34 Opera and Firefox finish 2005 with a bang

The underdog browsers of the PC world strike the iron while it’s hot. The Mozilla Foundation and Opera have decided to make the best of what could be their last months in the spotlight and are putting on fan-driven events/contests and getting some more publicity in the process.

Spread Firefox has launched Firefox Flicks, a contest urging all true fans with media skills to put together short “live” testimonials or 30 second home-made ads in which to glorify their beloved browser.

Not to be outdone, Opera has rented the ABC SuperSign, located in Times Square, New York, for the New Year’s Eve. The 54 square meter screen will show the face of the one fan who manages to best spell out why he or she should be chosen.

Both initiatives seem like a lot of fun and I hope they’ll exploit them fully and give us our fair share of submission browsing.

Early Firefox Flicks submissions, however, leave something to be desired. As AdFreak put it, Don’t alert the Academy about ‘Firefox Flicks’:

We’re totally down with the Mozilla Foundation in spirit, but the early results are, well, uneven. Firefox is a great product, much superior to Internet Explorer, but it is frustratingly hard to explain to people used to IE the wonders of tabbed browsing. […]The contest runs through February 21, and maybe the Mozilla Foundation is keeping the good stuff locked away.

Update (Jan 31, 2006):

Yeah, I only now remembered to check what became of these initiatives. :)

At least one of them turned out well, in quite an interesting way. The Opera winner was a Romanian young man, which is pretty cool. His name is Dan Alexandrescu and he won the contest over telling how he met and fell in love with a (beautiful) Serbian young lady in the Opera IRC chatroom. Neat.

In the Firefox camp, the Flicks campaign appears to be still running on the ground flapping its wings. Not enough momentum, yet. Either that or they’re not happy with the flicks that turned up so far.

Update April 12, 2006:…and we get to finally see Firefox Flicks. A bit… cheesy but that’s just me.