UsageWatch.org

The SpreadFirefox campaign
Since the launch of version 1.0, the 9th of November, efforts to promote Firefox and foster its adoption beyond the web developers community have multiplied. The community-based SpreadFirefox campaign has grown to 25.000 volunteer marketers, has banners and promotional buttons advertising Firefox on around 100.000 web sites and significant coverage in blogosphere, as well as in the more traditional medias. The most spectacular action has been to collect 250.000$ from the community in response to the invitation to donate money to finance a full-page ad on the New York Times. And the SpreadFirefox community is working on the layout and wording of the page itself.

Spectacular adoption rate
In these first days, the community-based SpreadFirefox campaign has had some spectacular results. As of today, November the 19th, Firefox has been downloaded over 4.5 M times (see counters on SpreadFirefox web site). Reports from webmasters of web professionals’ sites indicate that the number of visitors using Firefox browser is on the rise, overtaking in some cases IE. Web Analystics firm WebSideStory (via LinuxInsider) has witnessed a decrease in the number of US users using IE to view the sites it analyses: they were 95.5% in June, 93.7% in September, 92.9% at the end of October; and a gradual increase in the number of Firefox users, that it estimates to be at 3%. A very rough projection, using the Computer Industry Almanc figure of 185 M US Internet Users, would put the number of Firefox users at approximately 5.5 M.

Will this spectacular adoption rate of about 500.000 new Firefox users per day continue? And for how long?

These are obviously very difficult questions to answer. What is certain is that, for this trend to continue, Firefox has to grow beyond its technical home base and engage the larger community of Internet users. The Mozilla Foundations is very much aware of that as this quote from Mitchel Barker, Mozilla Foundation's president, clearly indicates: "our entire start page is new, and that reflects our ongoing goal of appealing to the general consumer market". 

The browser market is saturated, every PC has a browser; it is dominated by one product, Internet Explorer; web services and web sites are built and designed for the dominant browser and most Internet users seem to be relatively happy with IE. Certainly, IE's limitations are known and no significant new developments are in view, while Firefox represents real progress and innovation not only because of its features and of its development processes, but also for what it represents as a collective achievement by the open software community.

Will these arguments be enough to engender a strong uptake by the majority of pragmatic Internet users? In this respect, are the SpreadFirefox initiatives rightly targeted?

My feeling is that the campaign should make a larger effort to support more virality, in the sense of more direct - personalised - one-to-one sharing between Firefox users and their friends and relations. This form of virality is a necessary complement to more traditional mass media communication which diffuses more impersonal, generic representations about Firefox. Ideally, Firefox users should be in the position to give their friends a tangible proof of how Firefox use empowers them, just like it happened when people sent their friends and relations an email using HotMail or with a PayPal payment. These emails had the advantage of presenting the service in context - HotMail in the context of an email conversation; PayPal in the context of an economic transaction. At the same time, they created awareness, interpretation, and even more importantly a situation that favours identification and invites imitation. In this direct form virality bridges the gap between being exposed and trying out a new service, at a degree that is unreachable by mass media communication. Firefox is an experience, and a friend's experience of it provides one of the best possible proofs.

Assuming that this approach makes sense, how could it be implemented?
A signature, however nice, at the end of the message remains external to the main context. It is in fact the text of the message itself, plus surrounding information like the address used, the object or the time the message was sent that create the context. If the signature appeared on a webmail, there would at least be the minimal context of the browser, but not everybody is even aware of that. The best idea that comes to my mind is a personal email sent to friends that contains a link to an interesting page that should be viewed using Firefox. But I'm not sure that is such a good idea.