This is part of our larger effort to bring open video to the web. We’ve been glad to work with NVIDIA and Youtube on this project building the solution entirely on open standards like WebM and HTML5. Our hope is that by lowering the barrier for 3D video on the web, we’ll see more interesting apps being build on open web technologies.

This feature requires that you have 3D Vision hardware. If you do have 3D Vision Hardware, go to youtube.com and search for ‘yt3d‘. Files encoded with 3D have this tag. You will also have to set your 3D mode for the type of hardware you have.

Even if you don’t have the hardware, trust me. This feature is pretty cool. I was able to load up some 3D trailers on youtube and it was pretty amazing to see a little world appear in the video box.

Adam Barth recently demonstrated some serious attacks against the protocol that could be used by an attacker to poison caches that sit in between the browser and the Internet.

Once we have a version of the protocol that we feel is secure and stable, we will include it in a release of Firefox, even a minor update release. The code will remain in the tree to facilitate development, but will only be activated when a developer sets a hidden preference in Firefox.

A note for web developers: When a user doesn’t have WebSockets enabled, the WebSocket property will not be on the window object. So object detection should work.

To be clear, we’re still excited about what WebSockets offers and we’re working hard with the IETF on a new WebSocket protocol.

How it should go: browsers innovate differently, users pick the best one, later W3C standardizes what users chose, losing browsers conform.

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:

Geolocation

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.

Orientation

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.

WebGL

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.

1. The update offer of Firefox 3.6 to users of Firefox 3 and Firefox 3.5 is the first time we’ve ever done an offer to a .0 release to our user base. We’ve always waited until the .1 release or later. We did this because we were able to measure improvements over 3.5 in terms of performance, reliability and add-ons compatiblity.

2. This is the fastest uptake we’ve ever seen. From the metrics blog. Check out the fancy hockey stick:

Basically we’re learning how to get people to adopt and how to drive the release process even faster. We’re also doing this in our beta and alpha channels. We’re doing preview releases of Firefox.next every couple of weeks now, testing out new features and themes and driving the feedback process faster and faster.

It’s a crazy ride.

Basically a “skid mark” is something you leave in code as a signature so that in a crash dump you can figure out how you got there.

We’ve been doing a huge amount of work in Firefox 3.5 and 3.6 to reduce the number of crashes. For some crashes we have stack traces, but not a lot of data on how we got to that stack. So we’re actually checking in code changes and and shipping them into the wild to see how they change crash signatures.

The interesting thing is that it’s working – we’ve been able to track down some pretty serious crashes with this technique.

1. A decent sized (600×400 or so) Theora video playing on a Nokia N900, decoding on the DSP with the main CPU kept at around 50%. (Pulseaudio is about 10-15% of that, and the rest of Vorbis decoding and some work to get the video onto a fullscreen texture.) This is based on David Schleef’s Theora-on-DSP work and it’s showing real promise.

2. With Bas’ Direct2D windows build, I’m able to play a 1080p Theora (test here) video on my Lenovo X200s and it’s smooth as butter. Fully scaled, full framerate, full screen, no drops. Pretty amazing. And he’s only doing scaling in that code, not yet doing the YUV->RGB conversions so there’s still a huge amount of room to improve here.

All good improvements for HTML5 and open video.

One Cloud? by liberato

This really wonderful post by Anil Dash echos a lot of what I’ve been talking about in the context of the larger web. I had a discussion with Ben Galbraith recently about this topic during a Mozilla lunch. He and I took (intentionally) different positions on topics to see what kind of discussion we could stimulate around how developers see the web platform.

Ben has some concern that the web platform isn’t as coherent as those that you find from the other big players – the iPhone platform, Silverlight, Java or any of the other giant siloed stacks. (Actually Ben was more interested in the capabilities of those platforms vs. the web, but I’ll talk about that later.) I’m basically of the opinion that the web that we have, and as messy as it seems, actually produces pretty good results. That the incrementalism and experimentation that we’ve seen from web browser vendors results in what I call “developer-friendly incompatibility.” That those changes are eventually codified to standards and taken mainstream because they degrade well and we can learn as we go. (Kind of like life!)

But it does raise an interesting question – what capabilities do we need to have for the web that are found in these stacks? And can they be applied in an incremental fashion? We’re starting to see that with video being promoted as a first class citizen with Flash as a trailing edge fallback. We’re starting to see the web pick up 3D capabilities with participation from Google, Apple and Mozilla. And we have the pretty wonderful library model that has produced jQuery, jQuery UI, mootools, YUI, dojo and many others – all of which come from pushing complexity to the edges of the web community.

But is it enough? Discuss. What’s missing, and what’s interesting? I would particularly love to hear from Java and Silverlight developers. What do you really love about those platforms? Is source-as-delivery and incrementalism enough?

I’d like to personally thank the wonderful people at Dailymotion, along with Paul and Tristan who helped bring this project to the point where it is today.  Dailymotion has been an excellent test case for us because they haven’t just encoded with the formats that we support but also built a full-fledged player using HTML, CSS and JavaScript that looks, feels and acts like the flash-based players we see on the web today.  They also make it possible to embed open video using an clever <object> tag that loads the video content safely in an HTML page.

Standing on the twin pillars of the HTML5 video API and royalty-free codecs, the movement to bring open video to the web is well underway. Dailymotion, along with Wikipedia and the Internet Archive, have all committed to start serving up open video.  The free encoders are getting better and better over time and we’re starting to see more interest in the technologies.

Dailymotion, Mozilla and a large number of other partners will be at the Open Video Conference on June 19th and 20th.  If you’re interested in talking with us you might want to come down to the conference and learn what’s happening with video on the web.