Q&A with Firefox's Blake Ross (SeattlePI) [LWN.net]

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has an extended interview with Blake Ross, a founder of the Firefox project. "People expect us to come up with ever-better Spread Firefox campaigns. That's especially difficult for us, because the goal of Firefox has always been just to make things simpler, and making things simpler usually doesn't mean adding grandiose new features and making sure that the next version has something that identifies it as being new, which has kind of been the (Microsoft) Office model to date, every release has to have something new so people know they got their money's worth."

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Reacting on the summary

Posted Jul 5, 2006 18:00 UTC (Wed) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018) [Link]

their money's worth

Indeed, being a commercial product, every version needs to have something more for people to want to upgrade.

Now, Firefox is free, so people will upgrade without needing a better reason than "fixes a few bugs, and is a bit faster"

Reacting on the summary

Posted Jul 6, 2006 9:05 UTC (Thu) by quintesse (subscriber, #14569) [Link]

Well, bugfixes and small changes will be handled by the auto updater of course, but I think you underestimate the power of people's boredom. If nothing special is being done to somehow "improve" FF in some way or another people will at some time start "defecting" again to the next new thing.

I can predict that if MS somehow decides to churn out a new IE each year with brand new features and basically turning it into a christmas tree (or the kitchen sink) Windows users will start going back in droves.

Because in my opinion most people didn't go to FF just because somebody told them it was somehow safer, they did it because they were bored with IE and along comes something new and fresh. Most people don't care about that (and that's why IE still has at least 80+% of the "market") but lots do. But I don't think that a lot of those who switched to FF are somehow so "loyal" to it that they will stick with it even when there's nothing new anymore for a long time. But I'd love to be proven wrong :-)

Reacting on the summary

Posted Jul 7, 2006 14:43 UTC (Fri) by dion (subscriber, #2764) [Link]

I think you are right and wrong.

You are probably right about people wanting novelty, but there are solid reasons for using FF over IE, mainly adblock, rip and other extentions that allow users to get webpages the way they want them.

The largest advantage that FF has is that it's user-loyal, it's only recently that it has become user-friendly (> v1.0 imho) and highly featured.

MS might fix IE so it becomes user-friendly and add features, but somehow I doubt that it would ever become user-loyal.

Reacting on the summary

Posted Jul 10, 2006 20:50 UTC (Mon) by h2 (guest, #27965) [Link]

It's the extensions, that's what keeps people, you can't get around that. As soon as users start discovering extensions, it's all over, you can't ever leave.

That's what keeps me on firefox, I'd actually rather use Konqueror for several reasons, but I stay with firefox because of the extensions. And I like the way it handles bookmarks better than how konqueror does it. Don't like the gtk stuff at all, but that's life, can't change that.

Won't list my must have extensionss, since everyone has their own list.