Every single person at The Mozilla Foundation and who works on Firefox should read this.

The dumbing-down of what we (ironically) call smart technologies involves the oversimplification of their functionality. While the focus on usability has allowed users to achieve their goals more efficiently and with more satisfaction, the obsession over ease of use has restricted users’ choices to allegedly remove impractical barriers. We have replaced many user operated functions with automated functions, thus trading in a product’s flexibility for mass adoption.

Mozilla is a puzzling case because it chose to ignore and destroy its greatest strengths while competing in its weakest areas. As can be seen by its market share with with Firefox, this is not a winning strategy. (In fact, it is the stupidest strategy you can undertake in any arena unless you like losing.)

But if a system cannot perform complex actions while at the same time being simple, either we need two different products for different kinds of users or we risk losing the power user, who will gladly turn to lower-level interfaces.

Yep. If I were rich, I’d buy Mozilla and shitcan everyone there. That’s how much of a power user I want to be. Then I’d hire some real non-authoritarian developers and build a decent browser.

Mozilla’s main mistake is they bought into the notion that they needed to design a product that could be used by someone with the IQ of a rotting burrito. But in reality, that’s not and never was their market and this burrito person doesn’t much care about the product, anyway. Nearly anything is just as opaque to them.