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Firefox: Doing it for love

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Firefox

Ingrid Marson ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 19 Jul 2005 14:05 BST

This is how grassroots marketing works — small groups of people doing something in their area. A lot of this won't get into national papers, although we do have a couple of large projects planned.

I don't want to manage from the top down, saying, "I'm Asa, here's a project I want you to do." I would rather a group of kids in India said: "Lets get Firefox on an open source CD that the government is going to distribute across the country". We helped them campaign to get it on a CD. That's the kind of thing I want to support.

A representative of the Welsh Parliament recently made a proclamation to the parliament that they should be using Firefox. He sent me the minutes — it's now in their formal and permanent documentation. This is the kind of thing I would never have thought of. If you filter up from the bottom, good ideas will surface — much better than we can think of.

Why do you think that grassroots marketing is so effective?
When hundreds of thousands of people are doing it, it's more powerful than corporate marketing. For example, if I have a choice between listening to Sony tell me how great their walkman is, or hundreds of thousands of Sony users telling me how great the walkman is, I'd trust the real people over a marketing department any day.

We have real people who wouldn't say something if our product wasn't good. It takes a lot of repetition with a banner ad online, or a jingle on the TV — they need to keep hammering it to make a sale. When it's your best friend or neighbour it doesn't take any hammering.

The open source community generally has problems encouraging women to participate. Is it mostly men getting involved with SpreadFirefox?
We don't have any numbers on that as we don't ask about genders. Based on the interactions that I have had with people it seems that we have a much broader mix of females and males in the SpreadFirefox community than we do in the development and QA community; among developers there are several female developers out of hundreds; in QA, out of thousands there are hundreds of women; in marketing, of the 10 people who we recently gave awards to, three were women.

We have always had a global base, but it's nice to see we're growing the female component of the community, and the age component is also spreading — a lot of kids are spreading Firefox in their school. That's one of things I like about SpreadFirefox — it's very inclusive. It's fun to work in a community that's really dynamic and diverse.

Why do you think Firefox was successful?
A lot of things came together at the same time. Microsoft had disbanded its IE team. The web changed so there were more pop ups, spyware and viruses. People like my mum didn't like going on the web any more as they thought bad things happened there. Firefox took a lot of that pain away — you could go on web without being afraid of pop-ups trying to trick you into downloading spyware.

At the time 1.0 was released enough Web sites were becoming compatible. Our own rendering technologies were getting up to speed. This meant that when a user sat down with Firefox, the Web just worked.

Firefox was also becoming easier to use and getting smaller. Ben Goodger [the lead Firefox engineer] implemented some awesome installation tools so you could copy over your favourites, settings etc. It made Firefox seem like an upgrade for IE.