With nearly 400 million users, the changes we make to Firefox must be made with care. The cost of change for fiddling with a commonly used feature can be high for any one person — and when that cost is multiplied by 400 million the cost-at-scale is oppressive; even causing 10 seconds of confusion can waste over a million collective man hours. Change comes at a cost and it must be outweighed by change’s benefits. Yet, we can’t be better without being different.

The nearly 400 million current Firefox users is a testament to our ability to make those tough calls and change towards the better. As our user base continues to grow, those calls will only get tougher. We need to find technical and cultural ways to overcome the innovators dilemma and lower the cost of experimentation.

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In late January we held a workshop that brought together some of the worlds leading thinkers in online privacy, with everyone from the FTC to the EFF represented. We spent the day working to answer the question: What attributes of privacy policies and terms of service should people care about? If you are new to the project, please read the original blog post, as it will answer a number of the probable nagging questions (like how to make icons enforceable).

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I’m happy to announce that I’m moving to the Firefox team, where I’ll be taking the role of Creative Lead for Firefox to help in designing and guiding the future product path for Firefox. I’m excited by the new role, excited by the team, excited by the possibilities, and excited by the potential to make nearly 400 million people’s lives demonstrably more rad.

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While I’ve come to love Javascript, I miss the syntactic beauty of Python. The stark modern minimalism of the language causes the meaning of code to float on the syntax like a feather on water. There are no extra braces, brackets, or parenthesis to saturate your visual bandwidth. In comparison, Javascript’s syntax is like the cluttered boudoir of a Victorian house: elaborate, ornate, and unnecessary. You can be left with half a dozen trailing braces and parenthesis, with no clear owner; their balance in an unstable equilibrium.

Note that I am not arguing that Javascript isn’t a beautiful or powerful language, just that its syntax is a vestigial meme left over from a time when we didn’t know better.

I’ve often wanted to bring Javascript and modern minimalism together: to strip the language of parens, braces, and semicolons. So that’s what I’ve done. I wrote a little parser for a slight modification of Javascript. I call it Pyscript.

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There was a lot of great feedback for my post Making Privacy Policies Not Suck. We are now in conversation with a whole slew of industry leaders and deep thinkers in the area of privacy (Lorrie Cranor, Jonathan Zittrain, Lauren Gelman, Ryan Calo to name a few).

With all of the work that’s been done before us, I wanted to touch on some of the way our thinking and position breaks from the mold.

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Identity will be one of the defining themes in the next five years of the Web. Nearly every site has a concept of a user account, registration, and identity. Searching for “sign in” on Google yields over 1.8 billion hits. And yet, the browser does nothing to make this experience better save for some basic auto form filling. The browser leaves websites to re-implement identity management, and forces users to learn a new scheme for every site.

Most current solutions involve lots of redirects or iframes, which leads to a confusing and phishable experience.

Besides the poor user experience, we are seeing market-moving effects of the identity/log in problem. Facebook Connect and Google’s Friend Connect both let you use your pre-existing identity and social graph to super-power other websites. The problem?

Your identity is too important to be owned by any one company.
Your friends are too important to be owned by any one company.

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Privacy policies are long legalese documents that obfuscate meaning. Nobody reads them because they are indecipherable and obtuse. Yet, these are the documents that tell you what’s going on with your data — how, when, and by whom your information will used. To put it another way, the privacy policy lets you know if some company can make money from information (like selling you email to a spammer).

Creative Commons did an amazing thing for copyright law. It made it understandable.

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