Something stuck, because by early 2001, I was working for Netscape as Technology Evangelist on Mozilla.

This was the heyday of the Browser Wars, and I found myself becoming an ardent advocate of open standards. I worked for an awesome team, including Bob Clary, Marcio Galli, Tristan Nitot, and Eric Meyer. We were intrepid and had a mission. I was talking to Bank of America and Wells Fargo and Citibank about browser detection; to Macromedia and Microsoft and Adobe (and others) about plugin API support; to page authors about the standards-based DOM; to my friends about why Netscape (and Mozilla) was better than IE. We wrote prototypes of new applications using XMLHttpRequest (if only we also coined catchy acronyms!), and were tasked with pushing the web forward.

Netscape was part of AOL. And while we didn’t listen to the naysayers (there were plenty within AOL, and plenty outside it, and they were fueled by the dubious quality of Netscape 6), by June of 2003 I was sitting in meetings with lawyers about the antitrust litigation against Microsoft. I had to rebut the “expert witness testimony” of a Microsoft technologist, and felt righteous indignation as well as copious stress. Later that summer, the edifice crumbled definitively, and AOL layed off Netscape’s Client Engineering team en masse. It was heartbreaking. I went on to do other things.

But out of that detritus, a Firefox was born. And what a Firefox it has become! The Wall Street Journal says it is the best out there, period. A whopping five years later I’m back working on Mozilla. In April, I joined the Evangelism Team at Mozilla, and I’ll continue agitating for standards. Expect to see me post here about WebAPIs, markup, test cases, and the litany of usual themes.

What goes around, comes around, almost five years to the day (recall what I said about the general synchronicity of summer). Today is Download Day. By 10a.m. PST, help us break the Guinness Book of World Records by downloading Firefox 3.

Firstly, buddy and fellow AOLer Kevin Lawver blogged with gusto about replacing me as AOL’s Advisory Committee Representative to the W3C. I’m going to be doing other things professionally within AOL, and Kevin, a Standards Titan at AOL, is the right guy to step up and bat for the company. I’m still going to be a member of various W3C working groups. And I got elected by the Advisory Committee to be a member of W3C’s Advisory Board, which serves an advisory role to the W3C staff. I’m honored to have been elected, and start “officially” in July. As a member of the AC, Kevin will face all the questions of the relevancy of W3C and AOL engineers making time to participate in standards that I did, and I wish him all the very best.

Secondly, the blogosphere has already been given an inkling of myAOL, a suite of web applications that I’m working on as part of a great team of AOL engineers. We’re going to launch it this summer. In particular, I’m part of the team working on Mgnet (pronounced magnet), a way to discover content through some innovative navigational metaphors. Can’t wait to go beta already!

The myAOL suite has been discussed in a “pre-release” capacity on TechCrunch and on Jeremy O.’s Web Strategist blog.

He was right, of course. The panel I moderated on Web browsers at SxSW even got scooped by PC Magazine — yay! The article mentions the empty seats, which certainly caused a brief sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Nobody likes to throw a party and have scant attendance. But the panel itself went swimmingly, and towards the end I’d say we had over 150 people in there. Thank you, Brendan, Chris, and Charles.

There was also some small measure of controversy, which I suppose is the mark of a good discussion. Dan Appelquist (who chairs the Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group, which I am also a part of) asked a good question about WICD, and Brendan’s answer spawned much discussion. Soon, our panel will be podcast, and everyone can see the exact quote in question. Regurgitating what Brendan said in second and third hand accounts may not lead to the most accurate discourse

On Sunday at 5PM, I’m speaking on a panel called “How To Get your Company to Embrace Mashup Culture.” Kevin Lawver’s got Alla Gringaus (from Time Inc.), Steve Chipman (of WIM fame and SlayerOffice fame), Greg Cypes (Mr. OpenAIM) and myself talking about some of the things we did at AOL to usher in a wave of cool zeitgeisty stuff. I’m excited to talk about the cool things AOL’s engineers did with OpenID, amongst other things.

Then on Tuesday at 10AM I chair a panel I’m really excited about called Browser Wars Retrospective: Past, Present, and Future Battlefields. My panelists are Brendan Eich (who invented JavaScript and is CTO of Mozilla), Charles McCathieNevile (Standards maven at Opera Software and W3C titan), and Chris Wilson (who’s worked on every version of Internet Explorer that I can remember at Microsoft, and on Microsoft’s Avalon stuff). I want to use this panel to discuss some of the same battlefronts that seem to have occurred in the past. One such clash is that of proprietary formats versus open standards of various flavors. The panel description says it well enough — where’s the Web content model really going? The speakers lived the browser wars of the past. I’m going to goad them to talk about their visions for the future of the Web.

(Cross-posted from dev.aol.com)

While playing with it, I think I had a vague “aha!” moment about social media as television. Sure, there are bandwidth issues (insert net neutrality snide remark), but the Joost guys figure they’ve solved affiliated compression problems.

One of the things I like is that each channel has its own chat room, and you get plugins like instant messaging in full screen mode. I wonder where all the content will come from, since this is not about user-generated content. Content is a bit limited (how much of the surf video can you watch?) but I got really engrossed in an independent movie and started watching it. Before I knew it, a whopping hour had passed. Just like vegging out in front of the (regular) TV! I haven’t (yet) found a sufficient community to test out the plugins like chatting and ratings, but the left-over insight following my “aha!” moment suggests that there is, indeed, a “There there.”

I like the slick SVG menus that overlay the video when it is playing. I read somewhere that these guys use XUL Runner, apparently, and leverage a pretty diverse open source stack. I really like the fact that despite user-agent foibles, the Joost (Yoost?) folks make use of the most appropriate technology. That’s in keeping with my view that many of the most interesting things on the Web will likely be the sum of small parts, and not an immersive user agent experience. That is, Web technologies (protocols — HTTP — and formats — e.g. SVG) will be leveraged where they make the most sense, cobbled into application-driven user agents (not classic “Web browsers”). I think this is particularly true in the mobile world, and said so in my Mobile 2.0 presentation.

I was informed by the playfuls.com write-up on Joost.

Honestly, this made my day. Taboca’s also behind CCPhotos, part of his master plan of digitizing the known (Cartesian) world. Ah, life, life, life.