Blake’s post is about something I see for a long time. A Firefox complex. Opera is the most vulnerable, but there are others. A lot of them.
Firefox is a great success. It’s easy to spread the word about it, it’s easy to promote it, it’s easy to use it, and a lot people are happy with it.
One would think that it’s a great example of a free competitor. It should give hope to other projects, saying “hey! It’s possible to win this race!”.
But not everyone is happy with us (and I’m not talking about proprietary monopolist). Blake is right, that most of them fails to understand the reason of our success. And with time passing by, they’re trying to invent some reasons, which mixed with their frustration leads to anger.
From one point, I must admit that I never saw such devotion in the product as we see around Firefox. But I believe that it’s because we have so much non-coders as supporters, and with more supporters, the bigger the chance is that you’ll find some stupid fanatics around 🙁
From the second, I never thought that Opera will start to compete us, leaving IE, so early. They’re trying to deprecate Firefox’s value as an application, it’s functionality and Gecko’s power.
They fail to see what is a strength of Firefox, and because of it, they can’t understand what are the weak points of their beloved browser. So they’re doing some negative advertisement, saying in a first paragraph of any site to some poor, IE user, that Firefox is weak, slow and is similar to IE (intends to be offensive here), and Opera has much more buttons to click on something called “tabs”.
Hooray, to smart PR 🙂
I wonder what they will do if Opera 8 won’t be a “huge success”… (and to be honest – I doubt it will)
2 replies on “Firefox complex”
I think Opera should be very happy about Firefox’ success; as I can see, their marketshare is increasing since people become aware that there *are* different browsers. They should be happy, because Firefox’ success pushes web developers to use standards and lord knows Opera needs such websites much more then Gecko. On the other hand I can understand them, Mozilla is threating their very business model, especially with the upcoming releases of Minimo. Opera is a very fine browsermaker and they deserve to live on, but I don’t see a too bright future for them with their current business model.
> I wonder what they will do if Opera 8 won’t be a “huge success”…
Fiddle de-dee. I’m not going to think about it. Tomorrow will be another day. 😉