Comment by Klonoar
3 years ago
>No such massive advertising campaign ever existed to try to convince folks to "install Firefox".
I know HN tries to resist comments of this nature, but man do I feel old now.
Firefox's entire success pretty much owes itself to a campaign like that dating back to the early to mid 2000s. Hell, there was a massive NYTimes ad in 2004!
https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2004/12/mozilla-foundation-pl...
Edit: "there as" -> "there was"
True, there were Firefox advertising campaigns in the past.
How many days did that NYTimes ad run?
How does that compare in size to Google being able to spend somewhere around ten to twelve years constantly advertising "switch to Chrome" on every google property (search, youtube, mail, etc.)?
The massive size of googles advertising to "switch to Chrome" dwarfs all of the Firefox campaigns combined.
You are shifting the goalposts by trying to say it's about scale and reach, but scale and reach in 2004 wasn't the same as what Google has now. Firefox more or less blanketed the web in advertising to get the switch done.
Your point of "Google has a ridiculous playing field advantage" is noted and absolutely true, but you don't need to reach for the factually incorrect "Firefox has not had campaigns for switching" to make it.
> You are shifting the goalposts by trying to say it's about scale and reach,
Not at all, unless the meaning of "massive" has changed since I last looked the word up in a dictionary.
I said "no such massive campaign existed". Yes, campaigns did exist, but not with the "massive" size google was able to bring to their campaign.
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