Today, Joe Hewitt’s twitter stream is filled with things like this:
Joe hasn’t been part of the web for a while, so he might not notice that there’s a lot of that going on right now. Mozilla does participate in standards, including HTML5, the CSS working groups, and quite a few others. But participation doesn’t have anything to do with our ability to innovate, and very often we’re out way ahead of the standards. We’ve got a vision for a better web, and that sometimes takes the roads of standards and sometimes doesn’t.
Just so people know I’m not just blowing smoke here are three specific examples of places where we’ve stepped out and led in this space. Standards are still part of the picture, but certainly not where Joe thinks they are:
As part of our mobile browsing work we built Geolocation into the browser to take advantage of location-aware capabilities in mobile devices. We built it, we shipped it in our browser on Nokia devices and then we took it and found a way to put it into desktop browsers as well. Even though it was shipped in Firefox only (and is finally starting to show up in other browsers) it was widely adopted. You can find it on use on Google Maps (click the little button above the zoom slider and it will ask for your location), twitter, flickr and a number of other web sites.
Once again, the model here wasn’t “wait for the standards committee to figure out what’s important” it was “figure out what works for developers, what it should look like and figure out how to get it into the browser in a responsible manner.”
We’ve worked with other browser vendors since we shipped the feature to get it into their browsers as well, and that’s gone through a standards process. Our implementation has changed as a result – and for the better. But no one was waiting.
Once again, out of our mobile work we took the idea of being able to detect orientation on mobile devices and we’ve added it to our desktop product. Firefox 3.6 just includes the ability to detect the orientation of your machine. We’re not waiting, and we certainly haven’t had the same use on the web that we saw with geolocation, but we didn’t wait to include it.
This is another giant thing where Mozilla has been leading the web forward. WebGL started as Canvas 3D. Mozilla didn’t wait to start 3D work that we thought was valuable to bring the web to the next level. That implementation, done largely as an extension on top of our advanced addons platform, was a great way to experiment and learn about how 3D fits into the web model. (Note: we’ve shown that it works on mobile as well as desktops, showing how these technologies are running in both directions.)
This is an interesting case because we decided to take the work that we had done and go down the standards route, working through the Khronos group. In a lot of ways that’s turned out to be a really great decision. It brought Google to the table, it brought Apple to the table, it’s allowed us to engage with all of the hardware vendors who are also part of the 3D world and we’ve been able to build something that’s really good without watering down the original concepts and designs. It’s going to be something that’s really amazing.
Don’t believe me? Check out the number of demos and libraries that are already underway for WebGL. It’s never shipped in a production browser, and people are incredibly excited about it. It’s likely to change the face of gaming.
Conclusion
So I don’t think that Joe understands that browsers – or at least Mozilla – aren’t waiting to innovate. Not even a little bit. And we’re doing this up and down the stack, everywhere from how you interact to data to performance to CSS to multi-touch support to hardware-accelerated graphics. And we’re still doing it in the context of the web. Firefox 3.6 is light years of IE and somewhat ahead of other browsers on the HTML5 front. We’re also leading in a lot of other specs as well.
But that isn’t what Joe is worried about, and honestly it’s not what we’re worried about either. We want to go fast. We like to go fast. Finding the balance between going fast and shipping is where the hard decisions are, but we’re almost always to ready to fall on the side of innovation. And that shows in our history and roadmap. The fact that IE has been basically moribund for years hasn’t stopped us from building a better vision for the web or carrying through with it either. And now everyone is following us.
And a huge amount of that work didn’t come through standards. It came through our actions.
I’ve traded some mail with Joe about his visions for where he thinks the web should go, and they match up surprisingly well with our own visions. Expect to see Mozilla standing out in front on these issues. Connecting the web with new sources of information, bringing new technologies to bear and improving the experience and sense of ownership that everyone has over their data. You can start to see that showing up in our new Firefox Sync functionality (your data, encrypted on the server, it’s yours, not ours!), Contacts, Account Manager, Canvas, Video and a bunch of other technology where we’re leading the web where we want to go.
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Firefox Sync seems a lot like a feature from Netscape Communicator 4.6 where I could store my browser preferences and bookmarks on a server. It’s nice that the feature is back, but that functionality isn’t exactly new or revolutionary.