Memo: To: Mozilla Subject: The Popularity of Firefox Dear Mozilla: Just saw the headline, "Mozilla Foundation places two-page advocacy ad in The New York

Memo: To: Mozilla Subject: The Popularity of Firefox Dear Mozilla: Just saw the headline, "Mozilla Foundation places two-page advocacy ad in The New York Times (2004)" Okay, I will respond with some feedback intended to be helpful. I'm a long time Firefox user. Until recently Firefox was my "default" Web browser. I'm trying to remain a good and happy Firefox user, trying REALLY hard, but Mozilla is trying even harder to have me quit using Firefox. Mozilla has already in the last few weeks finally gotten me to tell Windows that my default browser is Chrome and no longer Firefox. I WANT Firefox back as my default Web browser, but for that Mozilla has to stop working so incredibly hard to have me quit using Firefox. "Mozilla, NO, greater than 99 44/100% of the time I do NOT want a proctology exam, an unanesthetized root canal procedure, a piercing for a nose ring, a tattoo, a Firefox update, a popup window, a popup window announcing another Firefox update, or the Firefox update that enabled those 10s of thousands of popup windows I have gotten in the last few months. A Firefox popup window is where Mozilla believes that it has some information for my eyes, attention, and work more important to me than the Web page the popup window is covering and that I was trying to read, and that belief is nearly always badly WRONG. A popup window is where Firefox stops and refuses to continue until I stop what I'm doing, pay attention to why my computer has stopped, move my hand, and click on NO once more of the tens of thousands of times recently. I can be patient, but somewhere on the way to > 20,000 times, I can become infuriated. I HATE, to be more clear, deeply, profoundly, bitterly HATE and despise, am outraged and infuriated by, unwanted updates and popups. In the last few months I have declined Firefox updates announced in popup windows literally, conservatively > 20,000 times. To be fully clear, did I mention, I HATE nearly all updates and popups." Here is some feedback on some of the current disaster: From some Firefox update, that I did not, NOT, N.O.T. approve, my current version of Firefox is badly broken. Why: When I try to have Firefox display a Web page, from a URL on the Internet, a tree name on Windows, or the Web site that has my email, I get a popup that says that Firefox is not my default Web browser, which was false, or a popup saying that Firefox is starting in "safe mode", which from all I could tell was inappropriate. Then I get another popup window announcing that a Firefox update is available. My suggestions: (1) Cut WAY back on the popup windows. If there is a really serious computer security problem, then announce that via a popup window. Announce it no more than three times. On average, there should be less than one such serious problem a year. (2) Restore the option that permits a user to decline updates and also decline announcements of updates. (3) Document your work. There is a lot to usage of Firefox -- DOCUMENT that work in TEXT in high quality technical writing. (4) For options, be willing to write the option values to a text file with a simple syntax, a file that a user can edit with a standard text editor and then specify to Firefox as the options to be used. (5) Instead of icons, use text.