14 DAY TRIAL // Aza Raskin has had a big impact at Mozilla and it seems he can still have even if he hasn't been with the organization for three years. In a recent blog post, he lays out his thoughts on Mozilla's strengths and weaknesses.
He believes Mozilla has never actually been an innovator, and that's a good thing. Mozilla is a fast follower – it takes an existing product that people love and reshapes it in a way in which users have the power, not some corporation.
That's what Mozilla did with the browser, and it worked; that's what it did with the email client, and it worked, for a while. But as email clients moved online, Mozilla couldn't simply become just another silo, another company that hoards your data.
Mozilla is trying to be a follower in the mobile front as well, and Raskin thinks it has a chance there as well.
But Raskin has another seemingly simple idea on what Mozilla could and should do to open up the web, which is becoming increasingly closed off.
His example is Instagram. The company has been mostly fair to its users and the APIs are useful and open. But it still has complete control over all of your photos.
Raskin suggests that Mozilla, through Firefox, make it easier to "remix" Instagram, add new functionality, change the way it looks and works.
That's actually not that complicated and it's something that's already possible; user scripts and user styles can already alter the way many sites work. But these tools aren't exactly easy to use, they suffer from lack of quality control and so on.
"Mozilla can bring that same educational opportunity to Instagram. We can make it open and add the ability to analogously 'view-source'," Raskin says.
"Why not use Javascript to modify, create and share new filters? Or change the layout of your profile? Or clone and host your own version of Instagram that has video? In other words, let both users and developers remix Instagram," he adds.
What Raskin seems to be saying is that Mozilla should be providing much better tools to customize the web but also providing the customizations itself.
It's a way of empowering the user and it's one of the things the web has over native apps. Users can still get to control what they see in the browser and how the apps work.
It might work too. While anyone can, technically, alter the way any site works, to a degree, having Mozilla back this and offer enhanced functionality and privacy via add-ons or extensions for the browser could be quite powerful.