We're igniting the web. Join us!
on Sun, 09/12/2004 - 15:24Spreading Firefox
Welcome to Spread Firefox. You are our marketing department, a diverse community of people tired of swatting popups, chasing spyware, combatting identity theft and installing security updates you could set your watch to. You have a vision of the 21st century web and are ready to push it to the world, wresting control from a monopoly that has let it stagnate.
We'll provide the tools, but you will drive campaigns that will be rolled out here over the coming months. In that vein, Spread Firefox ("sfx") follows the Mozilla community tradition:
- The community built Firefox. Over the last six years, thousands of individuals from around the world have invested countless hours and consumed billions of gallons of caffeine to help test and develop Firefox and the technologies it is built on. Hundreds of thousands of people already participate in Mozilla communities such as Bugzilla, MozillaZine, and MozDev.
- The community is making Firefox the browser people trust. Security experts from around the world participate in our security bug bounty program, uncovering security vulnerabilities before they become a problem so you don't have to deal with the mess or the patch-work clean up.
- The community is spreading the word about Firefox. Millions of people are already using Firefox and helping us chip away at Internet Explorer's marketshare. More than 80,000 websites already link to the Firefox page, with an additional 200,000 linking to mozilla.org. The buzz about Firefox was too hot for the blogosphere and has consumed the mainstream press: this month alone, Firefox has been declared officially "Wired" (IE? "Expired"), USA Today is recommending that its readers use Firefox, and Walt Mossberg, perhaps the most influential tech writer in the US, is telling Wall Street Journal readers that, if you're worried about security, Firefox is a good way to go.
Even this site itself is a community effort, programmed and designed by volunteers using an open source community platform called CivicSpace. CivicSpace is based on the open source Drupal content management system.
We hope you'll bear with us as we ramp up development of this site in the coming months. In the future, Spread Firefox will coordinate a series of volunteer efforts to promote Firefox, and run campaigns to focus our community's energy on very tangible, specific goals. This is just a beta, and there are still validation errors and bugs on the site, so make sure to let us know if something's not working right or if you have ideas for cool new features. And make sure to add yourself to the Spreadfirefox announcements mailing list.
Our first target: one million downloads of the Firefox Preview Release in the next ten days. Register, sign in, and spread the word by adding a Firefox promo line to your email signature and one of our buttons to your web site (or your personal new Spread Firefox blog). Each time someone clicks on your link, you'll get a point, so you'll be able to see how much impact you're making. We highlight and publicize the ten most successful promoters in the "roll call" in the green bar on the right. In the future, prizes and pronounced placement on the wildly popular Mozilla website will offer additional motivation to bump yourself into the top ten. We also intend to beef up our referral tracking and award points for many other things besides referrals, such as donations and active participation in one of our marketing teams.
Microsoft's own evangelists, journalists and security experts have already dropped the lost Explorer and made the switch to Firefox. Isn't it time everyone else did?
The Spread Firefox team --
Asa, Bart, Blake, Chris and Daryl.
