Eight years ago today, Netscape released the Mozilla source. Firefox is successful today thanks to the development and evangelism efforts of hundreds of thousands of people around the globe working together to make something great. I urge journalists to stop and realize how much more fascinating that story is than a personality piece. Congratulations to everyone.

Over at ZDNet, Microsoft employee John Carroll makes the case that his company’s monopolistic tactics over the past decade have in fact benefited our industry, and cites Internet Explorer as an example. Without preinstalling Internet Explorer, he says, how would anyone download Firefox? How would open-source markets grow?

So let me stop here and say, on behalf of Firefox users everywhere: thank you.

I also have a note here from the pop-up ad industry. They would like to thank Microsoft for allowing their market to boom while the IE team sunbathed in Maui for the past four years.

Sarcasm aside, the truth is that many people, I among them, never really took issue with the idea of preinstalling a browser on Windows. It would be pretty silly to buy a computer today that couldn’t access the Internet. We take issue with how Microsoft flagrantly strong-armed OEMs to leave out or marginalize competing browsers, such as Netscape. As far as I know, Netscape also allowed people to…download things.

John’s argument falls flat in other places, too. He points to AOL Instant Messenger’s lead over MSN/Windows Messenger as further evidence that preinstallation isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. But of course, the value in that space isn’t in the software; it’s in the network. AIM inherited much of its network from AOL. And how did AOL build such a massive network in the first place? Well, the fact that it negotiated prime placement on the desktop for years certainly didn’t hurt. People don’t seek out AIM because it’s a better client.

John concludes that “the mere notion that such consumers are somehow so skewed by the mere inclusion of a software default that competitors can’t gain traction is RIDICULOUS…”, but capitalizing a word does not an argument make. I can see how that notion might seem ridiculous to someone with John’s level of technical literacy. How about the tens of millions of people out there who have never downloaded and installed a piece of software in their lives, even in our broadband world? Believe me, they’re out there. We’re pursuing them every day, one at a time, with SpreadFirefox.

One of the most fundamental problems we’ve encountered in evangelizing Firefox is that many people don’t even know what a browser is. If they know the term at all, they think it’s a search engine, which is understandable; the concept of the independent “browser” in a Web world is just a bit too meta for many. So you can imagine convincing someone to download an “alternative” to a product he didn’t know he used, in a genre of software he never knew existed. John’s blithe dismissal of the difficulty suggests to me that he’s never had to do that before. And that’s fine, except his entire argument is predicated on that perspective.

I think the main problem here is that John, like many techies I know, sees everything in bits and bytes: people couldn’t easily download software in the past; now the bandwidth constraints are gone; therefore, the competitive barrier to entry is gone. It reminds me of some of the things coming out of the Linux camps: Linux is technically superior to Windows; therefore, people will switch to it. These kinds of arguments ignore an entire spectrum of barriers facing “regular people” that we developers never contend with, and I think our industry would do well to empathize with them.

Though I disagree with John’s understanding of the past and present, I agree with him that eventually there will be no distinction—for any audience—between software that happens to be on your computer already and software you procure manually. But we’re not there yet.

One of the things you never hear about when press, moviegoers, Buzz Lightyear, etc. rave about computer animation is the fact that its stunning visual display is also its greatest flaw. That’s because computers are too stunning: tell them to give you a brick wall, and they’ll give you the flattest, smoothest and most symmetrical brick wall imaginable. Animators must take special care to muck up the wall enough that it might actually exist in our flat-tire world, such as by tacking on chewed-up bubble gum or festering sewage.

I’m pleased to announce that next month, I will personally be playing the role of the sewage.

Actually, it’s less glamorous: I’ll be playing an extra in Parental Guidance Suggested, the next film by American Pie producer (and Firefox fan) Warren Zide. But the goal is the same: I exist to make a perfect scene more average. It’s quite the ego-booster.

It’s probably a good thing I’m playing the role of Kid with Freckles #9, because having read the script Warren sent over, I think it would be illegal for me to play any other role in at least 19 states (you do NOT want to see what Kid with Freckles 7 has to do). One studio executive characterized the film as: “This movie has no redeeming moral value.” Even the Fandango puppets are pixelated.

Reading the script for PGS rekindled my own longstanding dream to write films. In weaving together stories that reach out to us and touch our collective souls, screenwriters do what I, as a young boy writing stories for Literature class, could only fantasize about: pad 3 lines of text into dozens upon dozens of pages. Seriously, the average film script looks something like this:

The general rule of thumb is one beat per actual character heartbeat. The original Terminator script was just “Hasta La Vista”, followed by 119 pages of beats and an exclamative “baby”. It was much better than the final product.

But you need to start somewhere, and I will do my best to faithfully depict the Average Joe, the everyman, the “guy next door”, by wearing a Firefox t-shirt, a Firefox hat, a Firefox sandwich board and Firefox long underwear (outside of the sandwich board) . When you see this movie, it should be very easy to spot me. If you can keep your eyes off #7.