Comment by yeukhon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yeukhon | Hacker News Reader

On one hand, Dell seems to think there is a market of people willing to pay to install Firefox. Whoever conducted that research probably found people trusting Firefox than IE or Chrome or Opera. That's just my guess. I have heard people saying "web download is broken. You first have to use some browser like Chrome or IE to install Firefox, but what if that IE version is compromised? What if people click on the wrong mozilla.org by googling and instead installed a malicious, modified Mozilla firefox?" Maybe Dell read HNs and thought "yeah let's help the poor souls out there!" (http://noncombatant.org/2014/03/03/downloading-software-safe...)

On the other hand, this charging practice is ridiculous. I can understand some people are not technical at all (espeically the elders and new computer users), but come on, this is a ripe off. If you already created a custom image to load into every hard drive you sell to your customer, modify that image by adding Firefox. How much effort is that, Dell?

edit: Does Dell's installation bundles with third-party addons? Remember the old toolbar spam? It would be interesting one day Dell decides to sell Tor installation service.

I think there's a different force at play here:

When the software comes with the computer, you can turn around and complain to Dell about the software. There is someone you can call, and generally it's rolled into the phone support contract.

When the software is installed afterwards, you don't have the same ease of complaining. Dell can argue that Firefox somehow messed up your computer.

That is a convenience many people are willing to pay for. Whether they would pay the 16£ is a different question

EDIT: Ha. I forgot IE is part of Windows, damn.

Sure, but who's next on this service installation? I also want to make an analogy of asking Dell to upgrade 2GB to 4GB or to 8GB. I don't know how much an upgrade cost now, but a few years back it was about $20-$40? It was worth it to upgrade a hardware, not quite sure how it plays out asking Dell to install Firefox at ~$27 USD. Also consider Firefox upgrades every few months; things going to break, I don't know if Dell is ready to do GOOD support, or just one of those "have you tried power off and restart your computer?" This is also something Mozilla might need to look at as SUMO can get pretty overwhelming. The web is sometimes too technical to debug :(

.. or that IE comes with Windows and Google pays to include Chrome in Dell computers. For example, here's a 2009 note involving Sony: http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/sony-defaults...

Opps. I forgot all about that. :) Thanks for pointing out. Been a Linux user for far too long.

It would not solve the authentication problem, but you can use command line ftp to download Firefox from a new installation, assuming it's available or can be installed with Windows setup.

Start command prompt. Enter

  ftp ftp.mozilla.org
  ftp
  ftp
  cd /pub/firefox/releases/latest/win32/en-US/

  get "Firefox Setup 27.0.1.exe"

There is a stub installer in the same directory, which will download the full package and install it, if you prefer.

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