Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

Asa, I have never been ashamed of or hid my love for Firefox and Mozilla.

However, I must say, I am opposed to these kinds of weekly anthropomorphic "blow-by-blow" market share narrations. I dislike when analysts talk about the stock market as if it were a living person with feelings, hopes and dreams. Agglomerations are abstract entities, even more abstract than people are, but never mind that. Agglomerations don't have "an up day" or a "down day" and the reality of the market is that "it" does wobble (it's hard even to call a market or a market share an "it"). This wobble is not interesting at all. Weekly wobbles, daily wobbles and arguably even quarterly wobbles are meaningless and irrelevant. And because the markets are 100% psychological (because all trades are based on perceived value, and all value judgments are based on the state of mind and nothing else (and this is why the culture is so important)), focusing on these kind of market minutiae produces market instability of a bad kind (as opposed to a good kind of market instability that is caused by "disruptive innovations" or morally significant market shifts).

I think it's not controversial to say that mind share is a type of a market, just like the stock market in many important ways, so what I say about the stock market applies to mind share.

I love Firefox, but I think the narrations should focus on the great job developers are doing, on the great job QA and bugzilla teams are doing, and perhaps even the great job the corporate officers are doing (but with concrete examples please, so it's believable and not just empty flattery or simply a re-attribution of the developers' merit to the CEO), or focus on the great community of users and extension developers, and so on, not in any particular order. These are far more weighty subjects to talk about than the weekly percentage shifts. :)

I believe there is enough honest to God substance within the Mozilla community that we don't have to resort to these types of stories. There are things that don't oscillate at all, at least for me. For example, an Open Web is equally important every day, no matter what market share anyone has at any given hour. Since it doesn't wobble, it's always good to talk about it and it's good to talk about anything that threatens to break it. In other words, I prefer a focus on values and fundamentals and not a focus on weekly operational shifts. Are the customers happy? Are the values solid? If yes, then who cares if the market share went down 1, 2 or even 25%. It's not important as long as the good work can continue.

Firefox is definitely getting the market share of power users. However, it still takes a lot of get the average joe to even acknowledge firefox. It is unfortunate but true. I have seen whole technology departments at top universities still stuck on IE7, with a mandate that no new browers are to be installed on university department computers.

Yeah, but you're a fucking arse and Firefox is the shits. I mean really really fucking awful.

And those aren't general-web stats.

Truth: so you know, saying something is "the shit" means exactly the opposite of saying something is just "shit". In other words, you're praising Firefox in your post, which may not be what you had on mind.