We talked to two of the three authors about the development, popularity, and future of Firefox and Thunderbird. John Hedtke has written all kinds of technical and non-technical documentation for all levels of readers, including 24 books, 100 magazine articles, hundreds of manuals, dozens of online help systems, white papers, brochures, and FAQs. Marcia Knous is a Project Manager at the Mozilla Foundation and has been working with the Mozilla Project for five years. She is involved with both the Firefox and Thunderbird projects

Desktop Pipeline: To start, how do you explain Firefox's meteoric rise in popularity and public awareness?

John Hedtke: Firefox's elegantly simple design and the many improvements over other browsers started attracting the blogging community in early 2004. People were also excited by Firefox's adaptability: If the browser didn't do what you wanted it to do, you could create or install a simple extension to customize the browser to suit your needs. By May, there were over 200 extensions available for download. Interest in Firefox increased so dramatically that, by June of 2004, the top Web sites started seeing a significant number of Firefox users. This was the first sign that Firefox reached beyond the technical community and into the mainstream browser population.

The following month, the U.S. government's Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) warned Web surfers to stop using Internet Explorer (IE) and to use alternative browsers because of "significant vulnerabilities" in technologies embedded in IE. This warning came on the heels of a sophisticated attack that targeted a known IE flaw. Downloads from the Mozilla Web site shot up to 200,000 a day with this announcement, and developers started evaluating Firefox as the alternative to IE.

In August, 2004, Spreadfirefox.com was launched and played a key role in evangelizing the Firefox Preview and 1.0 Releases. It also became another important promotional idea and fund-raising venue for the project: The Spreadfirefox team raised over $250,000 from 10,000 Firefox devotees in just 10 days to pay for a two-page ad in the New York Times and cover other expenses to promote the Firefox 1.0 release. Market share of Firefox started with very small numbers but grew dramatically over the second half of 2004. Over 8 million people downloaded the final pre-release version of Firefox in 10 days; currently, there are over 46 million downloads of Firefox 1.0 with downloads continuing at the rate of about 250,000 a day.

DTP: So a new form of Internet marketing is using consumers not as just objects of advertising, but as partners in promoting interesting products?

JH: I think that we're also seeing the classic marketing principle of products not really taking off until 10 percent of your potential market knows about the product. Microwave ovens are a good example: they'd been around since 1951, mostly for hospital/restaurant use, but it wasn't until the early 70s that they became well-known enough to really take off in the consumer marketplace. What's different, though, is that the Internet is decreasing the time necessary to reach the take-off point.

Marcia Knous: As an open source project, Mozilla has always relied on its community for a number of things -- for development, quality assurance, evangelism, and so on. You cannot underestimate the power of community in the success of the Mozilla project as a whole and in the success of Firefox and Thunderbird in particular.