The Book Of Mozilla

Source: YouTube

What is it?

The Netscape and Mozilla Firefox Easter egg The Book Of Mozilla.

The Book Of Mozilla (By Mozilla)

And the beast shall come forth surrounded by a roiling cloud of vengeance.

The house of the unbelievers shall be razed and they shall be scorched to the earth.

Their tags shall blink until the end of days.

-From The Book of Mozilla, 12:10

And the beast shall be made legion.

Its numbers shall be increased a thousand thousand fold.

The din of a million keyboards like unto a great storm shall cover the earth, and the followers of Mammon shall tremble.

-From The Book of Mozilla, 3:31
(Red Letter Edition)

And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced.

But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird.

The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them.

For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.

-From The Book of Mozilla, 7:15

Mammon slept.

And the beast reborn spread over the earth and its numbers grew legion.

And they proclaimed the times and sacrificed crops unto the fire, with the cunning of foxes.

And they built a new world in their own image as promised by the sacred words, and spoke of the beast with their children.

Mammon awoke, and lo! it was naught but a follower.

-From The Book of Mozilla, 11:9
(10th Edition)

The twins of Mammon quarreled.

Their warring plunged the world into a new darkness, and the beast abhorred the darkness.

So it began to move swiftly, and grew more powerful, and went forth and multiplied.

And the beasts brought fire and light to the darkness.

-From The Book of Mozilla, 15:1

The Beast adopted new raiment and studied the ways of Time and Space and Light and the Flow of energy through the Universe.

From its studies, the Beast fashioned new structures from oxidized metal and proclaimed their glories.

And the Beast’s followers rejoiced, finding renewed purpose in these teachings.

-From The Book of Mozilla, 11:14

What is it about?

This is how Wikipedia describes this Easter egg:

The Book of Mozilla is a computer Easter egg found in the Netscape and Mozilla series of web browsers.^[1][2]

It is viewed by directing the browser to about:mozilla.^[3][4][5]

There is no real book titled The Book of Mozilla. However, apparent quotations hidden in Netscape and Mozilla give this impression by revealing passages in the style of apocalyptic literature, such as the Book of Revelation in the Bible.

When about:mozilla is typed into the location bar, various versions of these browsers display a cryptic message in white text on a maroon background in the browser window.

There are seven official verses of The Book of Mozilla which have been included in shipping releases, although various unofficial verses can be found on the Internet.

All seven official verses have scriptural chapter and verse references, although these are actually references to important dates in the history of Netscape and Mozilla.

The seven verses all refer to the activities of a fearsome-sounding “beast”.

In its early days, Netscape Communications had a green fire-breathing dragon-like lizard mascot, known as Mozilla (after the code name for Netscape Navigator 1.0).

From this, it can be conjectured that the “beast” referred to in The Book of Mozilla is a type of fire-breathing lizard, which can be viewed as a metaphor for, or personification of Netscape.

While part of the appeal of The Book of Mozilla comes from the mysterious nature, a knowledge of the history of Netscape and Mozilla can be used to extract some meaning from the verses.

Furthermore, the Book of Mozilla page has annotations for each of the first, second, third and fifth verses hidden as comments in its HTML source code.^[6]

These comments were written by Valerio Capello in May 2004 and were added to the Mozilla Foundation site by Nicholas Bebout in October that year.

Neither Capello nor Bebout are ‘core’ Mozilla decision-makers; and there is no evidence that Capello’s interpretations received any high-level approval from the senior management of the Mozilla Foundation.

My Thoughts

Recently my male coworker Mr. JM told me about and showed me The Book Of Mozilla Easter egg for the web browser Mozilla Firefox that I did not know about.

Mr. JM had me type about:mozilla in the Firefox web browser, and that displayed a random entry from The Book Of Mozilla.

I then did a web search to find Mozilla’s web page with all the verses, and I read some of the Wikipedia page about it.

I think that this is a creative Easter egg, and I think that they should add more verses.

Thank you Mr. JM for showing me this.

The end,

-John Jr