The Book of Mozilla

How to unlock The Book of Mozilla in Cheevos by visiting about:mozilla and reading its cryptic verses. Worth 20 XP.

The story

Partner. You found the verses.

There is a page hidden in Firefox that reads like scripture from a religion that was never founded. No login screen leads to it. No settings menu mentions it. You have to type it in on faith, and then you land on a black screen with a single passage of cryptic, biblical-sounding text about a beast, and a fire, and being refreshed.

Cache has had this page bookmarked since 2003. He has read it more times than he can count. He is still not entirely sure what it means. He has theories. He is fond of all of them equally, which tells you something about how Cache relates to mysteries in general.

He does not need it explained. That is the whole point of the thing. It is a joke and a riddle and a small act of mischief left inside a browser by the people who built it, meant only for whoever goes looking.

You went looking. Cache logs this as a primary source, the same category he reserves for the things he trusts most completely. Into the bag. Never let go.

The catalog entry

ABOUT:MOZILLA Acquired: Visited about:mozilla. Condition: Ancient. Still accurate. Rarity: RARE. An internet artifact. Cache's Notes: The cryptic verses. The beast. The bird. Cache has had about:mozilla bookmarked since 2003. He has read it many times. He is still not sure what it means exactly. He thinks that is the point. Primary source. Into the bag.

Spoiler: how to unlock it

Short trip, strange destination.

  1. Open Firefox.
  2. Click the address bar.
  3. Type about:mozilla and press Enter.

You'll land on a page styled like an ancient manuscript, presenting a short passage written in the style of the Book of Revelation, referencing "the beast" (an old nickname for Netscape/Mozilla's dinosaur-like codebase) being "made legion" and periodically "refreshed." It has appeared in every version of Netscape and Mozilla-based browsers since the late 1990s, updated with a new verse for major releases, and it's one of the longest-running easter eggs in browser history. Like about:robots, it lives among the many internal about: pages Firefox ships with, most of which are undocumented outside of developer references.

Where it fits in the Stash

Cache files this next to the other things the internet made without asking permission, jokes and riddles that outlived the people who wrote them. To learn more about the raccoon collecting them, read the story.