Is it? The guy is "highly offended" (???) by playful language and color themes and does the performatively enraged internet guy thing of being shocked that Mozilla has a political agenda, despite the fact that Mozilla, a purpose driven non-profit has had a manifesto written by Mitchell Baker since 2007?
If you're enraged by an emoji or by someone saying thank you for loving our browser it's probably time to turn the computer off or something
I find it concerning that my top-level comment is garnering a lot of support and agreement from people who see my complaints and this ranting guy's performative indignation as aligned. He pretends to not understand vague, virtue-signally marketing speak rather than be honest about the fact that it just bugs him. Maybe for reasons he doesn't understand, or maybe for reasons he's uncomfortable with sharing.
I want to make it as clear as possible that my primary issue is Mozilla's insincerity. I'm also put off by the particular tone they're using, but that's just a matter of aesthetic preference.
If you are just a freeloader sure, but someone who's been involved and supporting the project for years would certainly be right to be offended at the blatant abuse and wastage of his efforts.
The rant makes a great point that professional writers should be able to write substantially better than we're seeing from Mozilla.
It's easy to take pot-shots at complaints about usage of "upleveling" (which is not a word, for the record), but his point is well-taken. Take a look at the Mozilla's blog post that has that sentence: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/news/privacy-online-just...
The writing is just weak, pretty much across the board.
> October is one of our favorite months of the year with autumn and Cybersecurity Awareness Month.
"favorite months", "with autumn"? I feel like a 5th grader wrote this from the get-go.
Second paragraph is almost incoherent:
> Earlier this year we celebrated our 100th Firefox release and reaffirmed our commitment to put people first. For today’s release, we’re rolling out new features that deliver on our user promise to provide web experiences that prioritizes people’s privacy and needs whenever they go online.
The writer is somehow trying to tie the idea of the 100th release to "people first", but the 100th release has nothing to do with what this paragraph is about, and neither does "people first". This paragraph is actually about Firefox's privacy features. If that's "people first", any user feature is "people first", right? The writing is a bunch of fluff around "We've improved the usability of Firefox's privacy features". My summary is just a better way to say that than the original post.
It's a slog to reading writing critique, but let's do one more: Firefox View
> We created Firefox View to help users navigate today’s internet. For today’s launch of Firefox View you will see up to 25 of your recently closed tabs within each window of your desktop device. Once you’ve synced your mobile devices, you’ll see the last three active tabs you had open on your other devices. You’ll also get to refresh your Firefox with a new Colorway inspired by the Independent Voices collection. Firefox View will continue to be a place where you can quickly get to the information that matters most to you.
I can do a lot of critique of useless words here, but let's put that aside. They seem to be explaining that there's a new feature that shows recently closed tabs. Cool. And then the second to last sentence is just jammed in there, unrelated to anything else in the paragraph, and introducing terms I'm not really sure about.
> You’ll also get to refresh your Firefox with a new Colorway inspired by the Independent Voices collection.
No clue what that's doing there. I'm an engineer, so I thought Colorway was a Firefox feature or something, but I looked it up and it seems to be a term-of-art:
> The scheme of two or more colors in which a design is available. It is often used to describe variegated or ombre (shades of one color) print yarns, fabric, or thread. It can also be applied to apparel, to wallpaper and other interior design motifs, and to specifications for printed materials such as magazines or newspapers.
And then I realize all the links to Colorways that should have been in the post, are in the post! They are just at the end. So all the mentions of Colorways are unlinked until the end of the post, where they finally explain what they are referring to. This is just basic editing feedback that any decent editor would provide. The fact is Mozilla is just not paying people to write well for them.
It's a short post that's mediocre end-to-end, not because of playful language, but because it's bad writing.
The reason this kind of critique seems so lame is that I don't think people think very much about what they're reading (when reading stuff like this, at least), so they just don't care that the writing is sophomoric. But that doesn't mean the rant isn't fundamentally correct that Mozilla is doing a poor job in their writing.
>>"Last year we upleveled our Private Browsing mode."
>> Sorry, "upleveled" is not a verb I've ever heard of, in decades of using the Web. Why are you beginning articles with made-up verbs that you know people aren't going to understand? Why not use standard, plain, clear English?
Just because the person ranting had never heard of it doesn't mean that uplevel isn't a verb; and I am not sure how their amount of time spent using the web would correlate to their grasp on the English language.
>Ngrams not found: upleveled what, upleveled which, upleveled you, upleveled all, upleveled both, upleveled certain, upleveled several
>Ngrams not found: upleveled various, upleveled few, upleveled little, upleveled many, upleveled much
>Ngrams not found: upleveled my, upleveled his, upleveled her, upleveled its, upleveled our, upleveled their, upleveled your
This suggests all the supposed matches for the word alone could be OCR errors or typos. If "upleveled" is a real word it's so rare that it has no place in any writing that you expect to be broadly understood.
We should stop inventing useless words. "Footgun" has some use because it's shorter than the alternatives. "Upleveled" is just a worse version of "improved".
Is it? The guy is "highly offended" (???) by playful language and color themes and does the performatively enraged internet guy thing of being shocked that Mozilla has a political agenda, despite the fact that Mozilla, a purpose driven non-profit has had a manifesto written by Mitchell Baker since 2007?
If you're enraged by an emoji or by someone saying thank you for loving our browser it's probably time to turn the computer off or something