The Hacker Manifesto

An interesting foreword by Blake Ross, co-creator of the Firefox browser, in the book Hacking Firefox.

If software is an art - and I think it is - then I must be the only artist in the world who advocates defacing his own work. But if ever there was a product designed for hacking, Firefox is it. Because Firefox is an open-source project, it's lifeblood - its source code- is available to hackers the world over. And i do mean hackers. These guys ship software before they put on pants.

What separates Firefox from other open-source projects is that it isn't designed for a technical community. Products like Linux are generally regarded as being "by geeks, for geeks", but with Firefox it's more like "by geeks, for grandmas". We focus obessively on the user experience so that everything just works, right out of the box. Indeed, you may find that when you first start Firefox, you don't need to hack it. This odd sensation will be accompanied by symptoms of hacker withdrawal, including, in severe cases, a sudden willingness to go outside. You'll find yourself scoffing at certain parts of Firefox just to feel as if you have something to hack ("Pfft, I could hack a much cuter fox for their logo").

No worries: Shortly thereafter, your geeky sense will begin tingling again. Think back to The Matrix. Where most of the world saw a vibrant 3-D reality, Neo and his crew saw an endless stream of flashing green code. Okay, so real life (if this is real life) isn't quite that cool, but you and I see technology through a different lens than Grandma. She isn' t going to notice - or care - if her toolbar buttons are five pixels apart instead of seven, but I am, and I want to fix it. Because we are empowered to change anything, we notice everything.

Besides, hacking isn't just about fixing what's wrong. It's about what already works work for you. Sure, traditional rectangular contextual menus work well enough, but wouldn't pie menus work better? And yeah, it's easy enough to click that back button, but it's ever so far... Why can't I make a quick gesture with my mouse to go back, wherever it happens to be? Well enough, good enough - "enough" does not exist in the hacker vocabulary. There is only an escalating sense of "better".

I began work on Firefox two years ago, when I was 17, and I'm still hacking on it right now in another window. Firefox is not a business. It is a passion. It is the product of a global community of developers fueled by their own drive to create, and no matter how hard we try to polish it for Grandma, our roots shine through. We urge you to join us; our art is yours.

My favourite quote: "Because we are empowered to change anything, we notice everything."