This is not an uncommon SV story archetype, but as many people have pointed out before me, it's one that highlights the concept of privilege with particular clarity. In the US, both men and white people are more aggressive at this sort of bluff than non-men and non-white people, and there are strong implications that this is because it's a much easier bluff for them.
Sorry you felt that way — definitely was not my intention to be off-putting. It just seemed like a natural way to partition the various stages of the story, especially given that the group was started 9 months ago.
I fixed blink in Mozilla twice (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=89065) in the old days, back when I was running around looking for things to fix. The first time it broke was a result of Dave Hyatt's rewrite of the style system; I always suspected he had broken it on purpose. The second time seemed like it was just a mistake.
I'd actually love to hear more about your fixes, your suspicions and your feelings about blink's removal. The anthropology of the internet is fascinating to me and it sounds like you would have a pretty unique perspective on this. Either here or a blog or whatever, I'd love to know more.
There's not a lot to say. I didn't have any huge role in the project, although the experience working on it was hugely influential in the way I thought about programming. Maybe I'll write it up some day.
As for Hyatt, it just seemed like something he would do as a joke. Blink was a ridiculous feature, but it was a standard, which was a wedge that Mozilla leaned on heavily in those days.
Call centre: Can you please provide the answer to the secret question.
Social engineer: sigh, I know this is going to sound really strange, but I just pick random words when I set up secret questions, and I'm not sure what I used with you. If it helps, it will just be a set of random words that make no sense...
Call centre: Ok, I've spoken to my supervisor and he said that, seeing as you kind of know what it's like, and seeing as you have the name and address, I can reset your password. What number would you like me to SMS it to?
Margo Seltzer taught CS50 for much of the 90s -- at least '95, '97, and '98 and also, I believe, for a couple years prior to that. (She was on leave in 1996, and Brian Kernighan taught the course.)
Might also check page 2 where it says, "...focus on two of the tools that made up the Mozilla Suite: Firefox and Thunderbird."
Neither Fx nor Tb were part of the app suite--they were both offshoots that, at the time, really violated what the project was aiming for. The story of how Firefox came to be and roguish it was seen within the organization at the time is interesting.
Yea, I actually played with that sentence a few times. I thought about making it clear that Firefox and Thunderbird weren't called Firefox and Thunderbird when they were part of Mozilla Suite... but the codebases are the same, I think. Sometimes you have to know where to draw the line, to keep things clear :)
Nice addition, although as a marginal Mozilla contributor at the time (and frequent IRC lurker), I remember a few other principals being involved -- notably Ben Goodger and and Matthew "mpt" Thomas, who seemed to me to be Blake Ross's primary co-conspirators. For a while it was just this skunkworks project called "m/b" (for "mozilla/browser", I believe), and there was a lot of implied frustration/drama related to AOL/NS-internal development process (the pinnacle of which was the doomed Netscape 6.)
I would love to read a real oral history of Firefox someday.
