Baiting you into clicking.

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Yesterday or so a new initiative I Love MDN was unveiled. People can show their appreciation for the MDN staff and volunteers by leaving a comment.

I have a difficult message about this initiative. For almost a day I’ve been trying to find a way to bring that message across in an understanding, uplifting sort of way, but I failed.

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For a terrible half an hour last night I thought Firefox was on the brink of disappearing as an independent browser and rendering engine. I was frightened silly by the rumour that Mozilla laid off significant portions of its browser team. The official press release being full of useless corporate open web blah didn’t help — the vaguer the press release, the worse the situation, in my experience.

Fortunately, the news is not quite that bad. Still, it set me thinking.

To my mind, Mozilla’s core problem is the cult of the free. To my mind, we should eradicate the cult of the free from web development, and Mozilla should take a small step in that direction by requesting donations from inside Firefox — on an entirely voluntary basis.

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