“That’s one of the great contradictions of white people. For the most part, all the world’s ills are based on large, evil corporations — government corruption, American expansion through the use of corporate contracts, pollution, globalization, every bad thing that’s happened. But if it happens with nice design, it’s acceptable.” ― Christian Lander, the Stuff White People Like guy, in an interview with Salon.
The Long Road to Firefox 3
With the release of Firefox 3 last month, the Mozilla project, corporation, community, and the open-source software world in general have a great achievement on their collective hands.
My involvement with Mozilla began with a weblog post in October of 2003, over a year before the initial release of Firefox. During the year that led up to the release of Firefox 1.0, we assembled a team that created the branding and visual identity for Firefox (and later, Thunderbird).
As the launch of Firefox 1.0 approached, our involvement in the project grew from visual identity to include a redesign of the Mozilla.org in the summer of 2004 by our company, silverorange. This also meant a change in the nature of our involvement to include professional services. We were now making some money!
Though my involvement in Firefox was a only thin layer on top of the years of engineering, design, and development that truly built the product and organization, I’ve occasionally had some unique opportunities. On November 9th, 2004 at 4:51AM Atlantic time, I had the privilege of making the CVS-commit to the mozilla.org website that officially released Firefox 1.0.
With the release of Firefox 1.5 in November of 2005, we launched a the new Mozilla.com website (having separated the Firefox and Thunderbird products out from the larger Mozilla.org website). The release of Firefox 2, brought with it the first redesign of Mozilla.com where the visual style was provided by another design firm (NoBox) and our role was one of implementation.
With the release of Firefox 3, Mozilla.com received a major design, again with the visual style coming from another firm (The Royal Order of Experience Design from Chicago). The style of this new site is unlike anything we could have created ourselves and it made the implementation both challenging and fun.
The involvement that I and my co-workers had with Firefox and Mozilla has paralleled and contributed to the growth and success of our business. Our work with Firefox and Mozilla changed the world in which our company operated and provided a new set of extraordinary opportunities. When a guy named Kevin Rose called and asked us to help with the design of his new site, Digg, the first thing he said was that he had seen our work with Mozilla.
As the organization behind Firefox grew, and the scale and amounts of money floating around grew, I was skeptical of the long-term prospects of the project and of the product. Once Mozilla was big enough, I thought, they’d have the same problems any large software company has.
Firefox 3 has proven me wrong. I really expected Firefox to get bigger, dumber, slower, as the small founding team of developers was eclipsed by a larger team. Instead Mozilla has shown that they are not “any large software company”. Like Linux, Apache, and other great free-software projects before them, they have shown how an open-source project can defy the traditional rules of software project management. The product has gotten smaller, smarter, and faster. The organization continues to look at issues that matter for an open web.
It’s been fun. So, when does Firefox 4 come out?
“Where the Hell is Matt?” is an oddly heart-warming short-film of a dancing fool dancing all around the world (via BoingBoing).
Here’s a code-swarm visualization of the Swat open-source project I work on.
Brad Sucks, Internet Music Guy Extraordinaire, has announced a release date of Sept 8th for his next album, Out of It. Available for pre-order now.
89 Tag Lines
The system that powers this weblog was recently upgraded with a new open-source weblog platform (because the world needed one more). What separates this weblog system from all of the others? The clever name: Blörg.
In the process of the upgrade, I’ve retired the randomly rotating tag-line/sub-title in the header of the site. Looking through the tag-lines in the old database, we accumulated 89 phrases. Most are insipid, however, I do think there are some flashes of accidental genius amongst the stupidity, embarrassing earnestness, and inside jokes.
For posterity, here are the 89 Acts of Volition weblog tags lines, all used at some point in the last five years:
- machine readable
- There’s nothing funny about Comic Sans.
- The Axis of Awesome
- Standing on the shoulders of giants
- Not too strong in the maths.
- Equal parts consumption and production
- ad hoc ad hominem ad nauseam
- Truths, albeit insignificant.
- Hack the Casbah
- AOL Keyword: Awesome
- grace over karma
- My ass is as smart as any.
- I hate Winnipeg
- “Tune the FM in to static and pretend its the sea” ― John K. Samson, The Weakerthans
- be the change that you wish to see in the world
- end-times = near
- Objectivity is a lie.
- Up with Metric Time! 10 Hours a Day!
- It’s hip to be square.
- Hey, that’s a spade!
- if ($road==’diverged in yellow wood’ && $road==’less traveled’) { $the_difference=’all made’ }
- I’m tired – let’s bring back that whole slacker thing.
- It’s all about the Pentiums, baby!
- “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.” ― Henry David Thoreau
- Everyone loves the future.
- alt.total.loser
- Jesus was a punk.
- Quit while you’re ahead.
- Adhocracy Now!
- my virtual cup runneth over
- My mom cleans my house.
- extra ordinary
- get rich slow
- Great is the enemy of good
- zip zap zipadee doo
- Better. Brighter. Tougher.
- all about alliteration
- bah, humbug
- want amidst plenty
- I like to meat new people.
- They pelted us with rocks and garbage!
- I’m your internet hero.
- Robots are people too
- Spammers go to hell
- Where quality of life is measured in MHz
- I only wear free t-shirts
- Dupe! No Digg!
- Ok, this is lame.
- BOGUS, WONTFIX, NOTABUG, WORKSFORME
- Terrorists Win!
- It’s never been a better time to be a nerd.
- It’s still morning on the Internet
- I figured out what’s wrong with life: it’s other people.
- Stupidity is much the same the world over.
- Language can be unsuitable for younger viewers. Use caution – they are our future.
- Now with more links.
- Relax. Take your pants off.
- Lately, the only thing keeping me from being a serial killer is my distaste for manual labour.
- Pamplemousse. Biftek. Poutine. Dindon. Chauve-souris.
- What are you going to do about apathy? Not much.
- Virtual thoughts.
- A site for, but not about, endorsed by, or even moderately related to, Phil Hartman. R.I.P.
- Not, in any way, affiliated with Chicken Soup for the Soul.
- Random Thoughts. Pumpernickel, for example.
- Formatted text from (un)formatted minds.
- Insert snappy subtitle here.
- Everything in its right place.
- Driven by contempt for you the reader.
- Are we being sarcastic? We don’t even know anymore.
- sarcasm is cowardly
- Be excellent to each other.
- Publishing without deadlines since August, 2000.
- beware the fish
- Gazing at your navel.
- Pioneering the utopian one-pair-of-shoes-per-person future.
- Save often, kids.
- No coins please.
- Nascent guruism
- You can’t coach height.
- The human head weighs eight pounds.
- may cause shrinkage
- Who’s the bully now!?
- We promise nothing.
- A good chew and peanuts too.
- kind of like that Alanis Morissette song
- Free Sklyarov!
- Like waggling a big beef in front of a hungry dog.
- Was it Eliot’s toilet I saw?
- So Say We All
“Having executives do foolish silly things on stage is apparently key to the formula of having highly motivated employees.” – Bill Gates
If you’re running Firefox 3, enter about:robots into the location bar and enjoy. Nerd.
Seeing Through Google’s New Icon
Google has a new favicon. If you don’t know what a favicon is, rather than explain it, I’ll suggest that you probably won’t care about the rest of this post.
If you’re still with me, the new favicon is notable because the old one was a small but ubiquitous sign-post on the web. What I find more interesting, though, is a particular aspect of the implementation.
The new favicon is a full RGBA color icon file with alpha transparency. What makes this noteworthy is that the this type of icon isn’t supported in Internet Explorer, still the dominant browser on the web.
Is Google intentionally leaving Internet Explorer behind on this visible, but admittedly trivial, part of their website? Or, is this an oversight (or part of an incomplete change)?
Either way, it doesn’t sound much like Google.
UPDATE: I was wrong about this. It is supported by IE – see my comment for a bit more detail.