OMG! A Firefox feature I worked on, showed up on Mr. Robot! pic.twitter.com/KKFOgOWnEu

— Michael Verdi (@michaelverdi) August 4, 2016

In last night’s episode of Mr. Robot, a character opened Firefox and to my surprise, I saw the blue “Refresh Firefox” button. That’s a feature I (and many others) worked on in the Fall of 2014. How cool is that!?

Now I’m wondering how that happened. This button is only shown to Firefox users who go to our download page with the latest version of Firefox. So someone working on the show could have just wanted to make sure they had the latest Firefox, went to the download page where we confirmed that they did (also a feature of the page) and then left it there. Leaving it there seems like an odd choice to me but it’s so immaterial to the story that I’m guessing it wasn’t even a thing that someone thought about.

Interestingly (probably only to me) they also could have then clicked that Refresh button because after a refresh we offer to restore your session which would then re-open that page. And that reminds me that I wished we could do something better in this situation. There’s no reason you would need to refresh twice in a row. It would be nice to ask people if this fixed their problem and offer further help. If a refresh doesn’t fix the issue, you most likely have a malware problem. But the issue with doing that is it probably means adding a good deal of complexity to a page used by millions that only helps a very tiny amount of people. Maybe the problem could be solved another way, though you always run into the how-hard-is-it-to-solve vs. how-many-people-does-it-help vs. what-would-we-not-do-if-we-did-this equation. Something to think about.

Note: More info on what the refresh feature is and how it works.

http://x627.com/firefox-refresh-on-mr-robot/