The ad was initially expected to run within a few weeks of the launch of Firefox 1.0 in the beginning of November, but publication was delayed due to the technical challenge of fitting the names of all the donors onto a single broadsheet page.
The first page of the two-page ad -- twice as large as originally planned -- features the Firefox symbol superimposed over the names of the 10,000 donors, and a line about the browser. "Are you fed up with your web browser?" says the ad. "You're not alone. We want you to know that there is an alternative."
The second page features the Firefox symbol, some information about Firefox and quotes from satisfied customers.
This is not the first Firefox ad in print -- a separate fundraising campaign in Germany raised over €48,000, the majority of which was used to fund a full-page ad in a German national newspaper two weeks ago.
Despite the delay in the ad, both the preview and final release of Firefox have attracted a lot of interest. David McGuinness, a donator to the New York Times campaign, said that he hopes the ad will further boost the number of downloads.
"Personally, I think the timing couldn't have been better, we've now got 11 million downloads, and the download rate is still going strong. This could be the boost that takes us to 20 million," said McGuinness.
Talkback
I use firefox at home all the time now!
But at work we are being moved to a corp pc build!
I need to convince them that Firefox is corporate software (as they think Internet explorer is!!!)
Else i will lose it at work!
Now we need to go further, something like... "Are you fed up with your operating system? You're not alone. We want you to know that there *is* an alternative... Rediscover your computer and unshackle yourself from big brother.
At my workplace I installed Mozilla FireFox and use it instead of Microsoft Internet Explorer (the baseline standard on desktops) whenever I browse anything other than the internal web site. It was too easy to figure out the proxy server address despite their attempts to hide it from the users and with that piece of information MFF can communicate with the Internet. I timed the page load times of both MSIE and MFF on the same web page and MSIE was consistently slower.