Comment by chrisrhee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisrhee | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla Foundation places two-page advocacy ad in The New York Times https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2004/12/mozilla-foundation-pl...

New York Times runs Firefox ad https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/new-york-tim...

> The first page of the two-page ad--which is twice as large as originally planned--features the Firefox symbol superimposed over the names of the 10,000 donors

My name is somewhere in that mix. I lost the physical newspaper copy at some point in the last 19 years. but it's cool the PDF is still around.

Surprised the getfirefox.com domain from the ad still works!

In the Battle of the Browsers '04, Firefox Aims at Microsoft https://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/15/technology/in-the-battle-...

> the early enthusiasm for the preview version of Firefox is a big reason that Internet Explorer's market share has slipped more than 2.5 percentage points in the last five months, to 92.9 percent at the end of October, its first decline since 1999

You mentioned getfirefox.com and while that was and is the official site, I remember a time (maybe?) when that was registered to a third-party fan of Firefox to promote it who handed it over to Mozilla. That said… I cannot find any evidence to back up this claim after a small bit of Google searching, so I might be wrong. I definitely remember a time after the rebranding was announced but before the full 1.0 launch where the moz website didn’t have an easy or obvious landing page for Firefox because so much website energy was still reserved for the open sourced Mozilla communications suite ;-) It always felt a bit new and edgy to recommend Firefox (Phoenix? Firebird?) back in the old days. Weirdly, there was a time when it was new and edgy to recommend Chrome too. Now it’s probably new and edgy to recommend… ad-blocking? Edge Read Aloud? It was easier when IE provided a common enemy and when Chrome wasn’t the only choice for low performance Android devices, or Safari on iOS.

Re third party sites, it’s likely getfirefox was actually always Mozilla’s (they would have known about the name first, of course) so maybe I’m thinking of “getfirebird.com” or something else like that. It’s even possible that I just assumed it was third-party because it redirected to the main Mozilla site for the longest time. And it really probably doesn’t matter anyway, just a digression. :)

> I remember a time (maybe?) when that was registered to a third-party fan of Firefox to promote it who handed it over to Mozilla.

I remember this too. Could have been a rumor but I definitely thought about this when I saw the domain.

If I recall correctly, getfirefox.com was the de-facto site because an individual blogger had owned and been using firefox.com. Mozilla was finally able to acquire the firefox.com domain and for a time, offered a free redirect to the original blog. I also tried to find a link to corroborate the history but was unable to do so, just the WHOIS data below. Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

WHOIS data for firefox.com says it was created in October 1998, four years before the Firefox project was started in 2002, and six years before the 1.0 release in 2004.

WHOIS data for getfirefox.com says it was created in April 2004, seven months before the 1.0 release.

You might be right. I remember a domain handover, but maybe it was firefox.com rather than getfirefox.com … I vaguely recall the opposite though, that somebody ended up redirecting to the Mozilla site pre-acquisition as a way of promoting Firefox. I vaguely recall knowing that the ownsership transfer took place because suddenly the URL that the domain redirected you to had some extra tracking query parameters added to it.

The earliest version of getfirefox.com redirects to Mozilla’s Firefox homepage which while it sells the browser does not have a clear Download link. I remember one of the earliest fan-made Firefox sites having a prominent download link as a way of helping people install the browser and switch to Firefox before there was a switch campaign site. https://web.archive.org/web/20040619171818/http://mozilla.or...

At the time the download page looked something like this: https://web.archive.org/web/20040619111818/http://www.mozill... and it was easier to download the old Communicator suite still.

The Firefox.com site obviously gained in popularity in 2004 as Firefox started gaining traction, based on how often The Wayback Machine was crawling it… https://web.archive.org/web/20040601000000*/Firefox.com

The site was transferred by mid-September of 2004: https://web.archive.org/web/20040914022408/http://www.firefo... and later that month a note was added about a different Firefox company: https://web.archive.org/web/20040922075506/http://www.firefo...

I should add, I think the tracking codes I’m remembering were part of https://wiki.mozilla.org/Spreadfirefox_affiliates

The blurb at the bottom! That was it! (I'm weirdly excited by this. :D)

> Thanks for the Domain Name, Kevin!

https://web.archive.org/web/20030805180640/http://www.firefo...

It's a shame that all of the other domains are offline now.

Wait… based on my previous lookups, I think it was SpreadFirefox.com or something related to that. https://web.archive.org/web/20040929012122/http://www.spread... I think the idea started as a quick webpage to download Firefox and turned into a Mozilla site to promote the browser…? It sounds right though I’ve forgotten some of the details. I definitely remember linking to some site off spreadfirefox.com because it was easier to find the download link there than to find it at the official site…

I bought and owned getfoxfire.com earlier on and had it redirect to getfirefox.com because so many people would mix it up.

Thank you for doing that :) Yeah, I’m pretty sure I typed it that way more than once. Especially if all you remembered was “FF”.

> Surprised the getfirefox.com domain from the ad still works!

This domain is still in my muscle-memory from the Windows days. Just used it yesterday for my wifes laptop reinstall, and I was surprised too it still works.

I remember my friend’s IE somehow getting corrupted/screwed up and I was still able to go to windows shell and ?tftp? to ftp://ftp.mozilla.org

Looks like the http equivalent is still up with all releases since 0.1! (Not sure what happened between 0.2 and 0.7)

https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/

Mozilla's FTP was a lifesaver when i was configuring/updating old, barely functioning Windows desktops. Glad to see them keeping it alive.

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