Skyrocket.be

While writing the previous post I made a staggering discovery. Spreadfirefox.com, the premier site dedicated to promoting the o-so-popular alternative browser, doesn’t have a single link to the firefox homepage or a downloadlink for firefox on their homepage. They are there for marketing firefox though, they say it themselves.

As a small, non-profit organization, the Mozilla Foundation has very limited resources at its disposal to market Firefox to the world. SpreadFirefox was created to fill this void, and was founded on the same principles of community involvement that drive the development and testing of Firefox. We believe there is nothing that a large community of enthusiastic volunteers can’t accomplish, and this site exists to unite the community into one cohesive marketing force that even competitors with unlimited resources can’t compete with. For more information, see our original announcement.

Ok, I agree that the site is dedicated to people looking for marketing material for promoting the browser but still it’s a little silly they don’t offer a link to the product they are marketing. The site is run by several members of the core Firefox and mozilla team. Maybe they have a reason they didn’t link there but I can’t think of one really. Can you?

Firefox is on the road to becoming a serious threat for MSIE for the most popular browser. Recent studies by XiTi, a french buro for market research, show that Firefox now has over 20% average marketshare in Europe and 15% in the US. A good evolution i’d say, now lets only hope Microsoft gets their act together and offers a product which doesn’t cause us webdesigners hours of frustration. Cross your fingers.

Via http://www.spreadfirefox.com

Jason Parker at Download.com recently posted a list of his favourite Firefox extensions. While i do agree that there are alot of nice extensions he listed I do have some questions with some of his picks. Most of them are personal taste really but i wonder what Forecastfox and Foxytunes are doing there. They really don’t add any value to my browser experience, especially since most of the forecasts they give overhere are wrong (and i live about 2km from a weather station, Kleine Brogel, Belgium). Foxytunes is probably nice for people who actually live in their browser, i’d rather use the hotkeys on my keyboard to control my music than another toolbar in Firefox.

Amongst my favourite extension are Webdeveloper Toolbar (Hey, i’m a webdesigner remember), Tabbrowser Preferences, DownloadThemAll, Customize Google, IETab and Sage. I have a bunch of other extensions installed but those are the ones i put to use most frequently.