Daily Inspiration Quote by Mitchell Baker

The line has the tidy humility of a product launch and the quiet swagger of a platform war. “We worked very hard” foregrounds labor, not genius: it’s a claim to seriousness from a project that, in Mozilla’s era-defining pitch, wanted to be the scrappy public-interest alternative to corporate browsers. Then comes the tell: the work isn’t to make the web better in some lofty sense, but to make “extensions” “very simple.” That repetition of “very” reads like a lawyerly insistence on clarity and safety, a promise that the complexity has been cordoned off behind a clean interface.

The specific intent is to reassure. Extensions can sound like tinkering, risk, instability. Baker frames them as accessible and almost domesticated: if it’s simple, you’re not really “hacking” your browser; you’re customizing a tool that welcomes you. Subtext: power is being redistributed. A browser with easy extensions isn’t just software, it’s an ecosystem in which third parties can reshape the experience faster than the core team can ship features. That invites innovation, but it also invites chaos, security problems, and governance questions - all concerns a lawyer-turned-tech-leader would instinctively anticipate.

Context matters: Firefox rose by letting users modify, block, enhance, and personalize in ways that made the browser feel like it belonged to them, not to an operating system monopoly or an ad business. The sentence is a mission statement in miniature: design as trust-building, simplicity as political strategy, and “hard work” as the price of letting everyone else play.