aruner
An annotated anthology of Arun Ranganathan's Web noise.
SxSW 2009 | Four Guys Walk Into a Panel…
It’s that time of the year again, and I’m back. I’m doing the Browser Wars Panel again for the third whopping time, and this time there are a few things that are different from the last two years.
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?...
OSIM 2009
Yesterday I spoke at Open Source in Mobile USA 2009 (OSiM) . The theme of my talk was really that that web’s the platform of choice in mobile, and that it distills the riotous assembly of choices for mobile development (J2ME, Java SE. BREW, Objective C, to name a few) to web development in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Device APIs are thus really web APIs exposed to JavaScript; Geolocation is currently the prime use case. I also discussed our unique Mozilla modus operandi, which is often an exercise in structured, beautifully productive chaos.
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....
gnuNify09
Feb 13, 2009
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.
IITK
Feb 12, 2009
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.
Night Robotics
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.
Not a Dictator
Ryan Lobo: “Oho, how much this missile costs?”
MozCampDelhi
Feb. 10, 2009
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.
There and Back Again
To those just joining this broadcast, it’s not you, it’s me. It’s taken me about a month to blog about last month. Late July and early August were just really eventful. I spent a week in Norway, where I attended what I suspect will go down in history as being a pretty landmark ECMAScript meeting. The upshot of my time in Norway was “ECMAScript-Harmony” and I’ve blogged about that on the nascent Mozilla Standards blog. There will be much said about the Oslo meeting and Harmony from various principals, and some said about this subject that captures the spirit of the thing but may yet be a bit misleading or sensationalist. And, here’s a press release from ECMA International.
A day after getting back home from Norway, I took off for Whistler, British Columbia (taking my Scandinavian jetlag with me) to attend the Mozilla Summit. In case you haven’t heard yet, here’s a brief summary of the various adventurous goings on: on Day 1, a traveler with worse jet lag than me saw a black bear rummaging through garbage; on Day 2, the Sea to Sky Highway collapsed, leaving us stranded atop the beautiful glacier park; on Day 3, the power went out in the conference hotel. I opted out of the 8 hour bus drive back to Vancouver, and chose to circumvent the rock slide via sea plane It was just… splendid. I documented the whole thing in my Moz08 Flickr set....
Building the Web, One Spec at a Time
I’m admittedly being a bit glib in my title. Can innovation and advancement of the web platform occur at all, given the temporal straight jacket that standards bodies sometimes impose? There are certainly proprietary platforms that leverage the web (Flash and Silverlight) and developers do happily bivouac in them, building some fairly compelling stuff. Some even argue that these proprietary platforms push the envelope more than what the web can do by itself, given the stagnancy of standards bodies.
But let’s talk about the web platform. Stagnant, really? Innovation at Mozilla ultimately manifests itself as innovation for the web platform. Let’s leave the intricacies of the standards process for another discussion — it isn’t ideal, and big questions about consortia (like W3C and ECMA) are probably valid ones. Great ideas are vetted for interoperability in forums such as the WHATWG, and the W3C’s WebApps WG, and we browser vendors deliver as rapidly as feasible on implementations (some are slower than others — you know who you are). Both IE8 Beta and Firefox 3 now support postMessage, for example, so talk of AJAX methodologies being stagnant ought to be revisited. And support of Canvas2D in browsers such as Opera, Safari, and Firefox results in stellar innovations such as processing.js, which — any “open platform” chauvinism on my part notwithstanding — gives Flash a royal run for its money.
Mozilla’s involvement in standards encompasses enhancements to JavaScript, graphics, and APIs for new capabilities. Below is a breakdown of the work that will eventually be a part of the web platform. Don’t stop and stare for too long — there is nothing stagnating here 
Meanwhile, Back At The Ranch…
Sometimes, what goes around does come around. I first started playing with Mozilla, a project launched by Netscape Communications, in 1998. That was a whopping ten years ago. I was in Bangalore, fresh out of college, and had finished a stint in Rajasthan as a substitute French teacher to dilute the effects of four years of undergraduate mathematics and computer science. Hiatus aside, grad school or profession or professional gadabout? The technology industry came calling with its dubious promises of intriguing work and the potential to travel (and a free cafeteria to eat in, and a free Internet connection), and Bangalore was the place to be, with its nascent information technology subculture.
Something stuck, because by early 2001, I was working for Netscape as Technology Evangelist on Mozilla.
SxSW ‘08 Redux via Epistolary Rumination
Dear Chris, Chaals, and Brendan,
Thank you. For two years, you’ve put up with my jittery nagging a few hours before the panel, and for two years, it has rocked.
Dear Apple,
We really missed you. Our “Browser Wars” panel at SxSWi ‘08 was standing room only, with people lining up outside who couldn’t get in. We discussed stuff that was really relevant to Safari, touching on mobility, standards, security, JavaScript, and stuff like that — PC Mag has a rough record of the conversation. People love your stuff — the MacBook Pro and the iPhone were ubiquitous at the Austin Convention Center. And while you are open in your standards participation (working groups like Web API and HTML conduct business in the open), and while you are candid on the Surfin’ Safari Weblog, it would be great if your PR / Marketing department could let you come out and play with us. Maybe next year?
