I remember when Netscape was abandoned and open-sourced as Mozilla, and it was huge and bloated as slow as hell. And out of that came a project to just pull out the browser part of Mozilla and make it super fast and as portable. I remember a series of early alphas, and even the name went through a few evolutions. First it was called Phoenix, then Firebird, briefly, until they realised Firebird was taken and changed it to Firefox. It had this shiny new Gecko rendering engine and its only rival was IE...5?

When I started my first dev job in 2006, Firefox was far and away the best browser to use because it had an extension that no other browser could match: Firebug. Firebug was the precursor to the standard F12 devtools that every browser now has and it was life-changing if you were a web developer. (Try imagine doing your job without it now.)

Then Chrome arrived and it was shiny and W3C compliant (yay!) and you could pull a tab off into a separate window (wow!) and every tab ran as a separate process (neat!) and Google wouldn't be evil for at least another decade. Back then, FF had memory leak problems and that drove a lot of us away.

And then Chrome pulled this ad surveillance shit and I was fucking out. I'm so glad that FF is still here.

I let myself be fully engulfed by the Google/Chrome/Android continuum and it's only recently that I realised just how much of myself I gave away and, while my personal data has long since been propagated to a million servers, I'd still like to try keep some of myself to myself.

My back hurts.