Mozilla/FireFox are popular, so now they get ads

Wired writes about the fact that Mozilla/FireFox are each gaining in popularity (to the detriment of IE) so much so that finally pop-up ad writers, as well as eventually spyware and the like are changing their tactics so as to include these browsers as well.

Before it was okay to only go after IE because they had the huge market share and therefore going after that would get the largest userbase. But now that userbase is spread out, Mozilla and FireFox have a legitimately large userbase that it requires people (both good and bad) to sit up and take notice.

Do note that there is still a significant advantage in going with FireFox or Mozilla - and that is speed of fixes for holes discovered in the product. IE is notoriously full of holes and notoriously slow to get patched - part of why there is so much spyware for it (not to discount the fact that it is even more due to its sheer popularity and userbase up until now).
But that is going to happen with FireFox and Mozilla too now that they are popular (and we talked about this being the case months ago). But they can and will respond faster to the exposed holes and patches are put out within days instead of weeks or months.

Now, if only FireFox:
1) was as fast loading/window switching as Safari
2) allowed Emacs-like keyboard controls in the textboxes like Safari
3) allowed arrow key niceties like Safari in the URL bar (in Safari, if I click in the URL bar with the mouse, or go there with Command-L, I can then press the down arrow and end up at the end of the string, or the up arrow and end up at the start of the string - makes it great for editing the URL quickly and without the mouse - FireFox doesn't have this)
4) Had iSpell in the textboxes without a plugin that you have to manually run... like Safari

If FireFox had all of that, and didn't crash as much as Safari, then I would gladly use it on my Powerbook. For now I use Safari for most everything, and FireFox mostly for Gmail.

On the PC I use FireFox for nearly everything and IE for sites that have to have it (ActiveX controls for work related issues).

Posted by Eric at March 1, 2005 09:43 AM | TrackBack