First, let’s start with the awesome dichotomy. You start with this:

My god, what a beautiful thing. They are the web. I love that. I could have written it myself. I should have written it myself.

That classic Apple dark headline and light grey subtext that everyone loves. And the text: standards, CSS, JavaScript, web designers, puppies and rainbows. Who could possibly disagree with that? From a marketing perspective, it’s beautiful – non-specific, feels good, it means that Apple loves the web, and loves you.

But how do they prove it?

That’s right. If you’re not on Safari, then Fuck You.

Aside from the incendiary language I’ve used to help you understand how it feels the real underlying message here is that if you don’t have access to Safari then you must not have access to HTML5. Wait, only Safari supports HTML5??

Nope, lots of browsers do. A huge percentage of the world does have access to standards like HTML5. Today. In fact, given the page says html5, you might ask, who has the best html5 support across the browsers right now? Not Safari. Not Chrome. The browser that also happens to have a lot of market share – Firefox:

(The best overall site that gives you useful information for this stuff is actually one that a lot of people don’t use, but should: caniuse.com lovingly maintained in his own time by Alexis Deveria)

Of course, the big problem is that html5 has come to mean a lot of things, mostly thanks to Google. They’ve basically been riding that and flogging it and making it their own. (That and performance – simple, great marketing messaging. I appreciate it, even if the dishonesty of it makes my blood boil.)

And I’m sure that this entire apple site is a result of exactly the same problem we’ve been struggling with at Mozilla as of late. This is best described by a recent experience that we had from a candidate that came in to interview. He asked:

Hey, are you guys ever going to support html5?

Like, what? Are you fucking kidding me? Truth that marketing works. The perception-to-reality gap is giant.

I’m sure this was Apple is having exactly the same problem. Basically they are saying internally “omg, no one thinks we support html5, we need to prove them otherwise! We’ll put up tests! Demos! The world will then know and we can go back to being perceived as actually leading the WebKit project which is also made of puppies and rainbows!”

So you end up with sites like this. Sites that entirely miss the point of the web, interoperability, standards and html5. The demos that they put up are just filled with stuff that Apple made up, aren’t part of HTML5 and are only now getting to the standards process. Part of CSS3? Kind of, sort of, but under heavy development and still in a feedback process.

Let me be clear. I’m being snarky here essentially to get your attention. Because this is actually important. And if there’s one paragraph you should read here it’s this one:

The most important aspect of HTML5 isn’t the new stuff like video and canvas (which Safari and Firefox have both been shipping for years) it’s actually the honest-to-god promise of interoperability. Even stodgy old Microsoft, who has been doing their best to hold back the web for nearly a decade, understands this and you’ll see it throughout their marketing for IE9. (Their marketing phrase is “same markup” – watch for it and you’ll see it everywhere in their messaging.) The idea that the same markup, even with mistakes, will be rendered exactly the same. HTML5 represents the chance for browsers to work together and find common ground.

Before people misunderstand me, this is different than the question of how we innovate in browsers. Standards are part of that process, but standards follow more often than lead. HTML5 contains lots of new stuff that isn’t in IE, so it looks innovative, but most of HTML5 is like breathing to Mozilla. We’ve been doing that stuff for years. We’re more interested in what’s next at this point.

But it’s unfortunate, and I guess inevitable, that browsers would compete on how much html5 they are bathed in. But it’s important to ask: when you see someone making a claim, what does it really mean? Is that a made up test by a vendor? A demo of something that goes well beyond the standards that exist? (Tons of room for that, but it should be labeled as such!) Is it a test that is designed to show off other browser’s bugs in a meaningful and constructive way? Does the person running the tests know what they are doing and respond to constructive comments?

Apple’s messaging is clearly meant to say “hey, we love the web” but the actual demos they have and the fact that actively block other browsers from those demos don’t match their messaging. It’s not intellectually honest at all.

Since you made it this far I’ll make a promise. I can’t go back and fix the past, but I can help propose a new future. I personally end up driving a lot of the messaging that comes out of Mozilla (although maybe I won’t be after this post!) I promise that:

• I’ll be as honest as I can be about what we’re doing, what it means to other browsers and even to the new darling brand of the web: html5.
• I’ll work to make sure that demos that Mozilla does work in as many browsers as possible, even with graceful fallback.
• Demos or messages that are meant to show off stuff that’s not part of any standards process at all will be labeled as such.

HTML5 is in a dangerous place since everyone wants to own it, but everyone is in a different place in terms of support or even what it means. I can’t promise what other organizations will do, but I can at least say what I will do in the future. At Mozilla, intellectual honesty matters and it matters to me personally. So I don’t think you’ll see us do things like this in the future. To us, the web and its users matter more than any particular standard or browser. And you’ll see that reflected in messaging that comes from me and shows up as marketing.

“Someone has it backwards–it is HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, and H.264 (all supported by the iPhone and iPad) that are open and standard, while Adobe’s Flash is closed and proprietary,” said spokeswoman Trudy Muller in a statement.

The snarky part of me thinks that this is two companies arguing about which level of hell they represent. (It’s still hell, guys!)

But the reasonable part of me wants to point out that one part of the Apple statement is worth looking at – the assertion that H.264 is open. Because I certainly don’t consider it to be – not even a little.

Standard? Sure. The specs are well known, it’s widely implemented and is for the most part interoperable. But I have a pretty specific definition of open, a word that is highly over-used and over-stretched. It’s basically this:

It’s open if I don’t have to ask anyone for permission to use it. Or ship it. Or improve on it.

Does H.264 pass this test? Nope. I have to pay someone before I can ship it in a product, even one of moderate success. It’s a sacred cow where the kind of innovation that we’ve seen on the web – a model from which Apple has benefited from like few others – just doesn’t happen. H.264 is locked up behind a glass wall, which you can look at and pay to enter, but it doesn’t have the fungible, open and distributed innovation quality that the rest of the web enjoys.

So standard? Sure. But not open. Huge difference.

Ryan’s article contains this quote from Nokia developer Oleg Romaxa:

“Nokia will use the best browser for the job,” he said. “Currently, we cannot make a full-featured and integrated browser with WebKit in mobile. But with Mozilla, we do not need to do anything, we can take existing models and API’s which are available. Also, NPAPI support is already in the Gecko web rendering engine. They are also concerned that WebKit is, to some extent, controlled by Apple, who are in competition to Nokia with their iPhone.”

There are a few important things to note here. First, that Mozilla is the complete package. We’ve got everything that you need to implement a browser. Disk cache, integrated (and well tested!) networking, a super-fast JS implementation, an XML UI markup language (XUL) and a brand that regular humans recognize. Those things mean you can get to market faster as a mobile integrator or developer instead of having to create them yourselves again.

Second, our neutral stance. We believe in the web over any particular platform. From Nokia’s standpoint if you’re building on the same technology that one of your major competitors is leading vs. working with someone who absolutely wants a web browser to succeed across all of Nokia’s platforms – which partner would you choose? I’ve often said “pick your partners carefully” and this has to be an important part of any technology decision making process.

There’s also another interesting flip side to this: who is WebKit’s other major competitor? Apple itself. Just like Microsoft’s push to get Silverlight out in the world, Apple wants people to write apps to their native platform. In this case, the iPhone. Given the strategic value of the native platform as part of Apple’s offerings, their investment in WebKit will (or at least should) always lag behind. We’re investing everything we have in the web and our platform and it’s starting to pay dividends.

And since I have your attention here are two other very interesting checkins: GTK+ and directfb (which people are actually building products on) and worker threads (ala Gears.)

Look at our current (and planned) platform support: win32, windows mobile, win32 + qt, mac OSX, linux + gtk2, linux + qt, qt embedded, linux + gtk2-directfb, x86, ppc, arm. We’re bringing the web to everyone and we’re doing it with a single coherent project with regular releases. That’s what I mean when I say “for everyone everwhere.” The web is bigger than any platform and we’re the embodiment of that mantra.

Mozilla is moving. It’s fast and furious now. And I think we’re just getting started.

[ Update: It was pointed out to me that what I wrote above might be misinterpreted as announcing that Nokia had picked a platform or something similar. Just to be clear that wasn't what I was doing, and as far as I know they haven't. I don't have knowledge about that decision inside of Nokia. Only they know. I was just pointing out what a decision making process might look like and the importance of picking well-aligned partners. And the fact that we're running on more and more platforms these days which is cool as hell. ]

The article covers well tread ground: People are worried that Microsoft will leverage its market power to create a leadership position for multimedia on the web. Replacing the (proprietary) Flash video codecs with the (proprietary) Silverlight video codecs and associated tools. In some ways it looks like a battle between two companies and strategies that no one would care about. More lock-in, more proprietary tools, more opportunities to undermine the main single item that makes the web great: it’s open nature. But those companies have existing market reach and they will do anything they can to convert that into even more leverage over how you interact with the web. If nothing else, they will buy their way with cold hard cash onto your computers. These two industry players should be taken seriously.

John Lilly is quoted in the article as talking about the “generative Web” (via Jonathan Zittrain.) I like this phrase quite a bit. I think that might be an even be a better way to describe what we (as in the Mozilla Project) think is the most important part of the open web. That is, by the act of creation on the web you are also creating things that other people can build on. Everything from scraping data to create a search engine like Google to being able to look at other people’s HTML and JavaScript to discover how they do something clever. Transparency and openness creates innovation – innovation by thousands and thousands of people, each of which has a positive impact on the millions who use the web.

Think about it another way. The main metric that I would use to describe the health of a truly open web is this: That as the ecosystem expands, the raw number of people, companies or groups who hold power inside the ecosystem, and can affect its direction, grows as the ecosystem grows. Put another way, the power center is decentralized over time. Change inside of that ecosystem require more voices to agree that change is good. That’s healthy. And that’s an open web.

Then there’s the other side of the metric. That as an ecosystem expands it enhances the power of a single player in the market instead of creating many players in the market. Change in that market requires the permission of only that one player and that one player can make decisions on behalf of everyone who is also part of it. That’s not healthy. And it’s not the open web.

Based on those metrics for health the battle is between those who would expand for the sake of expanding the opportunity for everyone vs. those who would expand for the sake of centralizing their own market power. In one phrase: it’s expansion vs. centralization. That’s what you should be looking for and what you should be thinking about when you hear someone talking about the open web.

All of this is nice, of course, but it doesn’t really describe what we have to do to create the world we want to live in. It talks about the nature of the marketplace but it’s not really a roadmap for people to understand how, as the good guys in this picture, we can continue to compete and win against much larger competitors. I first word in the title for this post is “competing” for a reason. Because that’s what we really need to do.

Recently at the Firefox summit I was reminded in one of Mitchell’s talks about how Firefox is a mechanism. Firefox is the best representation of our vision for an open + generative web that we can come up with: As a rule our users love it, we’ve built an ecosystem of thousands of add-ons, we continue to protect our users from the worst aspects of the web, we continue to both compete and collaborate with other browser vendors and we manage to do all that in an open forum with open source code. Firefox is a reflection of our larger view of the transparency that we want to see in an open web. Put simply: We are the change we want to see on the web.

So that’s a lot of talk. Back to the issue at hand. Silverlight, video, adobe, multimedia, market power. How do we compete? Or, really, how do you compete? Because Mozilla isn’t going to create this change alone. We’re very very small by any standard in the tech marketplace. Our reach is pretty good with Firefox 2 + Firefox 3, and we’re starting to have real market effects, but we’re not going to be able to buy our way onto millions of computers by sponsoring the olympics.

People who have talked to me have heard me talk about two things on this topic. I usually say something like “you need to learn how to build a product” or “you need to find out what you can lead at and go do that.” There’s usually more than that, but that’s the main part of the message. And I think that if we want to make sure that the web isn’t overtaken by the acts of industry giants, that there are real actionable things we can do to make that happen.

I’ll use video on the web as a simple example. Here are the things that I think need to happen to make Theora a player in the real world.

1. Make sure there’s a really great video plugin for Apple Quicktime that delivers the OGG Theora video format to people who use the video tag in Safari. When I tried to play the ogg theora video from my post the other day the ogg plugin jumped around, showed a white screen for long periods, paused for a few seconds at a time – bad!

2. Create a control that brings the video tag to IE like Vlad did for the canvas tag. The world is much bigger than just Firefox. This would make it very easy to deliver and build content and make it easy for consumers to get access to it. Bring ubiquity to content like Adobe was able to do with Flash. (Note: Cortado isn’t good enough – it’s still stuck in the plugin prison!)

3. Make a super-easy, consumer-focused, high-quality encoder for ogg theora that anyone can use to encode their videos for the web. (Here’s a hint: Handbrake is still too hard to use.) Hook it up to the various video camera providers on mac and windows so that it’s super easy to create content, encode it, and with the tools listed above, upload it and make it available to others.

4. Even better, build a business around the tools above. Or even a service for people to upload to. Sustainability is an important component and it should not be left behind.

5. Create awesome demos of what you can do with the video tag, or even better mixed with the recent stuff we’ve been showing off with video + svg filters. Blur effects, video driven by content, content people can create and overlay onto existing videos, etc. Some of this stuff is out there, some of it isn’t. But it’s a start. Try mixing video with other content on the web – mash it up, cover it up, add value and context to otherwise boring videos. Its easier to do with the video tag than it is when it’s hidden inside of Flash or Silverlight.

So that’s just a short list of things people can do to help with video. There are lots of other things that people can do in other areas, other than just video, but I wanted to give an example of my thinking around OGG Theora as an example.

People seem excited about us including OGG Theora in our next Firefox release. But keep in mind it’s only a start. If the same ecosystem that we’ve seen develop around the open + generative web doesn’t grow around open video like it has around the web then we will end up with the status quo: a vibrant growing web but with large parts that are hobbled by a model that doesn’t grow on itself. Mozilla isn’t going to be able to do this job entirely on its own, but we’re doing our part. It’s going to take others to understand how we do what we do, copy its model and try to create the same effects in the other important parts of the ecosystem.

I wonder what the world will look like five years from now. It’s going to be an interesting ride.

Mozilla speeds up Firefox: Users say it’s twice as fast as Safari, three times faster than IE

Gregg Keizer talks about the improvements we’ve made in Firefox 3, as well as how we compare to other browsers and browser engines. It’s easy to talk about simple benchmarks but Mike Schroepfer states our goal pretty clearly:

“There are lots of ways to ‘game’ the system [in benchmarks], but what we’re trying to do is speed up the things that enable people to run the really heavy-duty applications on the Web.”

Forget Facebook. The Web’s platform is Firefox

Matt Asay interviews John Lilly and discovers how large our ambitions really are. An important quote here that goes to the heart of how we develop and deliver software:

Our question is always, how do we grow in a way that is leveraged? We always lead with the user experience and think about the money secondarily.

Cairo 1.6, Quartz, and Gecko

Vlad talks about the work that he’s been putting into Cairo to make Quartz a first class citizen, including support for the iPhone. Vlad seems to feel that Cairo is really starting to come into its own after being in development for so long. (Mozilla has been working with cairo for so long that it’s important to remember where it was when we started.) There’s some good stuff in here for Linux folks too. Soren has been doing a lot of good work on pixman and Mozilla has been investing in improving upstream cairo performance (some of the MMX work is funded by us) in order to help Linux and our mobile efforts. All good stuff.

ARIA on Webkit’s R(a)dar?

With the beta release of IE8, WebKit is the last major browser engine that doesn’t have support for ARIA. The upstream WebKit bug picked up a tag that points to Apple’s internal bug tracking system. Which means that Apple may or may not be working on it. If this were fixed, it would be a pretty big step forward for the web.

Year of the Gecko

Mike Shaver reflects on where we are today. I liked this quote in particular:

Other people are excited too, from users and journalists to extension developers and companies looking to add web tech to their products. In the mobile arena especially we’re seeing a ton of excitement about the gains in speed and size. A lot of people aren’t yet used to thinking of Mozilla as a source of mobile-grade technology, but they weren’t used to thinking of us as a major browser force either. It’s fun to break the model.

Fast, small, cross-platform, industry-leading stability, solid OS integration, excellent standards support, excellent web compatibility, great security, ridiculously extensible, a productive app platform, accessible, localized to heck and back, open source from top to bottom: it’s a great time to be building on top of Gecko, and Firefox 3 is just the beginning. Wait until you see what we have in store for the next release…

With mobile browser, Mozilla hopes to shake up market

Washington Post article on our entry into the Mobile browser market. They note that Samsung has been working with us, submitting UI ideas and also working on bits of the underlying platform and that the N800/N810 OS includes a Mozilla-based browser. (Sadly, the MicroB that’s on the N800 is a tad old and hasn’t benefitted from all the recent performance and size we’ve been doing at the end of this release cycle.)

Mobile applications, RIP

Long essay on the decline of native mobile apps and the trend of moving mobile apps to mobile web apps. The web app deployment model (unencumbered by greedy operators) mixed with the fact that a vendor can often leverage huge amounts of existing work and the testing matrix gets much smaller means that the web as a delivery mechanism for mobile apps is becoming a reality. (Expect to see more on this topic from Mozilla in the near future – we’ve got some great stuff coming down the pipe.)

Andy Rubin on Android (quoted by Robert Love)

We’re building an open-source platform for mobile phones called Android. The strategy is to provide Web-style innovation and rapid development on the cell phone, which we think is still in prehistoric times. If you have people developing applications at home, one of them will create the next Facebook. That’s the idea behind our mobile mashups. Third-party developers get data from one site and overlay it on something like a Google map. We want to deliver thousands of applications to your phone.

Of course, I’m not sure you need Android to do that, but I agree 1000% with the goal. A decent web browser is the first place to start, which is one of the main reasons why we’re investing in Mobile.

Chris put up new video-enabled builds to test with about 4 days ago. Here’s a screenshot of it running on my Fedora 8 machine:

Back in August Chris also made a post about mixing video and SVG transformations and made a video of it. You can see a version on youtube or see the ogg version.

It’s great to see Alp doing similar work in WebKit for Linux. The question that I have is will Apple, who is by far the largest distributor of WebKit today, also be including video support with baseline Theora support so that we have at least one base open standard for video on the web? Otherwise it’s the format wars all over again and we’re all stuck with Flash or, even worse, Silverlight.

The platform is much improved. Overy 300 memory leak fixes, the XPCOM Cycle Collector which removes an entire class of leaks, ongoing work on memory fragmentation, improvements to rendering performance and better reliability in preserving user data.

This quote from an ars technica article sums things up well:

Firefox 3 beta 1 delivers an outstanding improvement to the user experience. Unlike Firefox 2, which was a bit light on new features, Firefox 3 is practically overflowing with shiny new goodies. [...] Despite delays and other setbacks, Firefox 3 is shaping up to be an outstanding web browser that delivers innovative new technologies while retaining Firefox’s signature ease of use.

Go get it.

David Pogue has a wonderful little review of the iPhone. He’s an acquired taste, I think, but fits my sense of humor very well: silly, good points, and lots of over the top audience participation. I loved the punchline: But, uhh, is there an Apple logo? Great little dig about the value of brand and identity over rational decision making.

Also worth watching is his talk at TED. His talk is – wait for it – a musical. Very silly, but very enjoyable.