If Bart Decrem could ever pull this off, he’d have earned his salary from the Mozilla Foundation for a year. At least.
I’m beginning to think that Mozilla Firefox will really take off only after one major Internet Service Provider specifically offers it as an alternative to Microsoft Internet Explorer.
The security and stagnation issues have been well-publicized. Unfortunately, I believe these ISP’s (AOL, PeoplePC, Juno for three I’ve used) either have contracts that prohibit them from offering other web-browser programs, or, equally likely, they feel that their customers want IE and don’t care to have confusing alternatives offered to them. Many people want a simple Internet.
It’s a clout issue. Convince one of these major (or even minor!) ISPs to offer Firefox as an alternative to their customer base, and you’ll have scored the marketing coup of the decade. If just one of these heavy-hitters offered Firefox, the others would take notice.
Branding a Mozilla-based product doesn’t sound that hard

. Gervase Markham’s Patch Maker (a tool I still use all the time when I hack Mozilla) gives as a sample instructions on changing the browser’s main title. It’s time-consuming and requires a dedicated team of chrome hackers (MozDevGroup, anyone?) to do it right, but it’s eminiently feasible. If for no other reason than it’s been done before.
It’s also a clout issue in that if a major ISP suddenly offered a branded Mozilla Firefox, web developers (myself included) would also take notice. We’d be happy about all the features Mozilla Firefox supports (DOM 2 namespaces, traversal, range, events just to name a few that I care about) that IE doesn’t. It would go a long way to convince people who write web pages to support standards a bit better.
In short, I think getting this done would break a hole in the Hoover Dam of web standards.
Now, I don’t want to tell Bart Decrem how to do his job. I’ve met him, and he’s got a tough job that he does admirably. (I’ve tried my hand at marketing before. I know what it’s like.) But I’m wondering what the community at large can do. The press has been raving about Mozilla Firefox well before the 1.0 final release. Millions of people have downloaded it and use it on a daily basis. It’s reached a de facto 1.0 status unofficially. But if we can’t get a major conduit to the general public to offer Firefox (not outright replacing IE, since I don’t think any sane ISP would consider that at this stage!), then Mozilla Firefox will probably remain a niche browser that Microsoft and friends can safely ignore. If a certain Firefox marketing site were to ask its visitors to politely request their ISP’s offer Firefox, who knows? The beancounters would probably shrug, as both browsers are free to the public.
What a marketing coup that would be: to get an ISP to offer a branded Firefox to their customers.
UPDATE: I should clarify that I don’t want people to push a product “before it’s ready”. I’ve never wanted that. This blog entry could be misconstrued as saying, “Let’s do this now,” when it’s not supposed to be. My only goal here, as in other blog entries/editorials, is to get people thinking about things like this.