Mozilla launched "Rock Your Firefox" Website
Rock Your Firefox, the website created by Mozilla to feature reviews, feedback, and insights from people around the Web who are using Firefox Add-ons to make their online experience better. New highlights, relevant and helpful Firefox Add-ons will be added every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
The one “Featured Add-on” on launch day, 11 March 2010, is Yoono, a social networking add-on with over 3.8M downloads. Yoono Add-on put popular social networking and IM (Instant Messaging), such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Friendfeed, AIM and Yahoo IM, on Firefox sidebar. There is also a desktop version of Yoono.
According to Mozilla regarding the new website:
- Why Rock Your Firefox: Over a hundred million people worldwide have downloaded nearly 2 billion add-ons. We created Rock Your Firefox as a way to showcase the amazing depth, breadth, and power of Firefox Add-ons in a simple and friendly way that even my mom would understand.
- How it began: Rock Your Firefox was originally a Facebook application launched by Mozilla in 2007 to let add-on fans share their favorite add-ons with their friends and discover new ways to customize Firefox. Although we retired this application several months ago, we liked its strong branding so much that we decided to revive it for this exciting new site.
The success of Firefox undoubtedly linked to its vast array of quality add-ons. When Firefox first came into the scene, it was promoted as a simple and fast browser, unlike the bloated Mozilla browser at that time. Then came the add-ons, which became one of the major reasons for many of the people switching from Microsoft IE (Internet Explorer).
People who use Firefox are generally more technologically aware and willing to try something new something better, that is what made them switched from IE in the first place. When Google’s Chrome first appeared, it was fast but too basic for practical use. Then it had gotten more polished, a small number of people started to switched. One of the major reasons that kept Firefox users from switching to Chrome was the Firefox add-ons. But now, the number and the quality of Google Chrome Extensions has improved so dramatically, Mozilla should start to worry.
Firefox is no long the lean mean browsing machine that it was famous for. Its gecko rendering engine is getting old and bloated. In many speed tests, Chrome has consistently out run Firefox in many areas.
Mozilla’s Add-on for Firefox is already a well established website. It already has some Featured, Recommended, Popular lists on the front page. Is this “Rock Your Firefox” a duplicated effort?
Is this new Rock Your Firefox website a desperate attempt to raise interests of Firefox by highlighting popular and essential add-ons, which Chrome do not yet have, to make as many users as possible hook on Firefox and its add-ons before they switch over to Chrome?
Speed of browser has always been important. In the past it was the issue with internet connection speed, though now broadband has become a normal, speed remain a major issue, because the content itself has became so much more complicated, with Ajax and Flash and Videos streaming etc; and people open multiple tabs at one time. While Firefox is still a very good browser, it should put more efforts into its fundamentals first, security and speed.
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Chrome also has privacy issue. People worry that Google track their net activities through Chrome.