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It began life with a shoestring budget competing against the world’s largest software monopoly, but in under two years, it has been downloaded over 220 million times in 43 languages on 7 platforms. The story of how we built, launched and marketed Firefox offers invaluable insight for all professions.

I enjoy speaking with groups of all sizes and backgrounds, from executives to high school students to engineers to users groups. Recent engagements include:

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7 Responses to “Speaking”

  1. Tony Soprano Says:

    pretty soon you’ll be giving talks on how FF lost it all to Opera. Honestly, I loved FF initially, compared to IE5/6, but recently FF’s piggish CPU and memory consumption make heavily tabbed browsing a huge PITA. WIth the same windows/tabs open, Opera takes up 83MB, and FF took up 330MB. Go figure.

    Plus Opera’s widgets, portals and overall feel/experience is far superior to FF1.x. I have also tried FF 2.0 and it is not much better.

    There you have my two cents. Ciao FF. Was nice whilst it lasted.

  2. arc Says:

    Tony, please, tell us how we can improve our browser.
    You talked about “piggish CPU and memory consumption” and “Opera’s widgets, portals and overall feel/experience”.

    - memory
    This issue has already been raised and I think they’re working on that.
    Maybe Blake can give us more info about this.

    - widgets
    don’t you like extensions?
    Why? Which one would you like to see developed in Firefox?
    Please tell us.

    - portals
    if you mean the “community” side of Opera portal then go to www.spreadfirefox.com, if you mean the main Opera website then go to www.mozilla.com.
    Why don’t you like these sites?
    How can we improve them?
    Please tell us.

    - “feel/experience
    the look and feel of firefox 2 seems better than the previous one and if you don’t like then there are many themes:
    https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/themes/

    Hope this helps.
    ;)

  3. James Dunn Says:

    I’m with Tony on this one. FF has good response speed but once you’ve surfed with Opera you realize what you’ve been missing. It’s features are amazing. Peraps you should install it and take a few notes from OB yourself.

    I’m just suprised why FF is so popular.

    On that note, please keep innovating.

  4. James Dunn Says:

    I’m with Tony on this one. FF has good response speed but once you’ve surfed with Opera you realize what you’ve been missing. Its features are amazing. Peraps you should install it and take a few notes from OB yourself.

    I’m just suprised why FF is so popular.

    On that note, please keep innovating.

  5. Kapil M. Gupta Says:

    well, i’m completely with “arc”, till date i had used all these browsers i.e. IE7; FF 2.0.0.4; Opera 9.10 ( Opera 9.20 is not yet tried by my ) and i vote for FF on the ground of safety, extensions ,add-ons ,all though i might be not at par with you people on the ground of knowledge, but on practical standards i can say FF is best and many people are switching from other browser to FF,
    Great work Blake and congrats to you and your team for making FF such a fab. browser.
    Keep up the good work

  6. arc Says:

    And don’t forget an IMPORTANT issue: FIREFOX IS ALMOST FREE SOFTWARE.
    OPERA it is not.

    http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

    Free (as in freedom) software has many advantages on privacy, security, bugfixes fields that closed/proprietary software such as Opera have not.

    THIS is the main difference.
    Using Firefox you’re almost free from a company decisions.
    Using Opera you’re not…

  7. Hapuzi Says:

    Its not all about popularity, speed nor friendly GUI.. when you’re with FF, your generally is safe.

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