If software is an art—and I think it is—then I must be the only artist in the world who advo￾cates defacing his own work. But if ever there was a product designed for hacking, Firefox is it.
Because Firefox is an open-source project, its lifeblood—its source code—is available to hack￾ers 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 obsessively 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”).