It took me a fortnight to move beyond other people's examples and get my first bit of nicely working verilog code written to my own spec and running on an FPGA,

It took me a fortnight to move beyond other people's examples and get my first bit of nicely working verilog code written to my own spec and running on an FPGA, having never touched a hardware description language before. If it is taking you weeks to get up to speed with Firefox, what on earth are you attempting to do with it?