by rpdillon | 2025-07-16 13:58:22+00:00
The rant makes a great point that professional writers should be able to write substantially better than we're seeing from Mozilla.

It's easy to take pot-shots at complaints about usage of "upleveling" (which is not a word, for the record), but his point is well-taken. Take a look at the Mozilla's blog post that has that sentence: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/news/privacy-online-just...

The writing is just weak, pretty much across the board.

> October is one of our favorite months of the year with autumn and Cybersecurity Awareness Month.

"favorite months", "with autumn"? I feel like a 5th grader wrote this from the get-go.

Second paragraph is almost incoherent:

> Earlier this year we celebrated our 100th Firefox release and reaffirmed our commitment to put people first. For today’s release, we’re rolling out new features that deliver on our user promise to provide web experiences that prioritizes people’s privacy and needs whenever they go online.

The writer is somehow trying to tie the idea of the 100th release to "people first", but the 100th release has nothing to do with what this paragraph is about, and neither does "people first". This paragraph is actually about Firefox's privacy features. If that's "people first", any user feature is "people first", right? The writing is a bunch of fluff around "We've improved the usability of Firefox's privacy features". My summary is just a better way to say that than the original post.

It's a slog to reading writing critique, but let's do one more: Firefox View

> We created Firefox View to help users navigate today’s internet. For today’s launch of Firefox View you will see up to 25 of your recently closed tabs within each window of your desktop device. Once you’ve synced your mobile devices, you’ll see the last three active tabs you had open on your other devices. You’ll also get to refresh your Firefox with a new Colorway inspired by the Independent Voices collection. Firefox View will continue to be a place where you can quickly get to the information that matters most to you.

I can do a lot of critique of useless words here, but let's put that aside. They seem to be explaining that there's a new feature that shows recently closed tabs. Cool. And then the second to last sentence is just jammed in there, unrelated to anything else in the paragraph, and introducing terms I'm not really sure about.

> You’ll also get to refresh your Firefox with a new Colorway inspired by the Independent Voices collection.

No clue what that's doing there. I'm an engineer, so I thought Colorway was a Firefox feature or something, but I looked it up and it seems to be a term-of-art:

> The scheme of two or more colors in which a design is available. It is often used to describe variegated or ombre (shades of one color) print yarns, fabric, or thread. It can also be applied to apparel, to wallpaper and other interior design motifs, and to specifications for printed materials such as magazines or newspapers.

But they capitalized it, so it must be a product? So I go and do more research and discover it's an add-on I've never heard of: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/4757633...

And then I realize all the links to Colorways that should have been in the post, are in the post! They are just at the end. So all the mentions of Colorways are unlinked until the end of the post, where they finally explain what they are referring to. This is just basic editing feedback that any decent editor would provide. The fact is Mozilla is just not paying people to write well for them.

It's a short post that's mediocre end-to-end, not because of playful language, but because it's bad writing.

The reason this kind of critique seems so lame is that I don't think people think very much about what they're reading (when reading stuff like this, at least), so they just don't care that the writing is sophomoric. But that doesn't mean the rant isn't fundamentally correct that Mozilla is doing a poor job in their writing.