I recently attended the wedding of a family friend in which a number of conversations about Firefox-love-and-destroy-IE-completely came up. Now, at first I didn’t pay any attention to it as I thought it was just a form of congratulations on the new job, but looking back on it, the responses were more than that. A number of these people, many of whom I had seen only once or twice in my lifetime, raved on and on about it. The it they were talking about wasn’t the browser; it was the switch they had made. They were given the opportunity to choose their browser and make it better if they so wanted.
Now, this concept has been beaten half to death within the Mozilla community as well as those in the know about open source projects, but I don’t think the movement has fully scratched the surface of its potential to the rest of the world. You see, those wedding attendees weren’t just talking about a simple switch of their primary web browser. It was the fact that someone had built a system to give them the opportunity to make a change against a very inhumane state of affairs. They, nay, We wanted to be shown that something could be done to change the status quo…and it was. So, a little over 10 years later, where does it go from here? I have no idea, but I’d like to think that this is just the starting point.
