Mozilla? Firebird? moz.org needs to make up it's mind

Even not-for-profits have to deliver well-defined products

[ricfink]

Downloaded Firebird tonight and was blown away.

Finally, someone got smart.

Profit making organizations have it easy weeding out the products that are sucking up more in resources than they generate in customer benefit - those products lose money.
That's one of the benefits of a bottom line: it imposes discipline.
Not-for-profit organizations have it a lot rougher. Money isn't the thing so discipline has to be imposed intellectually. Defining the organization's mission and such.
Strangely, not-for-profits need to practice MARKETING in a much more stringent way than profit making organizations do.

Money or not, you have to ask the question: who is your product for? And if anyone thinks that the browsing public at large is going to give a thing called Mozilla a try, well, a couple of blocks from where I work is the Brooklyn Bridge. Wanna buy it from me?

Imagine! A sleek, slimmed down, good looking version of Moz that addresses some real widespread problems in an easy to understand way - like controlling pop-ups for example.

I've been chiding Opera in these forums and elsewhere to introduce an "Opera light" - less features, lower price, without the mail client and all the other stuff and to rename it something a little easier for most people to associate with 'Internet Browsing'. (If we gotta stick with musical theater, how about "Broadway"?)

Lo and behold, moz.org are the ones who are doing it and I applaud them for it.
Firebird, firebird, firebird, yeah, yeah, yeah....

Now, with the introduction of Firebird and it's untethering from AOL and the Netscape association, it seems like moz.org is on the throes of an identity crisis. They need to redefine their mission and, most importantly, differentiate their product line.
(And if anybody finds it odd using terms like "product line" in the context of an open-source project, get over it and enjoy the freedom of being in business without having to worry about making money!)

In order to be effective, every organization has to deliver a product that a significant number of people find desirable. And that means positioning the product in the mind of potential users - what the product is and who it's for.

[4serendipity]

I think that Mozilla has done a pretty good job differentiating its products and defining their redefined mission with the following pieces:

[mozilla.org...]
[mozilla.org...]

[tedster]

I've also been hearing good things about Camino - the Macintosh browser that uses Gecko [mozilla.org]. I plan on testing it on our local Mac in the next few days.

Have you checked out the Mozilla Hall of Fame [mozilla.org]? All projects that have benefitted from Moz's development work. Pretty impressive.

[lazerzubb]

Yeah i use Firebird too, have added some features to it, use the crystal skin, and everything looks nicely.

[dragonlady7]

Firebird is cool! I've been using Mozilla for over a year now but I just never bothered downloading any updates to it, and I never bothered to check out Firebird until that link you just posted.
Hmm... I may have to bother downloading it. Wouldn't mind at all having my popups blocked...