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Download Firefox, Feed a Red Panda 90

Posted by samzenpus from the have-a-sandwich dept.
KenW writes "Mozilla has launched a new marketing campaign to promote Firefox: adopting red pandas and putting them on live webcams. The company wants to underline the fact that the red panda is the mascot for its open source browser via a new section on its site called Firefox Live. It's clear that Mozilla is trying to think of new ways to promote its browser ahead of the launch of Firefox 4. The company has been struggling recently as Firefox steadily loses share to Google Chrome."

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Download Firefox, Feed a Red Panda More

Download Firefox, Feed a Red Panda

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  • Everytime you download... (Score:4, Funny)

    by IronSight ( 1925612 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @11:31AM (#34473970)
    Chrome, god kills another red panda?
  • I think of a fox that's ON FIRE and nothing else. Damn pandas.

    • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

      by larry bagina ( 561269 )
      I think of a fresh fucked fox in a forest fire. Now you're probably wondering: fox the animal or fox the hot piece of ass? It's both, actually. I'm a furry.

  • They look tasty.... (Score:3)

    by Dexter Herbivore ( 1322345 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @11:33AM (#34474008) Journal
    Oh wait, they mean feed the Red Panda, not feed me. Pity, they look delicious.
    • I wasn't sure. The picture here was only a face (and you can tell nothing about its edibility by a face), so I went and did a Google search, and found the Red Panda on Wikipedia. Apparently, they use to classify these similar to raccoons. That may be because they tasted similar. Now the diet of the animal may indicate it should be seasoned slightly differently. Might try substituting the Worcestershire for soy sauce, and juniper berries for bamboo shoots & watercress. The Zane Grey cookbook I have

      • the local parks prohibit taking their squirrels, and the ones in the forest are diseased.

        What makes you think that the ones in the parks are any less diseased than the forest ones? Are you sure that the parks prohibit the taking of "their" squirrels. Because if they assert property rights over the squirrels, then they also assume responsibility for every squirrel bite, every purloined sandwich, and every (allegedly) spread bacterium. A little bit of judicious enquiry ("I've been bitten by one of your squirrels in your park ; who do I send the writ to?") and I'm sure they'll rapidly assert that

  • This is ridiculous. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    When I'm using Firefox, I don't give the slightest shit about red pandas.

  • Struggling? (Score:3)

    by bunratty ( 545641 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @11:44AM (#34474170)
    The company has been struggling? It seems to me they're doing very well. Perhaps they've lost 1-2% usage share over the past two years, but Chrome is mostly stealing share from IE, not Firefox. Firefox share is holding steady at between 20 to 30%.

    • That's if you're talking large numbers. There are certainly smaller numbers who are leaving FF in favor of Chrome because of problems with Firefox.

      An example would be the old default settings problem in the file handling.
      If you click on a direct link to a CSV file and specify a program to open it with (e.g. OpenOffice Calc) and check the "always perform this action" checkbox it will work in the future.
      But if Firefox receives such a file as a header attachment the same setting will be ignored.
      This is due to

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by arth1 ( 260657 )

        That's if you're talking large numbers. There are certainly smaller numbers who are leaving FF in favor of Chrome because of problems with Firefox.

        Or because of speed. For certain ajax-heavy apps, Firefox can be rather sluggish.

        In my case, it's a problem with Firefox, though -- it uses its own font rendering engine which isn't DPI-aware. Firefox simply doesn't work well on high DPI displays. I have to go in the prefs and change the font settings for multiple fonts for each and every locale I use, every time I switch displays.
        That it also eats up a huge part of the screen real estate for the menu + toolbar + bookmarks bar + tabs + status bar is anot

        • Re:Struggling? (Score:4, Informative)

          by Lennie ( 16154 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @01:24PM (#34475822)

          FF4 will be released in Q1, it solves all these issues.

      • How does smaller number of users leaving FF in favor of Chrome equate to Mozilla struggling? They seem to be doing great. If they started having unprofitable quarters, perhaps someone could say that Mozilla is struggling, but not because they've lost some amount of usage share. In fact, I think they have more users [amuir.org] and are making more profit [lockergnome.com] than ever. (The usage share can drop even as they gain more users because there are more people using the Internet every month.) They're hardly struggling.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Lennie ( 16154 )

        "There are certainly smaller numbers who are leaving FF in favor of Chrome because of problems with Firefox."

        Their are also certainly other parts of the world where Firefox is increasing in marketshare, what is your point ?

        It's smaller number.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by arth1 ( 260657 )

      It's not the number of users, it's the amount of income. From things like embedded browsers and purchased support. Which, from what I can tell, isn't doing as well as the competition.

    • Err, Chrome is eating into Firefox, not IE. The IE users are computer illiterates who think the blue buttons means "the internet."

      Right now, Chrome is an impressive piece of software. Soon they'll ship a built-in PDF viewer (goodbye Adobe exploits) and have started sandboxing Flash. Its also fast and stable.

      Firefox is the current IE6. Its bloaty, slow, and mismanaged (no h.264 for html5). Of course you may disagree with that, but even as a loyal Firefox user since the days of Phoenix I'm really tempted to

  • Shiny new toy syndrome (Score:5, Interesting)

    by denis-The-menace ( 471988 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @11:44AM (#34474172)

    I think one of the reasons Chrome is affecting Firefox is the "Shiny new toy syndrome" and FF lack of willingness to support business needs.
    If using Chrome becomes as "cool" as it was when Firefox started, then Firefox will be in trouble.

    On the business needs side, Firefox is still stalling on:
    -an official MSI package for Windows platform (BTW: If FF MSI cannot auto-update, corps will love it more. It's a control thing...)
    -official, built-in, GPO support
    -official, built-in automated add-on installation

    On the JavaScript side, however, FF is doing pretty good lately: http://arewefastyet.com/ [arewefastyet.com]

    • I dislike chrome (actually Chromium).

      It's hard for me to say why exactly but there are certain annoyances, like closing the whole window when I close a tab, or not having a convenient way to access bookmarks, or inability to arrange the "opera speeddial" clone the way I like, and so on.

      I think I'll stick with Mozilla Netscape or Firefox or SeaMonkey for now.

      • Is Mozilla Netscape seriously still around? I could have sworn the split off was the creation of FireFox (or Phoenix, from memory).

      • I've switched to chrome at work, mainly because it works better with the firewall... though there are some things I miss, and the F12(firebug) in Firefox has a better UI than the CTRL+SHIFT+I developer tools in Chrome... having to go to the bottom of the screen for the element selector button, to go back to the page to select an element is annoying, there's a few other annoyances as well, some parts work better though... GP is right IMO because the GPO/MSI integration is very important, even having it as a

    • I recently switched to Chrome because it DOESN'T creep its way up to the 2 gig memory usage mark after awhile like Firefox has recently been doing on my machine. It had nothing to do with how shiny Chrome is.

    • I dislike chrome (actually non-google Chromium).

      It's hard for me to say why exactly but there are certain annoyances, like closing the whole window when I close the last tab, or not having a convenient way to save bookmarks, or inability to arrange the "opera speed dial" clone the way I like, and so on.

      I think I'll stick with Mozilla Netscape or Firefox or SeaMonkey for now.

  • Not really (Score:3)

    by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @11:47AM (#34474218) Homepage

    The company has been struggling recently as Firefox steadily loses share to Google Chrome.

    Near as I can tell, Firefox market share has been at a standstill. Chrome has grown at around the pace IE has dropped. Whether that means users have gone IE -> Chrome or IE -> Firefox and Firefox -> Chrome is a bit open, but they're not losing. However with Chrome in the 10-15% range you have to ask how long they'll keep backing Firefox and just go all out on developing Chrome.

    • Google backs Firefox because Firefox uses Google as the default search engine. If Google stops backing Firefox, Firefox may switch to another default search engine, and Google would lose money because its ads will get fewer hits.

      Besides, if what Google wants is strong browsers for which to develop complex applications, the best way to achieve that is through competition between differing browsers. Chrome must improve because there are some things that Firefox does better, and Firefox must improve because th

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tsa ( 15680 )

        Interesting that you don't even mention IE.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )

        Well if they drop it completely. But I assume what they get paid is related to their market share or hits generated, if Google can move 1% from Firefox to Chrome they pay "themselves" instead of paying Mozilla and that's money saved. And they get people using a Google product strengthening their brand, while Mozilla is someone else's brand. They also have the freedom to direct development and link Chrome harder to Google services in ways Mozilla might not accept, like pushing H.264 support for the video tag

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by e70838 ( 976799 )
        Google needs competition to avoid monopoly problems. Too many people would like to kill Google. Their single protection is to have real competition.
        I think this is their main reason to back Firefox.
        • Google is closest to a monopoly in terms of search engines, not browsers. Their competition in the search space is Bing (Microsoft), Yahoo, and Ask.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Khenke ( 710763 )

      However with Chrome in the 10-15% range you have to ask how long they'll keep backing Firefox and just go all out on developing Chrome.

      I bet Google don't care if Chrome+FF=biggest browser or just Chrome=biggest browser.
      What Google want is stable browsers that evolve to the better, not backwards closed unstable IE6.

      The more choice the users have to see their ads, the more ads the users will see and the more money Google will make.
      My bet on why they started Chrome is that FF needed competition so FF6=IE6 don't happen. That is why I think Google will continue to backing FF.

      I have always loved FF but Chrome are so much better today (that will

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Nemyst ( 1383049 )
      Google doesn't have that much of an interest in pushing their own browser. What they want is a standards-compliant, efficient browser that can easily run ads on people without breaking down on half the sites or requiring hundreds of man-hours to code for specifically. They make money of their websites, not off Chrome itself, so it could be Firefox, Opera, Safari, Opera or even IE9 for all they care.
  • Chrome is used only for page testing on my box. It appears that the youngsters at Google have marginalised the 'copy buffer.' Maybe someone who goes to AYSO [ayso-624.org] games, as a parent, should withhold some Google employee's allowance till that child can recite the definition of what "Copy, Cut and Paste" are used for. Until then, Chrome is Cripple-ware.

  • To me Chrome is a cluster fuck of strange software design so the FF guys lost me to Opera.

    Opera is faster, more stable and it allows me to place the tabs on the side of the screen instead of the top.
    NoScript would be nice but I heard that something similar is in the works and until then I use site specific configuration to keep the really annoying ads at bay.

    FF was nice when we had a gaping hole in the browser market but that hole has been plugged a while ago.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Nemyst ( 1383049 )
      One word: Extensions. Firefox was specifically built to have minimal features out of the box.

    • Ironically, Opera has lost me to Chrome recently, and that after 9 years of being an avid Opera users. I just got sick of seeing too many broken websites (especially AJAX-enabled ones), and too many crashes. As it is, Chrome dev releases crash less on me than Opera stable I've been using.

      The other issue is their interaction with the community. Opera does not have a public bug tracker at all - there is a form to fill, and it assigns a ticket number, but there's no way to track what is going on about it after

  • I'd rather feed hungry people right now.

  • I'll be sticking with FF. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Beelzebud ( 1361137 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @12:49PM (#34475246)
    I'm sticking with Firefox. I trust the Mozilla Foundation more than I trust Google.

    • Re:I'll be sticking with FF. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by tsa ( 15680 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @01:26PM (#34475844) Homepage

      I stick with FF because I like it and I'm not really interested in something else.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by syousef ( 465911 )

      I'm sticking with Firefox. I trust the Mozilla Foundation more than I trust Google.

      I'll stick with that bloated piece of shit memory hog Firefox that I usually kill from the task manager because the extensions give me capabilities I don't find in other browsers. I have no loyalty to or trust for any of the companies. Ever since they removed the ability to switch off "awesome bar" without an extension because THEY think they have the right to dictate how I should browse and what I should want, the Firefox team have totally lost any confidence or love I had for the product. In fact I don't

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by h3 ( 27424 )

      I stick to Firefox because the Chrome devs show a complete disregard for the Linux platform and its conventions by refusing to support middle-click loading of URLs:

      http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=11612 [google.com]

      • Chrome/Chromium is being developed and marketed to work on PCs and smart devices. Guess which miniscule marketshare OS doesn't follow the conventions of the entire rest of the market and won't be supported by Chrome/Chromium devs because this OS uses ass-backwards "conventions".

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by h3 ( 27424 )

          I don't know what you mean by "entire rest of the market" but Mac OS never had a convention for middle-clicking insofar as it barely had conventions for right-clicking for the longest time so I don't know what you mean by "follow the conventions" since all 3 platforms had different behaviors regarding the matter.

          Or do you think The Windows Way should be the only way? Is that what you meant?

  • No mastershifu tag?

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