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One comment on “Milestone: Mozilla takes part in Stop Online Privacy Act blackout”

  1. Michael Kelly wrote on

    I can’t remember who first thought that there should be an about:home snippet for this, but after it came up we jumped on the idea and came up with a really cool snippet that blacked out about:home and put a censorship bar on the Firefox logo (a bar originating from Potch’s work on the Protect the Internet page shown above).

    Screenshot: http://news.softpedia.com/newsImage/Anti-SOPA-Blackout-Day-Mozilla-org-and-the-Firefox-Homepage-Join-the-Fight-4.png/

    We spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to remove a flash of white before about:home blacked out, and when that failed, we covered it up with a CSS transition to make the fade-in look intentional. Turns out, people loved the effect of transitioning from light to dark!

    We ended up sharing the message with over 30 million people through the snippet and related campaigns. It was one of the first snippets we ever sent out that had more than an image and text, and it really caught the attention of users who didn’t expect about:home to be fancy.