Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

A couple of days ago, while looking at the WebWare 100 winners, I noticed that the editor called out Maxthon for sort of cheating, they were driving traffic to the voting by incorporating a pop-up advertising the contest right in the Maxthon browser. Today there's a post up at the Maxthon blog bragging about how effective it was.

That got me thinking about what would have happened if Mozilla used that kind of tactic. Can you imagine the hardware meltdown at c|net that would have resulted from 170 million Firefox users all being directed to hit their WebWare voting site?

I don't really know much about internet loads, but I've seen pretty decent sites get taken down by the digg or slashdot effect which probably only amounts to hundreds, maybe a thousand hits per minute? Now, c|net's not some shared hosting $10/mo solution, but what happens when it's tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of hits per minute?

Then again, that's all hypothetical for a couple of reasons. First, we wouldn't get in our users face like that for anything less than a critical security update (where we do actually throw a pop-up advertising the availability of the update.) Rallying the community that opts in to visiting Spread Firefox is completely reasonable. Interrupting 170 million Firefox users for a web poll is not. Second, I think most people would consider that cheating and I think we'd mostly all agree.

What do you think? Should Firefox win online polls at all costs ;-)

(Just kidding. I don't actually expect an answer there.)

Finally, while I think it's cool that Firefox got enough votes to be listed as a top 100 application (and apparently registered in the top total 10 vote-getters,) does it really say anything interesting when pretty much all of the browsers made it into the same top 100. It's pretty awesome that c|net was able to get nearly 2 million people to vote and to narrow down from many thousands of apps and sites to 100, but without some kind of public ranking within that 100 or at least within the various categories, it doesn't really inform people as much as it lets all the top players claim "winning" status.