Then, Jeremy Keith, our unofficial rabble-rouser, excoriates the cognoscenti about a certain “lack of imagination.” Chris Wilson, finally at liberty to blog and tweet about his responsibilities as web platform guy for Google, responds conversationally.
Browser wars always delivers. Thank you, Brendan (“Dart? Good luck with that!”), Charles (who conducted a much-needed straw poll: “Who knows what vendor prefixing is?” to which many hands went up, underscoring the fact that SxSW is really our favorite audience), Chris (“Do you ship VBScript?”), and John (“Chromeless — my favorite word.”).
The panel always coincides with my birthday. I won’t get mawkish, but I will say that there’s something interesting about growing up with web browsers professionally. When I was with Netscape, I talked a relentless amount of smack about IE and railed against closed-source stacks. That kind of talk is antiquated now, really. Flash fallback (for video) notwithstanding, there are open sourced stacks that confuse the web platform landscape. We talked about some of those during the panel, chiefly Dart (though SPDY and VP8 got some mention, along with Native Client). At some point, I found myself moderating a panel where browser vendors agree about the importance of DRM, and its inevitability on the web platform, at least as far as video goes. Times have changed. Have we all grown up? There used to be visceral auto-immune responses in some circles to any kind of mention of DRM whatsoever.
This time, SxSW was bigger than ever. Long lines. LOTS of long lines. And after-after-after parties for people that scorn sleep. Of course, I allowed myself some minor peccadilloes this year at SxSW. Like how I found myself on Snoop Dogg’s tour bus at 4a.m. one night, somewhere on the way to San Antonio. But that’s another kind of story. You’ll have to ask me about it in person.
Update: You can follow the H.264 conversation on the hacks blog also if only to be exposed to a different comment stream.
]]>I can’t seem to stay away. This is a vibrant space, and the very smart people I will moderate during Saturday’s discussion are the forerunners of it: Brendan Eich, who invented JavaScript, and is Mozilla’s CTO; Chris Wilson, who worked on every version of IE till IE8 and now works on Chrome for Google (we’re thrilled to have him back, following a brief moratorium); Charles McCathie Nevile, Opera’s Chief Standards Officer, back again this year; and John Hrvatin, IE’s Program Manager and a veteran from last year.
The technologies that we steward here have profound implications for society, and an hour is tight. Recently, Microsoft protested about how Google circumvents privacy in IE and Safari (showing, amongst other things, that two players, Google and Microsoft, are at loggerheads frequently).
Then, there are interesting questions about content itself. Should web video have DRM, or is that the real anachronism? Content protection measures in HTML5 Video proposed by Google, Microsoft, and Netflix have been dubbed unethical; parties within one company clearly don’t agree about how to take it forward, but that’s really how the web works (and big organizations like Google).
And then there’s those Angry Birds. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web, called for installable web apps to become more widespread, something which Ian Hickson (editor of the HTML5 specification) dubs “anathema.” What prevents Angry Birds from being an HTML5 app on mobile, and what exactly are the application stacks the web is in competition with? Some of our panelists and their organizations have been moved to call us to arms.
Throw in the vendor prefixing controversy (now as seen in the popular press!), SPDY, VP8 and other “non-standard” well-meaning projects, along with the Metro environment’s use of HTML5, and I think we’ve got ourselves enough wheat and chaff for a panel. As usual, audience participation counts for at least one-third of the panel, so come with questions. I look forward to seeing you all there, and to a Saturday night out in Austin after the panel. That’s an institution with longevity, too.
]]>What makes a compelling story for me is the browser peace, though. The web as a platform (“The Web Platform”) wins through consensus about standardization. I blogged recently about standards in the device era. What I didn’t touch on is whether patents will thwart the attempt to build out the promise of a seamlessly interoperable web. I’m not moderating a discussion dubbed “Browser Wars” this year, but I’ll leave last year’s attendees (as proxies for their browser companies) some fly-by notes:
Dear Darin (aka Google Chrome guy): I’m sorry I went easy on you last year. You guys can afford to move faster than us on some things, because you don’t have the marketshare considerations we do. You also have an armada of people working on Chrome (I think you have more PR people than we have employees, but that’s cool). I value interaction with you guys, not least of all because you have big web applications that can help drive use cases for all the stuff you put through in standards (GMail, etc.). We don’t have that, so we need to be diligent about developer relations, which is my big passion these days. We’re doing great things with WebGL (and the guys you have in standards are top-notch). I just hope we can agree about other stuff, like the right course of action on HTML5 Video.
Dear Chris Wilson (aka Microsoft guy, aka “go to” guy for IE team for years and years): You really handled my nagging last year with grace, and you made me look bad for doing it (I’m sorry). And you know what? You guys’ recent blog post about working with the HTML5 Community was really, really encouraging. I’m glad we agree on some things, like the fact that the SQLite API is the wrong choice for the web, and that we’ll work to fix this with a successor proposal, like Indexed DB. But what about video, canvas, 3D graphics, and all those other things? I’m watching, and expecting big things from you guys. What’s generally surprising to me is that with the promise of an agreement on fonts and other things, we’re agreeing more than disagreeing. Maybe browser ballot issues in the EU, coupled with the stance organizations are taking about killing IE6, will collectively improve the situation for the web (that you guys kind of caused).
Dear Apple: *sigh. I guess you couldn’t make it to the panel for the past three years, but that’s no biggie. Your participation in standards more than compensates for your restrictions on public speaking. The iPhone’s got some great stuff with respect to Orientation Events for Safari in it. Maybe we can agree on standardizing this stuff, just as we agree on other device capabilities, like WebGL (which works in nightly builds). And Safari 4.05 really moves the needle on the web platform, implementing the kinds of Ajax improvements we worked on together. I’m optimistic that your patent portfolio won’t cloud the future, and that the web will benefit from your smarts.
Dear Chaals, Opera Guy: You’re a standards titan. You guys implement everything! Congratulations on Opera 10.50, which has slick features. Particular kudos on doing the right thing on HTML5 Video in Opera 10.50! It’s clear, however, that we don’t agree on Widgets vs. the Open Web. They are very different, but some of your guys argue that they really aren’t that different (see my general thoughts on what to do in the device space). I think equating them as the same thing is sheer folly on you guys’ part. That being said, Opera Mini is a smart piece of technology, and I definitely felt a little rueful that Firefox for Mobile (Fennec) won’t work on all the devices Opera Mini works on that I saw used by the audiences I addressed in India.
Lastly, Dear Web Developer: I’m keen to spend time with you here at SxSW, since you’re really what drives us all. Brendan’s here as well (as are lots of the Firefox team, addons, JetPack, etc.), and I’ll try and get the other guys (mentioned above) to come out for beers, maybe some time after the Mozilla Party at SxSW.
]]>February 21
The guy working at the bakery knows where it is, or so he says. He gesticulates emphatically, pointing to the alley behind the neon INRI above the cross, which serves as an illuminating reminder that we’re in a big Roman Catholic neighborhood. I’ve been leading sethb and pike on a tour of Mumbai’s narrow winding lanes, all to further the discourse about the Open Web. We’re in Chuim Village on a Sunday night, after having left GNUnify 2010 in Pune. We’re on our way to the pad.ma offices and are following Sanjay Bhangar’s detailed directions. We’re here to talk to some of the Mozilla Mumbai community about HTML5, video, and emerging web technologies, and to ingest beer and delicious biriyani. We find out that Jan Gerber (who wrote Firefogg) and Sebastian Luetgert are in Mumbai as well, representing the impressive 0xdb.org movie database and working with pad.ma. It promises to be a very interesting evening, if we can actually find the place.
Earlier in the same Sunday, sethb, ragavan, pike and I spoke to the PuneTech community, consisting of local startups and techies in the Pune area. We talked about the entrepreneurial opportunities accorded by the open web. Here’s the presentation I used to stimulate discussion. I talked about HTML5 (inclusive of the WebApps APIs, such as the File API and Orientation Events), CSS3’s @font-face
property, and discussed the potential this had for Indic fonts. We closed with demos of Ambiera’s amazing Copperlicht JavaScript 3D engine built on WebGL. There was lots of talk about what open video and the video API actually meant for web applications, and the questions flowed freely. sethb then ran an ad-hoc entrepreneur’s competition to come up with great open web applications, splitting the room up into groups of three. Ideas included an Indian equivalent to typekit.com and e-learning for the hearing challenged using the HTML5 video API to nest videos within videos (with sign language in the interior video explaining the exterior one). Gurminder gives us a summary.
There weren’t as many questions on Friday, when I gave a similar demo-driven talk about the open web as part of GNUnify 2010. ragavan talked about Mozilla Labs, and sparked much discussion about OpenID. It’s clear that identity is probably one of the juiciest problems on the web. pike gave an overview of advances the Mozilla project has made with respect to localization.
You’d think I’d be exhausted by the time we leave Pune and get to Mumbai, but I’m simply hyper by the time we arrive on Sunday evening. Following the guy in the bakery’s directions, we navigate our way up some stairs to a charming rooftop overlooking Chuim. The pad.ma folks have got us together for an eclectic evening of code and cinema, and have a large screen with a projector trained on it. My open web demos this time around are choreographed by fireworks from a local wedding, punctuating their punch. Attendees ask us a bunch of questions, and I relish the opportunity to geek out a bit with Sanjay, Jan, Sebastian, and folks from the gnowledge.org project (who have a bunch of SVG questions for me). Jan and Sebastian have put together really slick UI on 0xdb.org, and are passionate advocates of stylable scrollbars, a la WebKit. All the while, we’re drinking beers and eating Mumbai’s best biriyani.
Our trip is off to a great start. Firefox accounts for 30% of the Indian browser market, and it’s clear that we have a vibrant community here. We have a few days of meetings lined up in Mumbai, and I’m going into all of them fairly amped.
]]>It’s also being cleverly co-opted as a symbol for MozCampMumbai, another amazing Mozilla community event, taking place on Sunday July 19 in Mumbai.
Speaking at MozCampDelhi was one of the highlights at the start of this year, and I’m sorry I can’t be at MozCampMumbai in person. Asa, Mary and I recorded a video for the occasion, which I suspect we’ll post on Air Mozilla before long. I spoke about font-face
, HTML5 Video, and a few other things that I think are particularly relevant to folks attending MozCampMumbai. If you’re attending MozCampMumbai and reading this after you’ve watched me prattle on in the video, happy MozHunt Enjoy some vada-pav, hackery and conversations about the Web.
For one, I now actually work for a browser company. Sure, some folks argued that I never really left (at least spiritually, since the last time around) but there’s a difference between just contributing and picking up a paycheck. And this time, we’ve got a fourth participant — Darin Fisher, who now works on Google Chrome, will join the discussion I moderate. This will be a fun session — we’ll have to break Darin in, but he’s been around the block, too, with past history working on Mozilla. It’ll be a spirited discussion (some of us will talk smack), and audience participation makes it all worth it. But really, we want to discuss where the web is going from here. The web is 20 years old now, and was feted where it was originally invented today, at a nuclear research institute (CERN) in Switzerland. With the JavaScript performance wars, escalation on the standards front about things like fonts and graphics, and the advent of a new entrant, where do these guys think it will all go?
Some things, however, don’t change much over the course of three years. Still no Apple — their PR machinery won’t allow it, given the publicity this thing has gotten. But Darin (who worked on Firefox and Chrome) will speak for Google’s use of WebKit, Charles McCathieNevile (worked on lots of W3C specifications; is Opera’s standards officer) will speak again for Opera, Chris Wilson will represent IE (worked on every single version of the thing, and is a CSS muckety-muck), and Brendan (invented JavaScript) will represent Firefox.
If you’re in Austin, say hi. If my voice holds up, you can also see me at Fray Cafe, telling a story.
]]>Of course, mobile Firefox (Fennec) isn’t available on many devices, and we’ve got a lot of work left to realize the vision of the web being the platform of choice on mobile. How will that manifest itself? I got plenty of questions about WebKit vs. Firefox, and ease of use of each codebase for mobile projects. Mozilla’s platform (including XUL, extensions, and XPCOM) stands as a sometimes weighty alternative to WebKit, but people love the platform with its extensibility, and that’s where the promise lies. This theme will make a brief reappearance (amongst other themes) in my panel on March 16 at SxSW 2009, in which I’m sticking a Chrome guy, a Microsoft guy, an Opera guy, and a Mozilla guy together for a panel discussion on where the web is going.
Here’s my talk at OSiM 2009, available as a PDF file:
]]>sethb and I don’t mean to tempt fate. We find ourselves whizzing through Lucknow on our way to the airport with that sinking feeling that we’re going to miss our flight. Our flight to Mumbai leaves at 7PM, and it’s already 645PM. A herd of buffalo blocks the road, and the driver’s nonchalance is both inspiring and enervating. We’re on our way to Pune (via Mumbai) for gnuNify 2009, where we’re scheduled to talk at the Mozilla Project Day.
We find that our flight is delayed, which means that though we make the flight (joy!), we eventually only get into Pune at 3.30a.m. (*sigh). Our talk is at 10a.m. w00t! We find ourselves chuckling with resignation.
Pune is sethb’s kind of town. This is where most of the Indian language localizers live and work (in particular, Marathi, Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati and Kannada), and they’re all attending gnuNify. The enthusiasm and hard work of the students really make sure the trains run on time at this conference. The lead organizer, Professor Harshad Gune, is on the board of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and is one of the driving forces behind introducing open source ideas to the students at Pune’s SICSR (Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research).
sethb and I talk to a capacity crowd for about 3 hours. I talk about the Open Web again, and show all the usual demos (SVG, CSS, CSS+SVG, with Video bringing it all home). I also show Bespin running on localhost. I get some fascinating questions. In particular:
sethb’s session on localization introduces Silme and he gets a lot of follow-up questions.
The next morning was a real treat. Navin Kabra (who also runs Pune Tech) organized a “Breakfast with Mozilla” discussion, where sethb and I got a chance to talk to a bunch of technology entrepreneurs from Pune. The crowd is a really diverse one. We get technologists interested in topics like Bespin, addons.mozilla.org, and Ubiquity, as well as extension authors like the folks from Lipikaar. Someone from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative is in the audience. We also get business folks interested in learning how Mozilla makes money, how extensions can be monetized, and what Mozilla is doing on mobile platforms. I also get a chance to pick the collective brains of the entrepreneurs in the room about how we can increase awareness of Firefox in India. These topics warrant their own blog post.
]]>Chintalgiri Shashank hasn’t been sleeping much. When he’s not building a satellite for ISRO or helping organize TechKriti 2009 (for which sethb and I are in town), he’s Mozilla’s Campus Rep. at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IITK). And a full time Master’s student there in the physics department.
IITK’s annual TechKriti festival seems to have increased this place’s cranial buzz (if that’s possible). We hear about the “Build Your Own Supercomputer” project, in which students take some NVIDIA GPU components and string them together to do complex calculations, powered by hardware from the local market in Kanpur. Then we actually witness some guys tinkering away on robots — Shashank tells me they’ve been up for two nights trying to get their robots to do stuff. I’m in town with sethb to give a talk about the Open Web. I’ve got some experimental stuff to show off from Mozilla, too.
For one thing, Dion and Ben have been up really late (like at 3.45a.m. their time — good for me, since that meant that I could chat with them in my time zone) tweaking Bespin for a sort of a special soft launch, exclusively for the workshop I’m doing as part of IIT Kanpur’s FOSSKriti event. They’ve given me a special URL which I can give to the students at the workshop, which I’ve titled “Hacking the Open Web.” My slides will follow soon-ish. Sure enough, there are some 11th hour bugs and quirks, and Ben sends me an email with a list of do’s and don’ts. The workshop has a capacity crowd of over a hundred, and I’m about to run an experimental web application on all the installations of Firefox in the IITK Linux lab — w00t! Shashank built me an ad-hoc projector screen with large sheets of paper, and in order to project my voice better, I strolled around the large room. The entire session was just really interactive, since I get stopped on my stroll with plenty of questions.
I started the workshop out with a general discussion of the Open Web, showing off some demos of SVG, Canvas, CSS+SVG, and bringing it all together with the video element invoking Ogg Theora content (layering SVG, CSS, and some Canvas action, stitched together with JavaScript, in different demos). There are some Flash fans in the crowd, who ask quite rightly whether all this will be made simpler with great tools, like what Adobe provides for Flash. We do need better tools, but I ask him to wait till I talk about tools in The Cloud.
The meat and bones of the workshop is really for folks to use Bespin, a day before it launches. My talk has some of Ben and Dion’s killer slides, describing (with eye candy) the “IDE in the cloud.” When we get out the starter gate, however, we hit a snag. My first exercise is to have students draw the Indian flag on screen (Deep Saffron, White, and Green). Turns out the Wikipedia entry on the Indian flag has an image in SVG, and I thought it might be fun to have a replica in Canvas. All the students name their project “IndianFlag” and suddenly start getting permission errors. Somebody smart figures out that about a hundred people can’t call their project the same thing, so I ask folks to add the last four digits of their cell phone numbers to their project names. That worked, and soon enough, people are playing around with Bespin, hacking on project IndianFlag0438 (or somesuch).
They identify all the early-stage common issues — no cut-paste (you can’t cut-paste from an image! Ben thinks that later on, an extension might help), and syntax highlighting for tab-delimited HTML files is just busted. There are, of course, general accessibility concerns and Bespin is still very much a work in progress. I stressed to the students that what I wanted them to absorb was that a graphics context coupled with high-performance JavaScript was where some promising directions on the web lay.
A smart student figures out how to use the Canvas2D context to draw the tricolor in about 20 minutes, and I enlist him to help the others. I’m still offering an honorable mention to anyone that can draw the Ashoka Chakra within the tricolor. This is a mixed audience of seasoned programmers (some Drupal hackers are there, as well as other Mozilla Campus Reps) and newbies. We didn’t have enough time for my jQuery examples (which I pinched from jresig’s talks), but I’d say the workshop was a success.
The next morning, I gave a talk on HTML5 and the standards process, which is also attended by a capacity crowd. Both sethb and I are pretty overwhelmed with the enthusiasm and thirst for knowledge that we encounter at IITK’s FOSSKriti event. It’s not all pure love, though — we get nagged about memory leaks again, and get questions about Chrome’s use of WebKit. Someone in the audience claimed that on his tests, WebKit outperforms Firefox, and wants to know whether our emphasis on platform means that we have performance compromises, which WebKit (being lean and mean and XUL-free) doesn’t have. Wow! That’s pugnacious. I’d like to take that question to the test-suite mat, and see what happens. I’m not above eating humble pie, but this one seems focused on a particular use case.
There are a LOT of contacts that I’m keen to follow up with. If you attended this event feel free to drop me some email or a comment — I’m still traveling, but will sift through my inbox when back — promise! I met students, professors, and professionals, and saw some artificial intelligence as well. This campus basically blew us away.
]]>It’s about midnight, and a wedding party next door is boisterously dancing to loud drum beats, preventing us from drifting off to sleep. sethb gazes out at the shadows behind the curtain with wide open, sleep-addled eyes. Like me, he’s probably exhausted and jet-lagged, but he is curious and intrigued by what he is looking at. It dawns on me that sethb’s adventurous curiosity will make him a great travel buddy as we do a Mozilla trip through India, hitting the road lean and mean. It’s our first day in Delhi, and it’s set a high octane precedent for whatever else will happen. Twenty or so hours ago, Seth got in from Europe, after FOSDEM; I got in at the same time from California and we meet up at Indira Gandhi Airport, Delhi. We haven’t really slept much.
Earlier in the day, we attended an event at the Indian Social Institute called MozCampDelhi, put together by the inimitable Mohak Prince in just a few short days. Mohak (aka “~~~STigMaTa~~~ ~~~HaLLuCiNaTiNg AmBiGuiTy~~~” in all his emails) is a Mozilla Campus Rep in India, and has a real flair for organization. Along with a really sharp crew of open source enthusiasts that helped put the event together, Mohak brought together an impressive audience of professionals, students, and hobbyists. It was a great crowd for a Tuesday afternoon. It was also pretty illustrative of the use of Twitter, Wikis, and the blogosphere in India as instruments of event promotion and spontaneous UnConferencing. I sensed that this was going to be a really smart, savvy and interactive bunch of people, and I remember feeling really elated to be there.
MozCampDelhi’s afternoon session started out with a Skype presentation by Pascal Finette, discussing the Mozilla Labs Concept Series. The important thing here is that contributions for directions the ‘fox can go aren’t restricted to those who can code; anyone can submit a prototype or an image or a video clip of themselves explaining something with interpretive dance (I exaggerate, but why not?). Pascal’s talk stimulated discussion in the crowd about Creative Commons, and other lab projects such as Ubiquity and Weave. Folks wanted to know whether localization initiatives were also part of the purview.
Seth then discussed localization initiatives. Against the backdrop of the BBC publicity about Firefox in Hindi [BBC] (amongst other languages like Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, etc.), I was personally interested in the number of users of a localized browser at MozCampDelhi. Very few hands went up when I asked who used Firefox in a localized version, but this could be a function of the audience. Seth got a great question about string transliteration across Indic languages, rather than always reinventing the wheel on a given Indic localization. This was something we took up with other folks in Pune.
As a bit of an intermission between talks, Mohak showed us a video telling the “story of Firefox.” This just really cracked me up. It had Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross as post-Netscape visionaries in a sort of animated version of the browser wars. When I see stuff like that, I’m always reminded of the fact that my day job impacts people. Lots of people.
My talk was about the Open Web — I’ll have my actual slides on SlideShare soon. All of my demos can be found on the Mozilla Library wiki, but in particular, I reused a lot of eye candy from Vlad’s talk on Web Graphics and Multimedia. I showed the audience demos of SVG, Canvas, CSS, and the HTML5 video element (on a trunk build). I also showed them the Bespin IDE running on localhost (later, at IIT Kanpur, I’d have students hack on code using Bespin — stay tuned for that update). The questions from the audience were provocative. Somebody asked us, somewhat pugnaciously, if “Opera was simply a better browser.” *sigh There’s one in every crowd. My opinion is self-explanatory, but I did point out to mobile enthusiasts that unlike Opera, we weren’t making a J2ME midlet for lower-end devices (and we weren’t providing a web proxy). Instead, Fennec goes after smarter phones, and is still a work in progress. In general, the keenly expressed desire to look for alternatives to IE and Windows is really awesome to behold. It was a welcome question, and I got it again repeatedly at IITK and Pune as well. Firefox memory leaks were also pointed out in no uncertain terms, and this clearly is something I’m going to take back and look at closer.
Others were really curious about open codecs on the web, and wanted to know if existing formats (like Flash), by virtue of their widespread availability, would stymie the advance of Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis as open alternatives to the incumbents. I pointed out that it was about the Open Web — that is, the intersection of fonts, graphics (SVG and Canvas), style (CSS), and video which is where the promise lay. That is, video as as first rate citizen of the web, not as something punted over a walled, rectangular garden (aka a proprietary third-party plugin) within a web page.
After it was over, Kinshuk Sunil got Seth and I to talk about stuff on candid camera. We’re both totally beat after we call the event a wrap, but my gastronomical enthusiasm convinces Seth to come with me and some family to Old Delhi for kababs (“Secret of Good Mood, Taste of Karim’s Food”). We haven’t really built much acclimatization time into this schedule.
Oh, and then the drums. They stop slightly past the witching hour, marking the end of Day 1. We’re off to Agra tomorrow, catching a 6a.m. train. So it begins.
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