Someone At Mozilla Is Getting Too Cute

June 18th, 2008

Ok, so I load up Firefox 3 and go to change some settings, you know, try reverting all the tweaks I’ve made to Firefox 2. I enter the incantation “about:config” into the URL bar and get this:

What Warranty?]

What? Void my warranty? I get a warranty with this open source software? That’s a new one to me.

No Warranty

Oh wait, yeah, I don’t. Please Mozilla, stick with the warnings about understanding the settings and don’t use inappropriate legalese. The whole “void your warranty” phrase is the fear-mongering motto of anti reverse engineering corporates everywhere. Firefox is open source, it should embrace everything the opposite, encourage me to explore and experiement.

To top it off, making me click on I’ll be careful, I promise! is just a little too cute and condescending. I’m feeling a lack of UI polish so far in Firefox 3. I’ll cover a few other things after I organize my thoughts, but this was just too good to wait on.

Thanks for reading and come again, -Matt

2 Responses

  1. tontechniker at June 18th, 2008 at 05:58 PM

    That’s a joke only, but you are right they should change the title in the next sub release.

  2. Andy at June 22nd, 2008 at 02:50 AM

    Hi Matt, I followed the bread crumbs over here from the ‘University or self taught’ article.

    I agree with your sentiments on the ‘you might void your warranty | I’ll be careful’. It doesn’t carry an air of professionalism, it is cutesy. While at the same time they’re trying to cover their arse in case a bug or setting takes down a mission critical app or system.

    Seems FF is so prevalent now, and in the big time, that they run the risk of being sued into oblivion if say something on the order of Microsoft’s old Blaster vulnerability takes down essentially most PCs in the country. To cover themselves they pretty much have to use the boilerplate Disclaimer of Warranty that is common with software nowadays.

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