Tim Beyers, over at The Motley Fool says about the IBM endorsement of Firefox
I've been in and around tech for near 15 years now, so I find IBM's commitment staggering. That's because IT managers, like mutual fund managers, tend to act as a group. This endorsement could very well start a chain reaction across corporate America.
Tim concludes with
Bottom line: Open source is a lot foxier today than it was yesterday. The discerning Fool will take heart and look for opportunities to profit as a result.Posted by asa at May 13, 2005 01:01 PM
"Open source is a lot foxier today than it was yesterday."
Don't tell Blake about this one. :-)
"Open source is a lot foxier today than it was yesterday." Yes indeed. No pun intended.
Posted by: JMack on May 13, 2005 02:52 PMOff-topic for this entry, but it's the latest one so...
Consider the following situation: A fairly-newbie Firefox user, let us call him Dave, hears about Kettle v2.0, the cool new extension everybody's talking about that allows you to make a cup of tea from Firefox's toolbar (and new in version 2, support for toast, crumpets and muffins).
Excited, he ventures boldly towards Mozilla Update where he's met by a message informing him that a new version of Firefox is available and offering friendly advice to keep Firefox up-to-date.
As discussed previously, Dave is a "fairly-newbie" Firefox user, not one of those guys who spend their free time loitering in the MozillaZine Forums. So Dave was unaware until now that a new version was available.
But he was aware that Firefox had an "automatic update" feature, which appears in the form of a red disc at the top-right of his Firefox window whenever a new version of Firefox is available. Perplexed, Dave produces his menu-bar-reading glasses from his shirt pocket and inspects the area closely. Alas, there is no red disc. "That's strange", he says to himself, "there must be something wrong with my Firefox.".
Dave decides to click the convenient "Upgrade Now" link and waits for the Firefox Update window to appear, as it has done thrice before. Instead, the Download Manager appears, but Dave allows it to continue and, after a short time, an icon labelled "Firefox Setup 1.0.4" appears on his desktop. "Ah", he thinks, "Firefox normally does this when it updates itself. I shall wait a little longer then see if Firefox has finished upgrading itself."
After returning from making his cup of tea by hand, and slightly disgruntled because of it, Dave dutifully closes and restarts Firefox, as he remembers doing the last three times Firefox updated itself. When Firefox restarts, Dave visits Mozilla Update once more, hoping this time to avoid manual tea-making forever. But once more he is greeted warmly by an instruction to upgrade, the same instruction he saw all those minutes ago. "I thought I clicked Upgrade Now", he thinks. "Oh well." Dave clicks "Upgrade Now" again, with the same result.
Dave never did install Toaster v2.0 with support for toast, crumpets and muffins and continued making his tea manually.
And the moral of the story, boys and girls, is: always enable automatic updates before locking people out of Mozilla Update.
This way Firefox updates itself as advertised and users don't have to learn to upgrade manually. I'm not saying "Unlock Mozilla Update", but that it's OK not to activate automatic updates immediately after a release, as long as you don't let the user know they're missing anything.
Posted by: Greg K Nicholson on May 13, 2005 07:38 PM