This is excellent news from Mozilla. Firefox is going to make it easier to block vampiric privacy-leeching and performance-draining third-party scripts and trackers.
In the physical world, users wouldn’t expect hundreds of vendors to follow them from store to store, spying on the products they look at or purchase. Users have the same expectations of privacy on the web, and yet in reality, they are tracked wherever they go.
Mozilla’s work-in-progress style guide and pattern library.
I’m impressed by Mozilla’s commitment to designing in the open—one of the hardest parts of any kind of brand work is getting agreement, and this process must make that even more difficult.
I have to say, I quite like both options on display here.
A Firefox plugin that ring-fences all Facebook activity to the facebook.com domain. Once you close that tab, this extension takes care of garbage collection, ensuring that Facebook tracking scripts don’t leak into any other browsing activities.
I’m all in favour of HTTPS everywhere, but this kind of strong-arming just feels like blackmail to me.
All new CSS properties won’t work without HTTPS‽ Come on!
I thought Mozilla was better than this.
That’s a harsh headline but it is unfortunately deserved. We should indeed hold Mozilla to a higher standard.
It must be the day for documenting the history of CSS. Here’s an article by Aaron on the extraordinary success story of CSS Grid. A lot of the credit for that quite rightly goes to Rachel and Jen:
Starting with Rachel Andrew coming in and creating a ton of demos and excitement around CSS Grid with Grid by Example and starting to really champion it and show it to web developers and what it was capable of and the problems that it solves.
Then, a little bit later, Jen Simmons created something called Labs where she put a lot of demos that she created for CSS Grid up on the web and, again, continued that momentum and that wave of enthusiasm for CSS Grid with web developers in the community.
At the 14 minute mark I had to deal with an obstreperous member of the audience. He wasn’t heckling exactly …he just had a very bad experience with web components, and I think my talk was triggering for him.
A ten-part tutorial on CSS Grid from Mozilla.
I had the great pleasure of finally meeting Hui Jing when Mozilla invited me along to Singapore to speak at their developer roadshow. Hui Jing is speaking at each one of the events on the roadshow, and documenting the journey here.
She’s being very modest about her talk: it was superb! Entertaining and informative in equal measure, delivered with gusto. Seriously, frontend conference organisers, try to get Hui Jing to speak about CSS at your event—you won’t regret it.
I had the honour of being invited along to kick off the first leg of Mozilla’s Developer Roadshow in Singapore.
A Mozilla-backed project for journalists, publishers, and online communities. The Talk part of it is aiming to fix online comments. The Washington Post is going to try it out.
Mozilla’s audacious rebranding in the open that I linked to a while back has come to fruition.
I like it. But even if I didn’t, congratulations to everyone involved in getting agreement across an organisation of this size—never an easy task.
Jamie Zawinski tells the story of how John Carpenter’s They Live led to Shepard Fairey’s Obey Giant which led to Mozilla’s logo.
So that was the time that I somehow convinced a multi-billion dollar corporation to give away the source code to their flagship product and re-brand it using propaganda art by the world’s most notorious graffiti artist.
This is a really, really nice tool for creating HTML, CSS, and JavaScript without needing a separate text editor. And then you can publish the results to a URL.
It’s a bit like CodePen but it shows the whole HTML document, which makes it particularly useful for teaching front-end development to beginners (ideal for Codebar!).
CodePen for snippets; Thimble for pages.
This should be a lot more straightforward than process I linked to before.
Mozilla are updating their brand identity and they’re doing it in the open. A brave, but fascinating move.
Here’s the video of the panel I moderated yesterday at the Progressive Web App Dev Summit. I had to get a bit Paxman at times with some of the more media-trained panelists.
I believe that Mozilla can make progress in privacy, but leadership needs to recognize that current advertising practices that enable “free” content are in direct conflict with security, privacy, stability, and performance concerns — and that Firefox is first and foremost a user-agent, not an industry-agent.
This page does a great job of explaining Mozilla’s thinking behind “pinned apps”—an idea that would be great for the whole web, not just Firefox users.