Topic: Learn from Firefox (Read 1935 times)

Lot's of stuff changes, for instance Google actually lost money on their search engine revenues a few months back which was a shock to them. The difference is everybody looking at m.google with their tiny smartphone screens that aren't big enough to fit any sidebar advertisements, so people stopped paying google for ads.

Big comfortable corporations can start to spiral pretty quickly these days. Looking at all those money transfer corps right now sweating with bitcoin rising. Why give Moneygram $40 plus ripoff exchange rate when you can send bitcoins for $0.01 transfer fee and they receive it in 3-5mins

The chatter doesn't seem to be hurting adoption or price lately. Bitcoin will succeed because of its anarchistic and decentralized nature, not because the Feds can look at the blockchain without a warrant.

great post Chydenius!

Africa is a great place to spread the word...lots of 'poor' people, but they all have cell phones and transact via their cell phones.  hmmm

first, there was netscape, a greedy company who tried to lock up parts of the WWW with their proprietary server software and sell the browser for money. then, microsoft stepped in and crushed them with their $0 software, which was in retrospect one of their best moves - although they tried to commercialize the web with their MSN too, and it played out differently from what they have intended. later on, the netscape company was about to fail and a group started a hugh push to open source the product, that's the mozilla foundation with the mozilla browser. that went fine for some time, but mozilla was too bloated. firefox was an attempt to re-start from ground zero in order to build a browser that is just a browser and nothing more. during that time, they used google as their integrated standard search engine, which brought them a shitload of money every year. therefore, firefox didn't grew out of nothing.

i also don't see many similarities to bitcoin: bitcoin is not the versoin 3.0 of some prior systems. if bitcoin would have been the reduced open source version of a paypal client that went bankrupt, then ok, but not in that way. additionally, there was no NPO in the first place, steering the development. it happened rather disorganized and in the very first beginning, it even stalled for some time and only got more track later on. finally, there is no huge company investing a fixed amount of money into bitcoin's development every year.

Because some influent bastards will put all their influence to make the NYT refuse such an ad
Why? Because Bitcoin->money laundering->terrorism->OMG you want the death of OUR BELOVED COUNTRY!!1!

Well if Firefox could arrange that I don't see why we can't? Not saying it's time for that yet, probably something to consider to go alongside the release of version 1.

December 16th, 2004: a huge ad in the NYT
I'd love to see a Bitcoin giga ad in the tube

I find it rather risky actually... Really. But smart people might provide the necessary security

Remember when everybody (over 50% of all web users) used IE6? As a web developer that sucked.

Somehow Firefox managed to take a huge share of the market in a very quick amount of time.

Similarities between Firefox and Bitcoin:

• Open source
• Popular with tech/geek crowd
• Improvement over existing market leader/s
• Has a message to deliver to the people

It might help to look back at exactly what Firefox did in order to get so popular.

Off the top of my head I can remember a "switch to Firefox" campaign which included fancy images that people used as forum signatures and on their websites. I can remember some webmasters even went so far as to block their site on IE telling users to switch (not recommended).

I don't think this applies to Chrome since they benefited from Google's near unlimited marketing budget.

On this note, the most popular feature Firefox brought to the table was extensions. Yes, Bitcoin is dealing with money and there are security risks, but I think extensions and an extension marketplace would be pretty amazing. Realistically that will probably have to come from a new client rather than the basic one, and there would have to be a team dedicated solely to maintaining this feature.