• by Shankar Gupta , May 11, 2005

The first-ever Firefox ad campaign launched last week with a set of viral spots created by French viral agency Pozz. The campaign, created for the Mozilla Foundation's European affiliate, was viewed more than 300,000 times over the weekend, according to Tristan Nitot, the co-founder of Mozilla Europe.

Firefox, an open source browser available at no cost on Mozilla's Web site, has been edging upwards in market share, stealing users from Internet Explorer, the Web's dominant browser. By mid-April, Firefox had increased its market share to 10.28 percent from 4.23 percent, according to Janco Associates.

The campaign consists of three 30-second spots, "The Office," "The Mobile," and "The Notebook," which are hosted on funnyfox.org. The site includes an option to e-mail the videos to friends.

Each ad features Internet users at home and at work, looking at their computers and becoming increasingly impressed by Firefox--although the screen itself is never shown. In "The Mobile," a woman surfing the Internet becomes so distracted by Firefox that she begins to chew on the cell phone she just put down, instead of a candy bar she had been eating. The taglines for each spot are different--"Feel the difference" for "The Office," "Taste the difference" for "The Mobile," and "See the difference" for "The Notebook." None of the spots feature any dialogue.

The spots were designed to appeal to a wide range of audiences, featuring a businessman, a woman, and a "geek," according to Pozz founder Eric Pozzo. Also, by not showing the screen, Pozzo hoped to build curiosity about the browser among viewers who had never heard of Firefox.

Nitot declined to say how much the campaign cost. But, he said, Pozz understood the limitations of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation's budget.

This campaign launched in the midst of security concerns about Mozilla. On Sunday, Internet security company Secunia reported two new vulnerabilities in the Firefox browser. The company's site describes the problems as "extremely critical," and notes that the code that is required to exploit the security holes is publicly available, since Firefox is open source.

To combat the problem, Mozilla has instructed users to disable JavaScript, and to disable the feature that allows Web sites to install software. The foundation has already updated its servers to lower the risk of exploitation, and an announcement on Mozilla's Web site promises a fixed version of Firefox, which will be version 1.0.4.