6 ms·

Firefox 1.0 New York Times ad (2004)

113 points by tones411 3y ago

gslin 3y ago
https://blog.mozilla.org/press/files/2013/11/nytimes-firefox-final.pdf https://blog.mozilla.org/press/files/2013/11/nytimes-firefox...
- Wowfunhappy 3y ago
  This should be TFA, it's higher quality!
  - ghusto 3y ago
    And doesn't require signup nonsense to download :/
- matsemann 3y ago
  Why are some of the names underlined? And why do I only get � when I try to copy names in that PDF? It's like it's not real text, makes it impossible to search for names I think should be there.
  - layer8 3y ago
    PDFs can use any custom character encoding they like. By default, there doesn’t need to be a mapping to Unicode or whatever. Sometimes it’s done deliberately to prevent easy copying, though in this case it might be more by accident than by design.
  - berkes 3y ago
    Maybe "not being able to search" is a deliberate choice? I'm in there, I think. I won't mind showing up that much. Firefox is still OK. But I like how they don't presume I still want to show up there.
  - asadotzler 3y ago
    This was one of my projects. The underlined names were people who got 10 other people to donate, sort of the super-donors.
    - matsemann 3y ago
      Cool, thanks!
  - chrisrhee 3y ago
    If you're searching for a name, it looks like they're mostly in alphabetical order by surname.
- vxNsr 3y ago
  Oh man! Remember when pop up blocking was essential! Was the original adblocking and built into every browser.
  - thrown1212 3y ago
    And a reminder that enshitification began long, long ago.
jszymborski 3y ago
Wait, isn't that Fira sans? I imagined that came much later
- simonlc 3y ago
  I think its ff meta sans or something.
- zinekeller 3y ago
  It's not and it is at the same time: FF Meta (FF for FontFont, not Firefox), which is the font used here, is a predecessor of Fira.
SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
Can anyone who was kinda close tell a story about Netscape and Firefox? I was just a kid back then and it would be nice to hear a story from the olden days about the before of Navigator and the after of Firefox
- shalabhc 3y ago
  Check out jwz's blog posts, eg https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/01/mozilla-orgs-25th-anniversary/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/01/mozilla-orgs-25th-anniversa... You may find other interesting articles linked from here:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski, eg https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html
- aaronbrethorst 3y ago
  There was the over the top cover article from Wired in 2005: https://www.wired.com/2005/02/firefox/ https://www.wired.com/2005/02/firefox/
- akling 3y ago
  There’s a fun documentary that follows some folks inside Netscape during the rush to make Mozilla open source: https://youtu.be/4Q7FTjhvZ7Y https://youtu.be/4Q7FTjhvZ7Y
- pmontra 3y ago
  Out of my memory: we were using a number of different browsers in the early 90s, mainly Mosaic. All of them basically shared a little problem: their HTTP call were blocking. So they first downloaded the HTML code, then one image per time (no CSS, no JS back then). And nothing appeared on screen until they finished to download everything. Netscape Navigator started to render the text of the page and add images when they became available. That was an instant success and everybody was using Netscape in a few days. I don't remember if it also made parallel requests or if that came with a later release. Netscape also had a bundled email client, which I used as my main client (is Brave doing something like that now? Opera did have one), and a Usenet news reader. Version 2 added the first version of JavaScript. Then Microsoft started to put some effort into Internet Explorer but it took them at least version 4.0 to reach feature parity. I remember a Microsoft evangelist wondering at an event why everybody was still using Netscape when IE was so good. They didn't say that about IE 3.0. Version 5 was definitely better than Netscape and won't the browser wars. All of that with the help of the behaviors that were subject of the anti trusts trial in the late 90s. They didn't know it yet but IE 5 made the history because it introduced XMLHttpRequest, that is Ajax calls. That transformed the web more than anything else. Then IE 6 came, an improvement over IE 5 and nothing happened for a while. Feature wise it was stagnation as Microsoft probably had no competitors to fend off anymore. Then the early versions of Firefox were released between 2002 and 2003. It had tabs and it was so much faster than IE 6 that whoever could switch, did switch. Corporate users often had to stick to IE 6 because of certifications of web apps, impossibility to install software except what mandated by their IT support, etc, so IE 6 made it through at least another 10 years well, despite new versions from Microsoft. Mozilla was created by Netscape before selling to AOL so in a way it's a successor of Netscape but I doubt there was some shared code. They extracted Netscape's email client to a different program, Thunderbird. Then Google Chrome happened and it was faster than Firefox, especially for large JavaScript sites. Not that Firefox was so slow not to be able to use those sites (I kept using Firefox for all those years) but it was faster, it was advertised on Google's search results page so people switched in mass. As a result we had a few years of huge improvements in the speed of JavaScript engines, Chrome, Firefox and every other browser. I think you know what happened next.
skilled 3y ago
They should really start putting out a few more of these, https://stackdiary.com/mozilla-usage-decline-from-2022-to-2023/ https://stackdiary.com/mozilla-usage-decline-from-2022-to-20... 30% of users lost in the last 4+ years and very little work being done on things like the latest CSS properties. Makes me wonder if Google uses this as a means to pay them less. The last contract was in 2020 to this year I think? https://www.zdnet.com/article/sources-mozilla-extends-its-google-search-deal/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/sources-mozilla-extends-its-go...
- not_your_vase 3y ago
  Google does not want to pay Mozilla less. They don't care about Firefox's market share, it's virtually 0. But in the moment Firefox disappears, Chrome will be undeniably a monopoly. As long as Firefox exists, Google can easily deflect such monopoly claims - they even "encourage and foster" competition on the browser market.
  - jjtheblunt 3y ago
    > Chrome will be undeniably a monopoly Isn't Safari by existing at whatever market share still a counterexample to Chrome being a monopoly?
    - pmontra 3y ago
      I can't use Safari on my HP Linux laptop and on my Android phone. Apple doesn't make it for those OSes. That's a choice like any other one. What I don't like is that deny other companies to run their own browser engines on iOS. They have to reskin Safari. Luckily this is going to change soon at least in the EU.
      - jjtheblunt 3y ago
        That’s unrelated to the parent comment that Chrome is an imminent monopoly, though.
  - darklycan51 3y ago
habitue 3y ago
Hey, I'm on there
- waltbosz 3y ago
  Me too. I think I paid $5 for the honor and a poster. I think I received a student discount.
ofrzeta 3y ago
same in the German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Firefox-anzeige-faz.jpg https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Firefox-anzeige-faz.jpg
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  That ad is just ... oof. Either I don't get German advertising (though I speak German) or the ad is poor.
  - heywhatupboys 3y ago
    Ads don't have to be hard blasting gangster rap, annoyingly shouting voiceover, and flashing lights. Some cultures prefer modesty and adult looks
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      That doesn't mean it's automatically a good ad, even for the German culture. It could still be a bad ad.
  - hutzlibu 3y ago
    You have to consider the target audience. People who read the FAZ are fine with lots of text and probably prefer that style over something flashy. (But I also don't think it is a perfect ad)
- schroeding 3y ago
  In Germany, Firefox was the most commonly used browser by a huge margin until 2016, when it was overtaken by Chrome[1] - it still has 11% market share (20% on the desktop) compared to the ~3% in the US or world-wide. Those German ad campaigns were quite effective, apparently. :D [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/germany/#monthly-200901-202307 https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/germany/...
chrisrhee 3y ago
Mozilla Foundation places two-page advocacy ad in The New York Times https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2004/12/mozilla-foundation-places-two-page-advocacy-ad-in-the-new-york-times/ https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2004/12/mozilla-foundation-pl... New York Times runs Firefox ad https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/new-york-times-runs-firefox-ad/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/new-york-tim... > The first page of the two-page ad--which is twice as large as originally planned--features the Firefox symbol superimposed over the names of the 10,000 donors My name is somewhere in that mix. I lost the physical newspaper copy at some point in the last 19 years. but it's cool the PDF is still around. Surprised the getfirefox.com domain from the ad still works! In the Battle of the Browsers '04, Firefox Aims at Microsoft https://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/15/technology/in-the-battle-of-the-browsers-04-firefox-aims-at-microsoft.html https://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/15/technology/in-the-battle-... > the early enthusiasm for the preview version of Firefox is a big reason that Internet Explorer's market share has slipped more than 2.5 percentage points in the last five months, to 92.9 percent at the end of October, its first decline since 1999
- lstamour 3y ago
  You mentioned getfirefox.com and while that was and is the official site, I remember a time (maybe?) when that was registered to a third-party fan of Firefox to promote it who handed it over to Mozilla. That said… I cannot find any evidence to back up this claim after a small bit of Google searching, so I might be wrong. I definitely remember a time after the rebranding was announced but before the full 1.0 launch where the moz website didn’t have an easy or obvious landing page for Firefox because so much website energy was still reserved for the open sourced Mozilla communications suite ;-) It always felt a bit new and edgy to recommend Firefox (Phoenix? Firebird?) back in the old days. Weirdly, there was a time when it was new and edgy to recommend Chrome too. Now it’s probably new and edgy to recommend… ad-blocking? Edge Read Aloud? It was easier when IE provided a common enemy and when Chrome wasn’t the only choice for low performance Android devices, or Safari on iOS. Re third party sites, it’s likely getfirefox was actually always Mozilla’s (they would have known about the name first, of course) so maybe I’m thinking of “getfirebird.com” or something else like that. It’s even possible that I just assumed it was third-party because it redirected to the main Mozilla site for the longest time. And it really probably doesn’t matter anyway, just a digression. :)
Ayesh 3y ago
> Unlock full access (page 2) by uploading documents or with a 30 Day Free Trial Scribd is the Pinterest of PDF files.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
alykhanv 3y ago
I’m in there. Paid $100 and even got a printed version that is framed and on the wall in my office. The team came out with several releases. In the first release my name was quite prominent in the nose of the fox but on the second or third release I got moved into the big white area. I wonder if those early releases are still available.

113 points by tones411 3y ago

https://blog.mozilla.org/press/files/2013/11/nytimes-firefox-final.pdf https://blog.mozilla.org/press/files/2013/11/nytimes-firefox...

Wowfunhappy 3y ago
This should be TFA, it's higher quality!
- ghusto 3y ago
  And doesn't require signup nonsense to download :/
matsemann 3y ago
Why are some of the names underlined? And why do I only get � when I try to copy names in that PDF? It's like it's not real text, makes it impossible to search for names I think should be there.
- layer8 3y ago
  PDFs can use any custom character encoding they like. By default, there doesn’t need to be a mapping to Unicode or whatever. Sometimes it’s done deliberately to prevent easy copying, though in this case it might be more by accident than by design.
- berkes 3y ago
  Maybe "not being able to search" is a deliberate choice? I'm in there, I think. I won't mind showing up that much. Firefox is still OK. But I like how they don't presume I still want to show up there.
- asadotzler 3y ago
  This was one of my projects. The underlined names were people who got 10 other people to donate, sort of the super-donors.
  - matsemann 3y ago
    Cool, thanks!
- chrisrhee 3y ago
  If you're searching for a name, it looks like they're mostly in alphabetical order by surname.
vxNsr 3y ago
Oh man! Remember when pop up blocking was essential! Was the original adblocking and built into every browser.
- thrown1212 3y ago
  And a reminder that enshitification began long, long ago.

jszymborski 3y ago

Wait, isn't that Fira sans? I imagined that came much later

simonlc 3y ago
I think its ff meta sans or something.
zinekeller 3y ago
It's not and it is at the same time: FF Meta (FF for FontFont, not Firefox), which is the font used here, is a predecessor of Fira.

SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago

Can anyone who was kinda close tell a story about Netscape and Firefox? I was just a kid back then and it would be nice to hear a story from the olden days about the before of Navigator and the after of Firefox

shalabhc 3y ago
Check out jwz's blog posts, eg https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/01/mozilla-orgs-25th-anniversary/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/01/mozilla-orgs-25th-anniversa... You may find other interesting articles linked from here:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski, eg https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html
aaronbrethorst 3y ago
There was the over the top cover article from Wired in 2005: https://www.wired.com/2005/02/firefox/ https://www.wired.com/2005/02/firefox/
akling 3y ago
There’s a fun documentary that follows some folks inside Netscape during the rush to make Mozilla open source: https://youtu.be/4Q7FTjhvZ7Y https://youtu.be/4Q7FTjhvZ7Y
pmontra 3y ago
Out of my memory: we were using a number of different browsers in the early 90s, mainly Mosaic. All of them basically shared a little problem: their HTTP call were blocking. So they first downloaded the HTML code, then one image per time (no CSS, no JS back then). And nothing appeared on screen until they finished to download everything. Netscape Navigator started to render the text of the page and add images when they became available. That was an instant success and everybody was using Netscape in a few days. I don't remember if it also made parallel requests or if that came with a later release. Netscape also had a bundled email client, which I used as my main client (is Brave doing something like that now? Opera did have one), and a Usenet news reader. Version 2 added the first version of JavaScript. Then Microsoft started to put some effort into Internet Explorer but it took them at least version 4.0 to reach feature parity. I remember a Microsoft evangelist wondering at an event why everybody was still using Netscape when IE was so good. They didn't say that about IE 3.0. Version 5 was definitely better than Netscape and won't the browser wars. All of that with the help of the behaviors that were subject of the anti trusts trial in the late 90s. They didn't know it yet but IE 5 made the history because it introduced XMLHttpRequest, that is Ajax calls. That transformed the web more than anything else. Then IE 6 came, an improvement over IE 5 and nothing happened for a while. Feature wise it was stagnation as Microsoft probably had no competitors to fend off anymore. Then the early versions of Firefox were released between 2002 and 2003. It had tabs and it was so much faster than IE 6 that whoever could switch, did switch. Corporate users often had to stick to IE 6 because of certifications of web apps, impossibility to install software except what mandated by their IT support, etc, so IE 6 made it through at least another 10 years well, despite new versions from Microsoft. Mozilla was created by Netscape before selling to AOL so in a way it's a successor of Netscape but I doubt there was some shared code. They extracted Netscape's email client to a different program, Thunderbird. Then Google Chrome happened and it was faster than Firefox, especially for large JavaScript sites. Not that Firefox was so slow not to be able to use those sites (I kept using Firefox for all those years) but it was faster, it was advertised on Google's search results page so people switched in mass. As a result we had a few years of huge improvements in the speed of JavaScript engines, Chrome, Firefox and every other browser. I think you know what happened next.

skilled 3y ago

They should really start putting out a few more of these, https://stackdiary.com/mozilla-usage-decline-from-2022-to-2023/ https://stackdiary.com/mozilla-usage-decline-from-2022-to-20... 30% of users lost in the last 4+ years and very little work being done on things like the latest CSS properties. Makes me wonder if Google uses this as a means to pay them less. The last contract was in 2020 to this year I think? https://www.zdnet.com/article/sources-mozilla-extends-its-google-search-deal/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/sources-mozilla-extends-its-go...

not_your_vase 3y ago
Google does not want to pay Mozilla less. They don't care about Firefox's market share, it's virtually 0. But in the moment Firefox disappears, Chrome will be undeniably a monopoly. As long as Firefox exists, Google can easily deflect such monopoly claims - they even "encourage and foster" competition on the browser market.
- jjtheblunt 3y ago
  > Chrome will be undeniably a monopoly Isn't Safari by existing at whatever market share still a counterexample to Chrome being a monopoly?
  - pmontra 3y ago
    I can't use Safari on my HP Linux laptop and on my Android phone. Apple doesn't make it for those OSes. That's a choice like any other one. What I don't like is that deny other companies to run their own browser engines on iOS. They have to reskin Safari. Luckily this is going to change soon at least in the EU.
    - jjtheblunt 3y ago
      That’s unrelated to the parent comment that Chrome is an imminent monopoly, though.
- darklycan51 3y ago

habitue 3y ago

Hey, I'm on there

waltbosz 3y ago
Me too. I think I paid $5 for the honor and a poster. I think I received a student discount.

ofrzeta 3y ago

same in the German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Firefox-anzeige-faz.jpg https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Firefox-anzeige-faz.jpg

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
That ad is just ... oof. Either I don't get German advertising (though I speak German) or the ad is poor.
- heywhatupboys 3y ago
  Ads don't have to be hard blasting gangster rap, annoyingly shouting voiceover, and flashing lights. Some cultures prefer modesty and adult looks
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    That doesn't mean it's automatically a good ad, even for the German culture. It could still be a bad ad.
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  You have to consider the target audience. People who read the FAZ are fine with lots of text and probably prefer that style over something flashy. (But I also don't think it is a perfect ad)
schroeding 3y ago
In Germany, Firefox was the most commonly used browser by a huge margin until 2016, when it was overtaken by Chrome[1] - it still has 11% market share (20% on the desktop) compared to the ~3% in the US or world-wide. Those German ad campaigns were quite effective, apparently. :D [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/germany/#monthly-200901-202307 https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/germany/...

chrisrhee 3y ago

Mozilla Foundation places two-page advocacy ad in The New York Times https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2004/12/mozilla-foundation-places-two-page-advocacy-ad-in-the-new-york-times/ https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2004/12/mozilla-foundation-pl... New York Times runs Firefox ad https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/new-york-times-runs-firefox-ad/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/new-york-tim... > The first page of the two-page ad--which is twice as large as originally planned--features the Firefox symbol superimposed over the names of the 10,000 donors My name is somewhere in that mix. I lost the physical newspaper copy at some point in the last 19 years. but it's cool the PDF is still around. Surprised the getfirefox.com domain from the ad still works! In the Battle of the Browsers '04, Firefox Aims at Microsoft https://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/15/technology/in-the-battle-of-the-browsers-04-firefox-aims-at-microsoft.html https://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/15/technology/in-the-battle-... > the early enthusiasm for the preview version of Firefox is a big reason that Internet Explorer's market share has slipped more than 2.5 percentage points in the last five months, to 92.9 percent at the end of October, its first decline since 1999

lstamour 3y ago
You mentioned getfirefox.com and while that was and is the official site, I remember a time (maybe?) when that was registered to a third-party fan of Firefox to promote it who handed it over to Mozilla. That said… I cannot find any evidence to back up this claim after a small bit of Google searching, so I might be wrong. I definitely remember a time after the rebranding was announced but before the full 1.0 launch where the moz website didn’t have an easy or obvious landing page for Firefox because so much website energy was still reserved for the open sourced Mozilla communications suite ;-) It always felt a bit new and edgy to recommend Firefox (Phoenix? Firebird?) back in the old days. Weirdly, there was a time when it was new and edgy to recommend Chrome too. Now it’s probably new and edgy to recommend… ad-blocking? Edge Read Aloud? It was easier when IE provided a common enemy and when Chrome wasn’t the only choice for low performance Android devices, or Safari on iOS. Re third party sites, it’s likely getfirefox was actually always Mozilla’s (they would have known about the name first, of course) so maybe I’m thinking of “getfirebird.com” or something else like that. It’s even possible that I just assumed it was third-party because it redirected to the main Mozilla site for the longest time. And it really probably doesn’t matter anyway, just a digression. :)

Ayesh 3y ago

> Unlock full access (page 2) by uploading documents or with a 30 Day Free Trial Scribd is the Pinterest of PDF files.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

alykhanv 3y ago

I’m in there. Paid $100 and even got a printed version that is framed and on the wall in my office. The team came out with several releases. In the first release my name was quite prominent in the nose of the fox but on the second or third release I got moved into the big white area. I wonder if those early releases are still available.