the professional world. I joined the community during high school at age 14, and soon afterward, my efforts landed me a series of internships at (rapidly sinking) Netscape. Working in the Mozilla community and later interning at Netscape were wonderful experiences, and I probably couldn't have asked for a better job. However, there was an itch that couldn't be scratched in either role: the obsessive desire to create a simple, lightweight browser that didn't encumber non-technical people with meaningless jargon and endless options. It was difficult to achieve this in Mozilla because the volunteer developers were more interested in creating a browser that catered to themselves (with all of the associated power-user features). It was also difficult to achieve this at Netscape because the company - now hanging on by a thread - resorted to monetizing its flagship browser at the cost of a simple user experience. Meanwhile, having won the browser wars, Microsoft all but abandoned the browser market entirely. Intrigued by such a wide-open opportunity, I found a small group of others within Mozilla and Netscape who shared my itch, and in 2002, we scratched it. Firefox was born.   Firefox solves your Internet headaches It's little wonder that computers are so difficult to use: The developers who make them have a much higher tolerance for pain. Something that's "hard" for an average user is easy for them, and when the user is screaming "I swear I'll throw this computer out the window!" the developer is just getting warmed up. We've found two problems with the way most software is developed: Some developers intentionally design products for themselves. This results in products that are made by geeks and intended for fellow geeks. The average user then has no idea how to use the product. Some developers just can't help designing products for themselves. They intend to make a product for the user, but they can't help tweaking it into a confusing behemoth of a program. We solved the first problem by declaring our intent in the Firefox manifesto: "The interface will not be geeky nor will it have a hacker-focus. The idea is to design the best Web browser for most people." Solving the second, however, requires an understanding of how non-developers look at and use software, and that isn't easy to come by. Enter my mother. I started working on Firefox toward the end of high school, after many years of jogging down the hall to help her with computer problems. That hall bridged the generation gap and opened my eyes to how "normal" people use and understand computers. Every Firefox developer has a story like that. Some observe their friends and family struggling; others sit down with strangers in book stores and coffee shops. We want to understand what's wrong with your Web experience and how we can fix it. In the following sections, I discuss the main complaints we've gathered. "I can't stand all the clutter." Buttons. Menus. Windows. Popups. Technology is supposed to help people, so why does it always stand in your way? We want Firefox to be practically invisible, so if we've done our job properly, you shouldn't notice it. Popup ads and other nuisances are blocked silently and automatically, and only the features you need are included. One of those features is called tabbed browsing, and it will change the way you surf the Web. Tabbed browsing is the kind of thing that's hard to explain but easy to fall in love with. (Figure 1-2 shows you tabs, and Chapter 7 tells you more about them.) When you work with tabs, you enjoy multiple Web pages in the same window, just a click away from each other! No more littered taskbar! Figure 1-2: Firefox pioneers a new, clutter-free method of surfing called tabbed browsing. It's a favorite among users.