I’ve decided to completely shutdown my FirefoxStart.co.uk website, for the various reasons stated below.

If you were a user of my Firefox Start, I sincerely apologise to you. I would advise you now to set “http://www.google.com/firefox/” as your homepage, as it is far better than my clone site ever was or ever will be.

Reasons for shutting down my Firefox Start website:

• The official Mozilla guidelines state that I have to apply to the Mozilla Foundation to use a domain with a Mozilla logo in it. I wasn’t even aware if this when I ordered the domain, and as they want a signature with a signed postal request for a domain before you can use it. This means I have directly breeched the guidelines stated clearly in this agreement, (PDF Link) and the website is technically illegal.
• There is already a firefox start page that works far faster and has about 0% downtime over at google.co.uk/firefox, which is more than I could provide with my hosting here at A Small Orange.
• I was getting hardly any visitors to the domain in the first place, as I recently purchased another Mint license to track visits on my Firefox Start. It has been up and running for about a year, and I’m only getting about 15 unique visits per day; most of which from search results for “Firefox Start” or something along those lines.
• It is a website designed for use in the United Kingdom, yet it is hosted in the United States of America. So, there is more lag, timing out, etc as the data has to travel over 3,000 miles before it even gets to the UK. This is fine for a universal blog such as this, but for a website that claims to be optimised for the UK, that sucks. As the Google page is probably hosted in London in the UK, it is extremely fast, and that is apparent on the Google homepage itself.
• It’s not the best idea in the world, as if someone doesn’t like the default Firefox Start page over on Google they are most definitely going to set a website of their choice as their homepage, not search for another firefox start page. This admittedly applies to me too, I just use my Firefox Start website because I have the knowledge that I have made it.
• I cannot integrate the website with the Google accounts manager like the official Firefox Start page can. This means that my Firefox Start page offers much less functionality, but boasts that it is an improvement.
• All it is is JavaScript tabs for search functions. Yeah, I did jumble the code around somewhat to make it valid XHTML and stuff, but that’s basically what the site was. So, the Google site has loads of uptime, is able to use the Mozilla logo’s legally and can integrate with the user’s Google Account, and i’ve got JavaScript tabs. That’s it.
• Although the domain and hosting cost virtually nothing, I’m eating away at my own bandwidth when I use Firefox Start. Take yesterday for instance - I visited it about 300 times, just normally searching Google. My opinion on the subject is just let the professionals at Google do what they do best. There is no good reason to improve something that doesn’t really need improving.
• I’ve never really felt like it’s my work, and I hate that. I didn’t make it at all really, I’m just adding to something that is already a good idea then making it seem like i’ve done loads of work, which is just not true.

You may call it “chickening out”, but it seems like all of my weird ideas for websites don’t exactly turn out okay - take onflickr for instance.

If you are interested in the source code or anything to do with the recently deceased “firefoxstart.co.uk”, feel free to drop a comment below or use the contact page to get in touch.