komencanto's blog

Need an excuse to get a football obsessed friend to try out Firefox? 

Hit them with FootieFox, an extension that gives them a list of upcoming games with times in their timezone, as well as scores for past and current games as the goals go in. A great organisational tool for those in the midst of World Cup fever!

Check it out at: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/725/

From the homepage at http://www.firemonger.org/en/

Firemonger Version 1.5 Public Beta Out!
September 13th - Robert Wiblin

It's out! The big update we hope you've been waiting for is uploading as I write. We have put a lot of effort into this release over the last few weeks and it really is a major change. We are now running Firefox straight off of the CD. For most people it will work absolutely fine. However, because we want to make sure our big release comes with all the benefits of Firefox 1.5, lots of translations, the momentum of the 1.5 publicity and a truly polished product, we are using this release as a Public Beta. Although we don't anticipate too many problems with it, be sure to send in any and all issues and suggestions to bugs AT firemonger DOT org or post in the forums (registration not necessary). The more feedback you give us the better we can get!

Currently the CD includes French, Spanish and Japanese text as well as English, but the content for this version is English only until we finalise the rest of the CD. The changes in this release are many so we recommend you just download it and try it out. Screenshots are available here. We've changed the extensions and themes, improved the help, added several whole new sections, made mass extension installing, fast lite and translations possible possible and just made the CD a whole lot more awesome. We're sure you will enjoy it! Note that we are still looking for someone to take on the challenge of improving the CD's graphical design now that Niels can't do it because he's too busy. If you're that person, tell us in the forums! Now go download. Then give your friends a copy, post about us around the net and send us details of any problems or suggestions that you have. Thanks.

P.S. Most of the credit for the technology in this version has to go to Oren Nachman who came on board a few months ago and has done most of the coding and other difficult stuff. Oren is now a great and valued member of the Firemonger team! He hopes to have a running version with the Firefox 1.5 beta in about 3 weeks for your enjoyment.

FiremongerCD 1.04c has been released in English, Spanish and German (the naming scheme is confusing but that will be changed soon). This brings us up to date with Firefox 1.06 and Thunderbird 1.06. Extensions and a few other things have been updated, but there are no fundamental changes to the CD - it's just an incremental update. This is to tide us over until version 2 - a complete and much improved rewrite - is released. Firemonger is a great tool for spreading Firefox (and Thunderbird) as well as its many great extensions so find out all the details and download it at www.firemonger.org. At the same time you might learn about some extensions, themes and even features that you didn't know about. Due to its ease of use and simple explanations it's the best way to introduce your friends (especially the non-geeky ones) to Firefox.

Version 2 is approaching completion and will run professionally off the CD, while being better layed out and easier to use. It looks great and will come packed with many new features. Translations will also be a lot easier for me! There's more details in our forums where you can contribute. We're really excited about it and we think other people will be too once they see it. Expect a release during September. You can use our RSS feed on the site to make sure you stay up-to-date but you'll hear all about it on spreadfirefox.

Cheers everyone,

Robert Wiblin

Uh oh, looks like things didn't go so well last month:

"Microsoft's Internet Explorer halted the steady market share advance of The Mozilla Foundation's Firefox browser in July, a Web site monitoring company announced Friday.

Last month, IE, by far the most used browser, regained lost ground and pushed back the upstart Firefox for the first time since version 1.0 of the open source browser debuted late last year, according to NetApplications.com, a maker of applications for monitoring and measuring Web site usage.

Firefox's share shrunk to 8.07 percent from 8.71 percent in June, while IE grew its
market slice to 87.20 percent in July from 86.56 percent last month."

There is reasonable refutation here, but even so, it does show you that Firefox isn't invulnerable.

As you can see we can't be complacent. If we don't keep running we'll start moving backwards ^_^.

It actually looks like SFx+ is coming to fruition just on time. I believe we'll have an announcement on the future of SFx any day now and trust me, given the people behind this I think it's going to be pretty exciting for everyone.
Cheers everyone.

Hi everyone again,

I don't know why I put in so much effort but I just spent the last few hours getting out the beta version of the FiremongerCD in German which you can download at www.firemonger.org/de. It's almost perfect but report any errors. It will still be uploading for a few hours. If you speak German please report this to all German Mozilla related sources. Thanks guys. Man... I gotta get some sleep. Thanks for spreading the word!

Hello everyone,

Sorry this is so long, but I think a detailed exploration of our problems and the potential solutions is necessary. I would like to start by quoting a reply from another spreadfirefox user from this post (which I wrote), which I recommend reading (not surprisingly):

"www.firemonger.org should undoubtedly be on the homepage, along with many other projects and actual material for spreading Firefox. I wrote a post about this in the spreadfirefox forums called Sfx situation. I like quite a few now are struggling to see a reason as to why a load of content has disapeared, hardly any projects or actual spread Firefox materials are on the homepage, or on the site at all. It's madness and no matter what’s going on, for content to be missing for this long is just not right."
(If you agree with what I and this person are saying can you please give this post a vote so that more people will see it, lest it be totally ignored. Even better, reply so that I know what other people think.)



Sorry if the attention grabbing title offends some, but my irritation with this website has gotten to the point where only serious criticism will suffice and it is necessary to shout to make sure this is read by the people who need to read it. In January I was puzzled when a bunch of important players at spreadfirefox.com got so frustrated that they decided to leave altogether, and I wrote about my confusion. Now I fully understand why and will explain my frustations if you allow me.


My main irritation is that the powers that be at spreadfirefox have done nothing in the last 8 months to improve the website despite acknowledging its flaws. Their inaction has inhibited many attempts by people to help spread Firefox, which is surely the purpose of this website. I know about my own experiences of this (and some of other people which I won’t report) and will discuss them, but I will be interested to hear what other people have to add. All of this has produced a half-baked website that is nowhere near reaching its potential as a hub of open source advocacy. If the people involved in Firefox really wanted to boost the spreading effort they would update spreadfirefox.com instead of letting it languish in the uncompleted, beta state that it has remained in since it started.

Asa may cheer the fact that there are now 100,000 registered users, but what is the point of having so many users if you are squandering the potential that they offer? It would be entirely justified for the Mozilla Foundation to hire a full time employee to coordinate such a potentially useful community of volunteers. Dozens of great ideas exist to improve the site, I won't list them (they are found in myriad blog entries), but because nothing has been done - only a few priveliged people are in a position to act - the place remains confusing and disorganised for the beginner user and offers very little in the way of help for the advanced user who has good ideas and wants to promote or coordinate them. When 1.0 was released this website has 10s of thousands of visitors every day and raised $100,000. Partly because it was not enhanced when the opportunity existed it now has FAR FEWER. Any marketer will extoll to you the virtues of momentum in any campaign and I'm afraid this website has really lost its momentum. A long discussion about this topic is available here. Decide for yourself what you think. Just as an indicator of all this, I'm sure many people are irritated that the ‘login error’ - the error that requires you to login again every time you close your browser - has been known about since day one but still hasn’t been fixed. I only hope that someone with the ability to generally fix up the site actually does something before 1.1 is released and we receive more visitors.


On a related issue, a number of marketing gurus used to hang around here discussing how the Mozilla Foundation could better target various market segments with its website at www.mozilla.org in order to improve download and use rates. Because NO COMMUNICATION mechanism exists or was set up between the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla community, all of that discussion went nowhere. They didn't even have their ideas considered and declined, they were simply ignored and eventually these smart people got sick of it and left. The irony is that Mozilla prides itself on being an open community but here we have absent, indifferent, unaccountable administrators while the people who actually want to put in effort are shoved aside. Currently it is the members who are expected to thank the managers for helping them, when it should be the managers thanking the members for dedicating their time and talent to give them the advertising they couldn't otherwise support. The Mozilla Foundation has embedded this website into its product and must demand better.



You might ask why I am so bothered by this that I have decided to write such a long letter. I've been involved in several projects to help spread Firefox. I helped start a Media Response thing before it died due to lack of publicity. Why didn't someone in charge pick up on an idea that they purported to support? I didn't know, but I gave up because you just can’t get the necessary page views without front page coverage. Next I pushed through the Always Use Protection Poster which received heaps of support from visitors to this site (thanks everyone). Not to be arrogant, but if I hadn't bothered to actually chase that poster up, despite resistence from admins on spreadfirefox who would not help me and took that post off of the main page (after another admin added it), it never would have been released. Did the fears of some about it offending a few people pan out? No, instead it got us good publicity on CNet and has been a great resource for many people on campuses (the Firefox on Campus idea also died because of disinterest) who have thanked me and others for getting it out. Just read the comments on that post to see the feeling of the average person on the issue and I'm sure you'll agree.

Next I noticed that the site was pretty disorganised and the average person would have trouble getting started spreading Firefox without spending ages looking around on the site for ideas and things that they needed. So I decided that until a projects area was created, I would start something almost as good, the "Spreading Firefox Guidebook" Project. I wrote quite a bit and emailed/messaged all of the admins and people who could help get the word out about the project, asking them to put it on the front page. Did they do it? No. Did any of them even reply despite repeated attempts to get in contact? No. In the end I was forced to write it almost by myself because no one else was likely to find it. Then I asked them to publicise it as a Featured Project, which they were still bothering to do at the time. Again, no reply (even to tell me that my idea was terrible) and no action, so my effort has been almost entirely wasted.


What next? Well, I continued and after noticing how excellent the Opera 8 marketing and their website was, I wrote about the ways Spread Firefox could improve itself by looking at what that professional company had done. MeAtWork agreed, and wrote a good reply, but could I get anything out of the people who have the power to actually consider some of these ideas? Nope. I did hear some competitive bickering over here (read the comments there for some corrections), which suggested that Opera improving on spreadfirefox was cause for our scorn.



Then I started working hard on the FiremongerCD project that I recommend you take a look at at www.firemonger.org. I wrote numerous times about it in my blog and pleaded with the admins at spreadfirefox.com to give the project some coverage so that the work that me many other people and I had put into it could be discovered by the people who needed it. After all, the project was started by people at spreadfirefox.com with the blessing of the Mozilla Foundation and the support of everyone. All of the feedback that we have received is positive, a sample of which is visible in the replies people have given me in those posts. However, when it comes to the people who can actually act and help me out, there was no action and not even a reply. I may as well have been appealing to the black obelisk from 2001 for all the support I got.


The final insult came when the website was slightly rejigged a few weeks ago and the projects box was removed with no explanation (EDIT: it has just been replaced in response to this letter; thanks Rafael, this is a step in the right direction). This totally cut spreadfirefox.com off from the community wiki which has all of the most useful resources and information. It also removed the link to firemonger.org which cut our visitor numbers quite a bit and prevented people from finding out about something that would definitely help them to spread Firefox! The spreadfirefox chat channel was also removed. In what way did they think it would be an improvement to reduce the number of projects and resources listed on the website? Despite being asked numerous times by several people, the question remains unanswered.

EDIT: I have elaborated on some of the ideas expressed here in another far more expansive post if you are interested in the issue.

The team over at www.firemonger.org has been hard at work improving the forum, homepage and getting translations out. So far Spanish and German are done, but French should be out soon. Despite the fact that our product is better than ever (try it for yourself, I'm sure you'll feel inspired to pass it on to your friends!), because our link was removed from spreadfirefox.com when the site was redesigned a bit, our visitor numbers have dropped quite a bit (EDIT: This box has since been reinstated. Thanks a lot whoever did that!).

Because we have all put in quite a lot of effort into making the CD, and the idea originally came out of people mulling over how best to spread firefox on this very site some 8 months ago, I really feel that the first place for us to turn is the huge userbase right here. The first thing you can do is to download the CD, try it out and give it to your friends. It's great, and if you have any ideas for other extensions or indeed anything, we make it really easy to contact us through our forums (no registration required) or just to email us direct. I'm sure there are lots of improvements that people can think of that wouldn't occur to me!

If you like the CD and are surprised that you hadn't heard about it before, please add your support to getting Firemonger reinstated on spreadfirefox.com, or at least covered on the main page at some point (none of our main releases were unfortunately). As our translations come out we would love to be covered on Mozilla Europe and the various other europe language affiliates. Given that we are currently the only distribution CD for Mozilla products it would be great if we could be mentioned on mozilla.org at some point too. Additionally, if you have any idea for how to get us more visitors and some publicity, then be sure to mention them here. Thanks all.