News, notes and ramblings from the Mozilla project
· Around the Web, Firefox for mobile, Mozilla Community, Mozilla News
Editor’s Note: Brendan Eich, Mozilla CTO, posted on his blog today about Mozilla and community-prioritized Web standards, excerpted below.
Mozilla is happy to support Facebook in forming a Core Mobile Web Platform W3C Community Group in which to curate prioritized, tiered lists of emerging and de facto standards that browsers should support in order for the Web to compete with native application stacks on mobile devices.
· About Mozilla, Around the Web, Firefox, Firefox for mobile, Mozilla News, Press Releases
This week we are in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress 2012, the mobile industry’s largest trade show. Our goal is to meet with industry operators, vendors and developers to further the cause of promoting an open, people-centric Web for consumers and developers across all devices and platforms.
Today, we announced several significant milestones in the advancement toward these goals. The first, was Telefónica’s support for the creation of open Web devices based on our Boot to Gecko project. Also supporting the project are industry leaders, Adobe and Qualcomm. Together, we are committed to driving forward the adoption of HTML5 as a viable platform option for the mobile industry.
In a joint press conference, Telefónica revealed their intention to work with us to deliver the very first open Web devices in 2012. These devices, architected entirely on the Web and built based on an HTML5 stack with powerful Web APIs, will mean significant advances in speed and cost reduction for mobile devices in
the future. Attendees at the press conference were able to see a sneak preview of what is possible with HTML5 open Web technologies powering entire mobile device functions and experiences.
Mozilla is delighted to also announce Deutsche Telekom’s support of an open Web platform. Specifically, Deutsche Telekom’s Innovation Labs will join the Boot to Gecko project with dedicated development resources, and is evaluating further steps based on our common experience.
This week Mozilla is previewing open Web apps and Mozilla Marketplace, enabling the creation and distribution of apps powered by open Web standards like HTML5, CSS and JavasScript. We are also previewing Persona, the first identity system truly of the Web, including Browser ID. Each offering represents the latest tools available to developers and users to take control of their online lives.
Since the beginning, it has been our mission as an organization to develop and bring about a completely open and standards-based Web as a platform for innovation. Mozilla’s latest innovations are being proposed to the W3C for standardization, helping us move the needle to advance the Web and make it a more people-centric experience for all.
As the Mozilla community has always known – the Web is the platform.
Editor’s Note: Brendan Eich, Mozilla CTO, posted on his blog about Mozilla and the mobile Web API evolution. This is reposted below:
Ragavan Srinivasan’s post about the forthcoming Mozilla Marketplace for Open Web Apps inspired me to write about Mozilla’s surging Web and Device API standards work.
A bit of background. Mozilla has always contributed to web standards, going back to the start of the project. We co-founded the WHAT-WG to kick off HTML5. As readers of this blog know, we are a leader in JS standardization. We have some of the top CSS and layout experts in the world.
In the last eight months, our efforts to extend the web standards to include new APIs needed to build compelling apps and OS components on mobile devices have really caught fire. B2G and Open Web Apps are the fuel for this fire.
So I thought I would compile a list of emerging APIs to which we’ve contributed. In citing Mozillans I do not mean to minimize the efforts of standardization colleagues at Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Opera, the W3C and elsewhere. Standards are a multi-vendor effort (although excluding WebGL [see UPDATE below] one shiny name is conspicuously absent from this list).
The Mozilla contributions are worth noting both to acknowledge the individuals involved, and to highlight how Mozilla is championing device APIs for the web without having a native application stack blessed with such APIs on offer. We see the Web as quickly evolving to match native stacks. We have no other agenda than improving the Web to improve its users’ lives, including Web developers’ lives — especially mobile users and developers.
As always, standards in progress are subject to change, yet require prototype implementation and user-testing. Mozilla remains committed to playing fairly by not forging de-facto standards out of prototypes, rather proposing before disposing and in the end tracking whatever is standardized.
Here is the list, starting with some 2011-era work:
Big thanks to the Mozilla WebAPI team for their invaluable feedback based on prototype implementations.
The group is deeply indebted to Mounir Lamouri, Jonas Sicking, and the Mozilla WebAPI team in general for providing the WebVibrator prototype as an initial input.
I did not list most of the HTML5 and Web API work aimed at Desktop Firefox, to focus on the new mobile-oriented additions. There’s more to say, including about bundled-permission follies and how to weave permission-granting (with memorization) into interactions, but not here.
One last note. The CSS vendor prefix brouhaha had, among many salutary effects, the benefit of shining light on an important requirement of competitive mobile web development: CSS style properties such as -webkit-animation-*, however you spell them, must have fast and beautiful implementations across devices for developers to find them usable: 60Hz, artifact-free rendering under touch control. This requires such work as off-main-thread compositing and GL layers.
This is a high technical bar, but we are in the process of meeting it in the latest Firefox for Android and B2G builds, thanks to hard work from many people, especially Patrick Walton, Robert O’Callahan, Chris Jones, and Andreas Gal. Onward!
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· Firefox, Firefox for mobile, Mozilla Labs, Mozilla News, Press Releases
The Mozilla Labs Apps project aims to establish a people-centric Apps ecosystem that provides freedom, choice and opportunity for users and developers. We are doing this by adding key capabilities to the Web platform in the form of new Mozilla-proposed APIs and by establishing the Mozilla Marketplace as the first operating system- and device-independent market for apps based on open Web technologies like HTML5, JavaScript and CSS.
Today, we are incredibly proud to announce that the Mozilla Marketplace will open for developer submissions next week during Mobile World Congress. If you are an app developer interested in distributing and monetizing your app across device and platform silos, you should submit your app to the Mozilla Marketplace. Submitting your app will reserve your app name and give your app the chance to be featured in the launch later this year.
We believe the Web has no competition when it comes to nurturing creativity and generativity. And we cannot wait to see all the amazing apps that will be built using open Web technologies allowing developers to build apps once and deploy everywhere.
Stay tuned for more updates on the Mozilla Labs blog.
Editor’s note: Today, Mitchell Baker posted her thoughts on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement proposal. Below is an excerpt from her blog:
ACTA (“Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement”) is a proposed new international law establishing international enforcement standards against counterfeit goods and pirated intellectual property items. ACTA was negotiated as a “trade agreement” which means that it was negotiated in private without open involvement of all the stakeholders. There has been no formal opportunity for input from people other than those who were lucky enough to be invited into the private discussions.
This is a bad way to build Internet policy. The Internet is a fundamental platform for communication and interaction. There are many stakeholders. The voices of human empowerment, human rights, and competing economic interests must be heard. These voices must have a place at the table when policy is debated. ACTA was not created through such a process.
