X-Ray Goggles

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

~ the last words ~

View source was the whole curriculum for people who came online in the late nineties. There was no course and there was nobody to ask. You pressed the key, you got somebody else's markup in a window, and you copied the parts that worked until your own page stopped looking broken. I was on a 33.6k modem in Turkey in 1998 and that was the available method.

X-Ray Goggles was Mozilla trying to turn that accident into a lesson plan. It debuted in 2014 as part of the foundation's web literacy push, a browser extension and bookmarklet that put a colored outline around whatever your cursor was over and named the element holding it. Click it and you could edit the contents in place. Publish and Mozilla gave your altered version a real URL you could send to someone, which is how a generation of students learned that a headline on a news site is just text in a box.

The notice went up on 9 September 2019 and gave a hard date: on 16 December 2019 Mozilla would shut down X-Ray Goggles, and all personal data associated with it, logins and saved content alike, would be deleted after that. The reason offered was honest and a little sad. As Mozilla's focus shifted from building educational software toward advocacy and research, the foundation no longer had the bandwidth to support it properly. Users were pointed at the Mouse Learning Network's free coding course.

~ the record ~

~ how it worked ~

The mechanism was deliberately dumb, which was the point. The goggles did not open a code editor or ask you to install anything serious. They sat in your bookmarks bar, and once activated the page you were already reading became a set of labeled blocks. Hovering told you that this thing was an h1 and that thing was a div. Typing replaced the text. There was no build step and nothing to save locally.

Teachers used it the way you would expect. Put a class on a real newspaper front page, have them change the headline to something about their school, watch the moment where they realize the web is not printed and does not have to be believed. Mozilla's own teaching materials leaned on that trick, and the foundation was running it in classrooms years before anyone at scale was worried about fake headlines.

~ what replaced it ~

The browsers absorbed the job. By 2019 every desktop browser shipped a developer inspector that did the same hovering and the same live editing with far more power, and Chrome and Firefox both put it two keystrokes away from any page. Alan Levine wrote a post that December making the case plainly, that the built-in inspector was the new goggles and teachers should just use that.

He was right about the capability and it still cost something. The inspector is a professional tool arranged for people debugging layout, and it has no publish button anywhere in it. X-Ray Goggles handed a twelve year old a link they could send to a friend, and a class of thirty would spend the rest of the period sending them.

~ the sixteenth of december ~

Everything published through the service went with it. Five years of remixed front pages and the class projects built out of them stopped resolving on the same day, because the saved content lived on Mozilla's servers and Mozilla was turning them off. Nobody archived it in any organized way, since the whole point of a remix was that it was disposable.

The code is still on GitHub, archived and unmaintained, with a notice at the top of the repository pointing at the blog post. That is the usual settlement for a Mozilla Foundation project. The source outlives the service by years and helps nobody, because the thing being offered was a hosted address that would resolve for a child's friend on the first try.

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