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January 14, 2004

Value of Firebird?

I was thinking about how much Firebird might be worth if I was paying for it as a commercial software package. Most browsers are in the $30-40 range. Given the amount of time I spend using it however, and how good it is, my assessment is that it's probably worth at least a hundred dollars a year. Maybe more. To me, it's worth at least as much as Visual Studio.NET, which costs a lot more per year (in MSDN subscriptions).

I'd donate to Firebird if I weren't already contributing over 40 hours a week to its development ;-)

Do you find Firebird useful? Help support Mozilla by donating, if you can! You can also donate through The Mozilla Store when you order CDs and other merchandise.

Posted by ben at January 14, 2004 2:13 AM

Comments

I find Firebird increadibly useful, although I wish I could get the DOM inspector working in 0.7. Indeed, its power and flexibility helped my team win in our group project presentations late last year. As soon as I find out what the prize is (hopefully money), I'll donate a decent portion.

Posted by: Darren Winsper at January 14, 2004 7:44 AM

Darren, why not download the latest nightly? It has the DOM Inspector built in and appears to work fine.

Posted by: Hampton Maxwell at January 14, 2004 8:48 PM

Oo, how handy :) I may wait for 0.8 though, then I can just get it off Debian. I don't need it at the moment since I'm not doing any web coding for around 2 or 3 weeks.

Posted by: Darren Winsper at January 15, 2004 3:58 AM

Ben, where do you get the $30-$40 range?

AFAIK, the four major browsers (IE, Moz./Netscape/Firebird, Opera and Safari) aren't sold a la carte.

Posted by: Joe Grossberg at January 15, 2004 3:59 PM

Opera is $39 USD and OmniWeb is $29.95 USD.

Posted by: Steven Garrity at January 15, 2004 5:32 PM

Thx.

I didn't realize anyone actually paid for Opera or used OmniWeb.

Not flamebait, just honesty.

Unlike pop-up ads, my brain just filters out banner ads, at this point.

Posted by: Joe Grossberg at January 16, 2004 9:43 AM

Just gave $50, Ben. Hope others will meet or beat my amount.

Posted by: Ray Birks at January 16, 2004 1:03 PM

I'm hanging out for a Firebird t-shirt to become available to make my donation - Ben is this on the cards?

Posted by: Ash at January 16, 2004 5:03 PM

Yes, we want a Firebird tshirt. It's likely that new Mozilla tshirts will become available first... but I would expect Firebird tshirts to be available by 1.0.

Posted by: Ben at January 16, 2004 5:46 PM

Nice, I could use a Firebird T-shirt!

Posted by: Robert Accettura at January 18, 2004 3:04 PM

quick question ... ive updated to adobe acrobat 6 pro and ive noticed that firebird sometimes has trouble loading and unloading pdf's when viewed through it.... is this because of the clunkyness of acrobat 6? or is it because of the way firebird is made???

thanks
-Paul

Posted by: Paul at January 20, 2004 10:28 PM

Ha, yeah I would love Firebird T-Shirts!!! Keep up the great work Ben :-)

Posted by: Jafe at January 21, 2004 9:00 PM

Yeah a Firebird t-shirt would rule...

oh and so does the browser.

Posted by: Ryan at January 25, 2004 1:19 AM

Any ideas how many users of FB exist? What would happen if a LARGE percentage of that number donated US$5.00? I'd think twice before plunking down US$50, but US$5 is a near-no-brainer. If the FB home page had some exhortation to that effect ("if everybody who uses FB donated US$5, then there would be US$nnnnn to help promote development) I'd like to think many would donate. In other words, go for volume over donation size. But I don't know the numbers well enough to know whether this would work well.

Same goes for the other Gecko platforms. I use Camino and the suite in addition to FB. No way I could drop US$50 on each, but a smaller amount, sure.

Posted by: Joel at January 26, 2004 12:32 PM

[*Deciding to place money in approximate location of mouth and finding foot there already*] Went to the two Moz donation spots and it looks like all donations go to general Moz development and aren't targeted for specific projects (e.g. suite, FB, Camino). Is this accurate? Is it better (and possible) to "vote with one's wallet" for a particular project, or just feed some funds into the big kitty?

Posted by: Joel at January 26, 2004 10:55 PM

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