Our current plan in Firefox is to ship -76, but with a private namespace. Why? Because we know the protocol is going to change so it’s important for developers to be able to tell which version of the protocol a browser actually supports. We’re leaving it in just for testing. WebSockets should not be considered production yet.

I can’t speak for the Chrome team because I don’t work for Google, but my understanding from talking with the people there is that they will change the protocol in Chrome once a new version of the protocol is out and push it out in one of their releases. (The current editor of the spec, Ian Fette, works on the Chrome team at Google.)

Anne, displaying some unintentional self-parody, says It will be interesting to see if we ever do get rid of -76.. Note that the best way to end up getting stuck with something is shipping it before it’s ready. Just saying.

I’ll be pretty disappointed if we end up with a world in which one browser shipped earlier than it should, it gets added to HTML5 scoring web sites and then it ends up in every other browser for product marketing reasons. And by effect we end up with something that isn’t very good because we were in a hurry.

It’s a protocol. We should spend some time getting it right.

That being said, there has been quite a bit of progress in the working group and many open issues have been settled. The draft somewhat lags behind consensus, but I would expect updates soon.

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.

“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.

It’s important to realize that wordpress.com is the second top 20 website in the US to add support for Theora. (The other is Wikipedia. DailyMotion has also been experimenting with Theora – number 13 in France and 38th world-wide.) These technologies are still new, but it’s nice to see that people are adopting open standards and open formats as early as possible.

Along with some web site adoption, really great tools are starting to come together to support Theora in HTML5, making it super-easy to transcode videos into open formats.

It’s great to see so much progress in such a short period of time.

I’ve included a link below to the video that describes VideoPress in an open video format hosted at wordpress.com, along with with MPEG-4 and flash fallbacks.

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?

If you have Firefox 3.1b3 you can try the demo here.

Today Mozilla and the Khronos group announced that Mozilla will be leading an initiative to bring accelerated 3D to the web.  This is a pretty big deal for us and for the web, and is really a reflection of the continued acceleration of open web technology well beyond just the classic HTML and JavaScript that we’ve seen in the past.  It’s our intention to include this as base functionality in the release after Firefox 3.5, assuming all goes well on the standards front.

We’ve started to see more and more libraries being built to support use cases with Canvas in a 2D context but we really want to take things to the next level and start to allow people to use 3D capabilities as well.  Accelerated 3D graphics with the super-fast next-generation JavaScript engines from nearly every  web browser vendor means that we’re going to be able to start to see more and more advanced applications written using open web technologies.  3D is a huge part of that story and we’re happy to bring our proposal to the table.

The proposed spec (found in one of vlad’s post on 3D Canvas) is a pretty light wrapper on top of OpenGL ES 2.0, with some changes to support some JavaScript pleasantries.  OpenGL ES is a decent starting point, which is why we picked it.  OpenGL is supported as part of every major operating system and in it’s being picked up as a standard on mobile devices as well.  Compared to the full OpenGL spec, the ES variant is a smaller subset that reflects the reality of what’s being used on the ground and most hardware and software vendors have actually been re-tooling to support OpenGL ES with support for older versions of full OpenGL emulated on top of OpenGL ES.  Mixed with the fact that there’s a decent amount of knowledge out there in the industry of how to use OpenGL, we think that this smooths the integration between the current set of OpenGL users and larger web developer community.

Expect to see some releases of the code to start with in the form of the Canvas3D extension.  Vlad has made releases of it in the past and we’ll be able to have something that works as an extension as part of Firefox 3.5 for people to start experimenting with.

But Chris Double beat me to the punch and has an excellent little tutorial about how he’s using the video tag with elegant fallbacks. (In his post you can use something other than the Java-based fallback. In my case I linked back to vimeo.)

Enjoy!