Mozilla Webmaker

» see webmaker.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

I learned HTML the way most people my age did, which was by hitting Ctrl+U on a page I liked and reading what fell out. That was 1999, on a dial-up line in Turkey, and nobody taught it to me because the web taught it to anyone who was curious enough to look behind the picture. Mozilla Webmaker existed because by 2012 that had stopped being true, and somebody at the Mozilla Foundation decided the loss was serious enough to build a program around.

It was announced on 22 May 2012 with an unusually direct mission statement, which was to help people move from using the web to making the web. The diagnosis was that the modern internet had become an appliance. You consumed it through apps with no visible seams, you did not know what a view-source was, and a generation was growing up fluent in using software and illiterate in making it. Webmaker was the Mozilla Foundation's attempt to teach the missing half.

The output was a set of free tools, each one aimed at a different entry point. Thimble was a browser code editor that showed your markup on the left and the live page on the right, so the relationship between the two was impossible to miss. Popcorn Maker let you layer text and maps and links over a video on a timeline. X-Ray Goggles, which had been Hackasaurus, was a bookmarklet that let a kid open any page on the real internet, rewrite the headline, and see it change in front of them. Later came Appmaker, for building a phone app out of visual bricks.

Around the tools was a program rather than a product. Maker Party ran annually in dozens of countries, there was a volunteer mentor network, and curriculum was published for teachers under an open license. For a few years this was the Mozilla Foundation's loudest public work, the side of Mozilla that was not shipping a browser.

~ the case file ~

~ the mobile bet ~

On 11 August 2015 the foundation published a note saying Appmaker and Popcorn Maker would stop working after 30 September. The stated reason was focus: those people were needed on Webmaker for Android, which had reached the Play Store out of beta on 15 June 2015 and which was the direction that supposedly mattered now. The note is worth reading because it is honest in a way that corporate shutdown copy never is, calling the Popcorn Maker decision very difficult and admitting that teachers had come to depend on it.

The reasoning was not stupid. In the countries Mozilla most wanted to reach, the first and only computer a person would ever own was an Android phone, and a desktop web authoring tool was useless to them. Building for that user was the more serious version of the mission. The problem was that two working tools with real classroom adoption were traded for an app that had been public for ten weeks.

~ the death nobody published ~

Webmaker for Android received its last update on 25 April 2016. That is ten months after the launch it had been given two other products to feed. There was no announcement, no sunset notice, no blog post explaining the decision. The app simply stopped being updated and the webmaker.org property stopped being tended.

The confirmation came on 30 April 2018, two years later, and only because somebody wrote to Mozilla and asked. A communications director replied that Mozilla was no longer supporting Webmaker for Android, that resources had gone to advocacy and leadership work and the Internet Health Report, and that older properties were being updated. That email is the obituary. It is the only reason this grave has a date at all, and it is why killedbymozilla.com carries entries for Thimble and X-Ray Goggles but nothing at all for the program that made them.

~ what came after ~

webmaker.org no longer resolves. Thimble ran on until December 2019 and its projects were migrated to Glitch, which is the softest landing any of these got. X-Ray Goggles was decommissioned the same month. The webmaker-browser repository was archived on 24 January 2019, which is GitHub's way of making a thing readable forever and editable never.

Whether the program worked is not really answerable, because you cannot measure the number of people who became engineers because a bookmarklet once let them rewrite a newspaper headline at the age of eleven. What can be said is that the diagnosis held up. The web is more of an appliance now than it was in 2012, view-source on a modern page returns a wall of generated nothing, and the accidental education I got for free in 1999 is not available to a curious kid today in any form. Mozilla noticed that early and built the right things, then spent them on a phone app it abandoned without telling anyone.

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