[ILUG] Firefox in the news

[John McCormac]

On Tue, 1 Feb 2005, Dave Lillis wrote:

> Sure, it makes a nice story (nerdy teenager single-handedly produces a
> new browser to challenge a huge international corporation) but you'd
> think they'd even pretend to have done some background research before
> writing a story about it, even if the mainstream media's knowledge of
> free software is hardly what you'd call "enlightened".

Ah fsck! I've timetravelled back a few years to the time when the clueless
Irish Times started promoting some Young Scientist of The Year
browser project that (as usual) it didn't understand. (That covers such a
wide area of technology that it is quite staggering to think about this
early in the day. Better get some coffee and wake up.)

The fact that it is in a mainstream newspaper and is being covered at all
is significant. The usual "technology journalists" are easily dismissed as
being clueless. However hitting the mainstream like this is winning
mindshare for Firefox. Sure it has the nice garage skunkworks with teenage
computer wizard approach but that is what sells in the mainstream and
probably got it included in the first place. It is not really a techie
story but more the tail end of the news Human Interest story that editors
like to pad out programmes and newspapers with when they haven't any real
news left. It is nice to see Firefox getting mentioned as being easy to
use though - winning key opinion influencers however lowly is a good
thing.

Regards...jmcc