| Firefox Community: Sickly Out of Control | Today's Top Stories | ||||||||||||
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(Column) - As much as I appreciate Firefox for defeating Internet Explorer in the enthusiast market, and as much as I’m pleased with its continual success, the Firefox community is too frustrating. I agree that Firefox has literally changed the way we browse the Internet, but that doesn’t mean that we have to affectionate the browser uncontrollably and recklessly. I’m proud of the community that pitched in enough donations for Firefox to get a full-page advertisement in The New York Times print edition, and I’m delighted to see them think of creative ideas for promotion, but reporting total downloads every so often and immaturely degrading Internet Explorer is ridiculous. The thing with these numbers is that they are misleading at best, and the only thing they accomplish is immature fanboyism. It’s a fact that Internet Explorer is inferior to Firefox with its extensive collection of extensions and ability to support qualified web standards, but does the community must resort to using third-class promotional tactics with total downloads number? It gets annoying after a while to see news publishers carry, "Firefox Downloads Exceed 150 Million" or similar headlines time and again. I suppose we can "thank" the absurdly immature Firefox community who has to resort to shameful campaigns to garner media attention. Seriously everyone, enough is enough. I’m not saying promoting Firefox is wrong. In fact, Firefox is one of the few applications that must be installed on every single machine, but come on, has innovation disappeared in Firefox that the only way to attract media, and thus free promotion, is to report total downloads every so often. It certainly appears that way, and it’s disgusting. There is so much wrong with those numbers that they are an inaccurate scale of measurement. For starters, I have downloaded a copy of the latest Firefox version a week ago, and have used the same installation file to update seven computers. Since I was upgrading my systems, how does that qualify me as a unique downloader? It doesn’t. Let’s not forget that I downloaded the file once and used it seven times. What if I download Firefox, dislike it and uninstall the application from my system? Will those numbers decline? Absolutely not! Though there are at least a few more reasons that prove the inaccuracy of total downloads, these are enough to suggest my argument. Related Articles: - Subscribe to CoolTechZone.com's RSS Feed What I recommend is that the Firefox community doesn’t get carried away with the whole "open-source is eternal" argument and its supposed battle against capitalism. Firefox is great, no doubt, but if total downloads is what it takes to promote Firefox, there’s clearly something wrong with the picture. Release updates, innovative extensions and add interesting features (not necessary by default) to promote with value. If I download it as a beginner based on numbers and dislike it, I would call it hype, and the way Firefox is headed, I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes another over-hyped application with nothing of value. |
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