com (there are positive ones as well) it seems an awful lot of new users have had their fingers burnt by issues that I’ve never even noticed. If we’ve learnt anything from the original launch of Netscape 6 it should be that a poor first impression lasts, so it’s not worth pushing Firebird at anyone who is likely to write it off the first time it crashes on them. That said, I haven’t had 0.6.1 crash once since I installed it, but it’s still an issue that’s worth baring in mind.

Posted 3rd August 2003 at 9:33 pm

This is Marketing Firebird by Simon Willison, posted on 3rd August 2003.

View blog reactions

Next: XHTML for future-proof content

Previous: Page Readability Bookmarks

15 comments

  1. "Kazaa is spreading like wildfire because it offers a killer app"

    Kazaa comes bundles with all kinds of spyware crap... the best way to get Firebird distributed to the masses would be get it bundled with kazaa and have it replace IE as the deault browser...so evil...yet so tempting ;)

    MikeyC - 3rd August 2003 22:30 - #

  2. There's a massive difference between Kazaa and Firebird when it comes to marketing. A competitor to Kazaa isn't installed on virtually every computer in existence. You aren't giving them a new application, you are trying to wean them off something they are already comfortable with.

    I agree that first impressions count. How about waiting until 1.0 before marketing it to the masses?

    Jim Dabell - 4th August 2003 00:50 - #

  3. "How about waiting until 1.0 before marketing it to the masses?"

    Firebird is to eventually replace the Mozilla suite along with Thunderbird, Songbird and other standalones that have yet to be written. Optimistically this is still a year away according to those who would know. Firebird 1.0 may very well come before then but I don't think that is what the Mozilla Organization plans to push to consumers.

    Firebird looks to be taking Mozilla's old role as "development product" while Mozilla (which eventually will include Firebird as its browser component) is taking Netscape's old role as "end-user product". Mozilla has always been about slow n' steady and I think they could very well miss the boat again if they don't get their collective ass in gear on this one...

    MikeyC - 4th August 2003 01:47 - #

  4. Simon: FWIW, I still see autocomplete crashes from 0.61 at least once a day. Not enough to send me back to IE6, but enough to make me curse the browser under my breath. It's gonna need to get a lot more stable before I'll be recommending it to non-technical friends.

    Roger Benningfield - 4th August 2003 03:58 - #

  5. I've been using Firebird/Phoenix as my primary browser since last October or November. Autocomplete crashes have been a pain, but I haven't seen them since 0.61, thankfully, and -- come to think of it -- I'm seeing much less textarea weirdness than in previous releases.

    I'm absolutely horrified by the number of negative reviews at download.com. Superior support for CSS is the killer feature for me. I don't know what it will take for an ordinary web surfer to switch. I would think integrated popup blocking would suffice, but perhaps not.

    jacob - 4th August 2003 05:30 - #

  6. "Superior support for CSS is the killer feature for me."

    Most people don't care about such things and really shouldn't have to care either.

    "I would think integrated popup blocking would suffice, but perhaps not."

    I used to think that that was Mozilla's "ace-in-the-hole" considering that every web surfer can relate to the annoyance of pop-up ADs, but addons like the Google Toolbar for IE (which does an excellent job of managing and blocking popups btw) are out there for mass consumption...much easier to just install a toolbar than to switch over to an entirely new browser.

    MikeyC - 4th August 2003 06:12 - #

  7. I've been reading the negative reviews on download.com and while many of them do appear to be genuine in that the person tried the browser for the first time and was disappointed, many of the comments strike me as being a bit too calculated. People knowing of specific flaws in the browser and complaining about them as if they had just stumbled upon them for the first time. Mozilla does have problems with some sites designed specifically for IE but the idea that all these people ended up stumbling upon sites that didn't work just strikes me as odd considering I haven't stumbled upon such a site in months. And then there's always the tagline of "if you really want tabbed browsing and pop-up blocking just use this wrapper application for IE instead!"

    A comment like the following one is particularly damaging as to Firebird as I'm sure it will turn many off forever: "Spyware and security problems galore!" Watch out! There is a deception going on here. The moment I installed this browser I started getting virus warning and my spyware alterter triggered like mad! Combine this with the many security holes that plague the browser and you will want to think twice before downloading it.

    MikeyC - 4th August 2003 06:25 - #

  8. Firebird: thumbs up: 49% thumbs down: 51%

    Netscape 4:thumbs up: 59% thumbs down: 41%

    hmm...

    MikeyC - 4th August 2003 06:32 - #

  9. I've been using firebird since before 0.4. Although I won't switch back to IE any time soon, it becomes infuriating that I can't upgrade past a 0.4 nightly without it eating my system resources. I imagine the same can be said of some new adopters.

    Gary F - 4th August 2003 12:29 - #

  10. As has been said here before, it needs to get an installer (as standard).

    I met problems with Sun's Java with it, too. Neither IE6 nor Opera 7.11 had any problems seeing the lastest Sun Java but Firebird did. I had installed Sun Java 1.4.2 and found Firebird 0.6 no longer saw the Java. So I thought, "Well, maybe it's the order of installation - and I want Firebird 0.6.1, anyway." So I went and got that. Still no joy.

    I tried the registry patch, but that didn't work for me.

    In the end I had to revert to Java 1.4.1_03

    I don't mind fiddling around like this, though it is frustrating and time-consuming. But the average user won't want to.

    Michael - 4th August 2003 13:38 - #

  11. Though I use Firebird as my primary browser, here are some things about it that irk me greatly:
    1. No more keyboard short-cut (ctrl+shift+l in mozilla) to bring up the 'Open web location' dialog box. It took me a while to find the rough alt+d equivalent in Firebird. Indeed the first few times I tried Firebird (0.4, 0.5) I returned to my Mozilla, opera, IE congolmerate.
    2. Both Firebird and Mozilla consume my Windows Resources (windows 98) like a starving person at a free buffet. This has got to change. Using 4 tabs, my resources are ~70% when I start Firebird (0.6.1) in the morning. At the end of my shift (10 hours), resources have dropped to ~14%. Not good.
    There are other things, already mentioned in comments here.

    kpower - 4th August 2003 15:18 - #

  12. Are these people actually recommending serving a "Switch" page to non-Firebird user-agents? That's effing sick. I guess it's evil when Buymusic.com does it but the moral purity that is open source justifies it for the Mozilla folks? Don't make me vomit. And give me Galeon/Epiphany with the Mozilla renderer; Firebird is a bug-ridden monstrosity that is *still* slower than than a three-legged mule and has an utterly broken theme engine.

    E. Naeher - 4th August 2003 19:42 - #

  13. I've just downloaded Firebird 0.6.1 (i've been using 0.6 for the longest time) and I've gotta say that to market it to the masses as is would be a grave error. It will be a 'Netscape 6' situation all over again. I really hope the Mozilla team holds-off on the marketing push for Firebird until they can get everything in order because in its current state it will end up doing more harm than good. It breaks almost all the existing themes and the options dialog box has some serious problems from what I can tell. Plus the idea that you have to create a new profile every time you upgrade really isn't going to fly. When I initially heard that it would take a year before replacing the suite with Firebird as browser component I thought that was just Mozilla's natural "slow n' steady" approach to things, but as it turns out, I guess that it really will take a year to get it to the point where the browser won't annoy and alienate new users not willing to "get under the hood" to make things work.

    MikeyC - 5th August 2003 01:09 - #

  14. Hmm... Looks like the comments attached to Moz Firebird 6.1 seem to be somewhat more favorable at this point...

    Simon - 6th August 2003 18:09 - #

  15. I've put together an example that I think could help the marketing effort. But it will only work if the idea catches on. Basically I have used a little CSS2 to create an adaptive link which should give negative feedback to anyone surfing my blog with a lame browser. I think it's qualitatively different than the "Best viewed in Nestcape" meme. It's painfully simple, which should make it easy to copy. If it gets copied widely, then more surfers will get the message more often that their browser is sub-standard.

    Please take a look at The Great Browser Upgrade Campaign and spread the word or tell me I'm out of my mind.

    Eric Dobbs - 8th August 2003 06:50 - #

Comments are closed.

Previously hosted at http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2003/08/03/marketingFirebird

A django site