Firefox: The alternative history

The success of this initiative led Ross and Dotzler to start SpreadFirefox site, a community marketing portal that encourages and rewards people for telling their friends, technical departments and schools about the open source browser.

"We launched SpreadFirefox with preview release, with the challenge of a million downloads in 10 days, we got a million in just over four days. In 30 days we had about 10 million downloads."

The SpreadFirefox community has grown considerably since the launch of the Web site, with many users joining the affiliate programme — where they can add a Firefox button to their Web site or email signature and get points every time someone clicks on the link, according to Dotzler.

"The community sprung from a couple of thousand people [in September 2004] to 30,000 people by the time 1.0 was released. It's up to about 110,000 people now [June 2005]. A non-trivial percentage of these — between a third and a half — are participating in the affiliate program."

October 2004: Mozilla Foundation calls on supporters to chip in to buy a full page advert in the New York Times for the launch of Firefox 1.0 in November. A quarter of a million dollars is raised in its 10-day ad fundraising campaign, with donations from 10,000 individuals.

After the success of the Firefox preview release, Dotzler and Ross decided they wanted to do something "even more ambitious" for the 1.0 release — an ad in the New York Times.

"The ad was not to go get Firefox, but was an ad celebrating Firefox. Our gimmick was that if you contribute to this we'll put your name in the ad — it would be celebrating our community of users," he says.

"We were both marketing the project and marketing ourselves. We were showing what we could do, allowing us to compete with commercial organisations. Our main competitor has no problem pumping 10 million dollars into a TV ad. We wanted to show that grassroots marketing can be successful."

November 2004: Firefox 1.0 is released.

December 2004: New York Times  ad is printed.

Even though the New York Times ad ran later than expected, Dotzler does not consider this a problem.

"Any community project is bound to have delays. Interestingly, some of the press we had about delays resulted in the downloads going up — people wanted to find out what Firefox is," he said.

May 2005: IBM encourages its employees to use Firefox, by letting them download it from the company's internal servers and getting support from the company's helpdesk staff.

Dotzler was pleased with this news and says that it is likely to persuade other companies to take the step. "It bodes well for other smaller organisations to feel more confident about supporting Firefox," he says.

Dotzler says the first step that companies are likely to take when migrating to Firefox is to offer users a choice of browsers, while they work to make internal applications work on both IE and Firefox. Now Firefox has now reached a significant market share, companies are more likely to make all internal applications work on both Microsoft and more standards-compliant browsers.

"I am confident that when companies embark on new systems, they will have a dual browser strategy. When they have a virus that affects one browser, they want to have two browsers. There is no doubt that people are working today on planning the next generation of projects to be cross browser."

ZDNet UK also spoke to Asa Dotzler about the rise of Firefox in the enterprise, future marketing campaigns and how the Mozilla Foundation plans to target less tech-savvy consumers.
To read the full interview, click here.

To see photos of the Mozilla offices and some of the people ZDNet UK met there, click here.