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Firefox 1.0 New York Times ad (2004)

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Re: Firefox 1.0 New York Times ad (2004)

#61

Post by JohnTHaller »

lstamour wrote: post #18
chrisrhee wrote: post #14

Mozilla Foundation places two-page advocacy ad in The New York Times https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2004/12/mozilla-foundation-pl... 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 mi…

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 wh…

I bought and owned getfoxfire.com earlier on and had it redirect to getfirefox.com because so many people would mix it up.

Re: Firefox 1.0 New York Times ad (2004)

#62

Post by skilled »

not_your_vase wrote: post #60
boomboomsubban wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>there would be no other browser where Google would have to buy the default search position. 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.

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…

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.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=marginalia_nu

Re: Firefox 1.0 New York Times ad (2004)

#63

Post by boomboomsubban »

not_your_vase wrote: post #60
boomboomsubban wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>there would be no other browser where Google would have to buy the default search position. 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.

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…

>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."

Re: Firefox 1.0 New York Times ad (2004)

#65

Post by maratc »

johnnyworker wrote: post #46
pmontra wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> It had tabs I discovered Opera in 2000 and it always drove me nuts how Firefox was praised for being the first browser with tabs.

Man ... the mouse gestures blew my mind immediately.

Re: Firefox 1.0 New York Times ad (2004)

#66

Post by chrisrhee »

matsemann wrote: post #39
gslin wrote: post #2

https://blog.mozilla.org/press/files/2013/11/nytimes-firefox...

Why are some of the names underlined? 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.

If you're searching for a name, it looks like they're mostly in alphabetical order by surname.

Re: Firefox 1.0 New York Times ad (2004)

#67

Post by darklycan51 »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #22
darklycan51 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safari exists... plus a browser engine alone doesn't constitue a monopoly, you'd have a hard case arguing that.

>Safari exists... Only for Apple users.

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.

Just like how office exists in macos

Re: Firefox 1.0 New York Times ad (2004)

#68

Post by lstamour »

rc00 wrote: post #43
lstamour wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

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 fire…

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...

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

Re: Firefox 1.0 New York Times ad (2004)

#69

Post by lstamour »

rc00 wrote: post #43
lstamour wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

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 fire…

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…

Re: Firefox 1.0 New York Times ad (2004)

#70

Post by lstamour »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #61
lstamour wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

I bought and owned getfoxfire.com earlier on and had it redirect to getfirefox.com because so many people would mix it up.

Thank you for doing that :) Yeah, I’m pretty sure I typed it that way more than once. Especially if all you remembered was “FF”.
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