Once again, it’s a contentious time for a web platform discussion (which is what has made moderating this panel fun, really). Firstly, there’s the small question of whether web browsers themselves are no longer the juiciest part of the newest new technology and media landscape. The nice folks at Wired Magazine think the web’s kind of done (as in, dead), since everyone’s using apps on iPhones and happily signing in to closed systems now (they mention HTML5 in passing twice).

But then again, for the past two years, HTML5 has been the dubious all-inclusive catch phrase for all that’s new on the web and in mobile, and has found itself at the fore of various axes that corporations have to grind against each other. But catch phrases easily lend themselves to obfuscation, and sometimes companies have to be told off for all the nuance that’s lost through their misguided HTML5 advocacy. Even the W3C got into the act, first sanctioning the all-inclusive catch phrase and then recanting in favor of nuance.

Let’s cut to the chase: how fast can we evolve the web really, what’s with app stores, HTML5 video, and where are the painful spots with disagreements when we collectively craft standards on behalf of developers? As always, audience participation is a huge part of the discussion, so come with burning questions and pressing curiosity. March 15, 2011.

Of course, soon after I left, the Giants are making a World Series run, making me long to be near Willie Mays plaza. I love San Francisco, with its micro-climates, improbable topography, and draconian parking inspectors. I spent one third of my adult life here. I worked with inspiring people to advance the reach and capability of a massively hyper-connected world; I played enthusiastically (if not adeptly) in the magnificent outdoors; I got up to all the usual urban shenanigans in my twenties, even getting my heart broken and wizened; and — at the great risk of courting the obvious metaphor — I emerged from the fog of a prolonged adolescence into what I hope will pass for maturity. I’ll miss the City by the Bay. There’s no place like it in all the world.

Within reason, I relish change, and seek it out whenever I feel I’m getting lulled into complacency. I’ve wanted to explore non-technical projects for a long time now, and the best way to do that was to leave the epicenter of technology for a while. My childhood brought with it much travel; I was raised in India, Hong Kong, Ethiopia, Russia, China, and France, with some time in Canada. I often dodge direct questions about where I grew up, preferring the quick version of the story, but I am sticking to the facts when I tell people that San Francisco is the longest I’ve ever lived in any one place. So why, then, New York?

I’ll spare you my romantic observations about cities. E.B. White (of Strunk and White and Charlotte’s Web fame) said it much better than I ever can back in 1948 (but you should read him in 2010, since his words have aged so well). A small snippet:

“There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size, and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last — the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion.”

For the next conceivable while, then, I’ll be a settler. I’ll bring to New York my “what if” questions, and see what happens when I pursue the answers with passion.

The transition does mean I’ll miss the people I worked with over the years, particularly at Mozilla, a project I grew up with almost right out of college. Few things compare to the thrill of contributing to something that you really believe in. Mozilla paved the way for what is now the triumph of open-source on the web over a closed-source monopoly. Not working on it full-time means that I’ll no longer be associated with some things, like being the Chair of the WebGL WG or being front and center for developer relations. But it also means I can take on some manageable tasks and make sure they get chaperoned through to completion.

I’m in what seems to be a a bigger pond now — a chaotic, crowded one with four seasons and a subway and even more draconian parking inspectors. The Fall is lovely here, and I am optimistic.

Tantek and I first met as competitors in 2002 at an event called Meet the Makers (organized by Jason Calacanis and Brian Alvey), where he was the IE guy and I was the Netscape guy. Along with Doug Bowman (who had just redesigned the Wired news site with pure CSS), we were on a panel at that event discussing web standards with a bunch of web developers. And while at that time we each worked for organizations whose fierce competition characterized the early evolution of the web (*sigh with Netscape moving from underdog to extinction), I was struck by how motivated Tantek was to get standards right.

It is remarkable what the passage of time can do. Not only are we furthering common goals for the betterment of the web, as we have in the past, but now we’re both working in various capacities for Mozilla. Tantek will help us out with the CSS3 Flex Box Model, figuring out what the right thing to do with respect to stylable HTML5 form controls are, and help us with fundamental questions of identity and the open social web in connection with the account manager initiative in Firefox.

Update 1: here’s a bit on C|Net about Mozilla working with Tantek.

Update 2: here’s a Belorussian translation of this blog post.

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 28, 2010

We’re in Bangalore. I’m excited to have sethb and ragavan hang with me in my home town, meet some of my friends, and generally get some exposure to the city where my parents live. As far as work trips go, this one has been a rollicking good time so far. We got a chance to visit a Bollywood studio in Mumbai, actually had a celebrity sighting or two, and met some amazing people. But the Mozilla DevDay we are organizing in Bangalore is really the main part of our trip. We’ve “co-organized” the event with Mahiti, an open-source non-profit based in Bangalore, and the Centre for Internet Society. We bought plenty of schwag: t-shirts, wrist bands, posters, and even a few Firefox plushies. We’re expecting over 200 people (at least!) at the National Institute of Advanced Studies campus, where the event is held.

sethb acts as MC, and gives us a glimpse into Firefox.next. We’ve also got Lucian Teo and John Britton joining us to talk about Mozilla Drumbeat and Peer to Peer University. I give a demo-driven overview of the web platform’s promise similar to the one I gave at GNUnify in Pune, but this time, there are plenty of questions, and a 45 minute session runs to about an hour and half. We’ve also got Mahiti’s CTO, Sreekanth Rameshiah talking about Mahiti’s projects, and the Centre of Internet Society’s Pranesh Prakash talking about software patents, and the relevance of these to video on the web. ragavan runs a session on Mozilla Labs, once again prompting great questions. Each session is interactive, with lots of questions, even though the delicious lunch organized by the CIS folks introduces a kind of postprandial stupor.

Vineel Reddy, one of our campus reps and regional leaders, then shares a little bit about what it’s like to be part of the Mozilla Community. Vineel’s been interviewed by the New York Times for the slick video he produced likening Firefox to a sports car. That video, made on a shoe string budget, went viral very rapidly. Marketing, typically a corporate function in most “classic” companies, is often a community outreach endeavor for our project, with volunteers expressing their passion for participation in creative ways. Vineel’s story is inspirational, and he gets a lot of follow-up questions when folks approach him after his talk.

In the afternoon, I do something a bit scary. I run a “hack” session with live coding on screen. I think my example is simple enough: I solicit a camera from the audience (but end up using my Nano) and shoot some video of the MozDevDay folks applauding, which I then embed in a web page (with the <video> element and some JS, of course). It works, but it’s not smooth sailing. If you tempt fate, you’ll encounter the proverbial obstacle — Firefogg’s transcoded OGV file has to be renamed with a *.ogg extension to work. It’s not quite a bug I can diagnose, since *.ogv files do appear to work in general. Maybe it’s a Firefogg thing.

I could give you my own breakdown of MozDevDay in Bangalore, but what others say about the event is far more interesting:

• Lucian Teo on MozDevDay
• Ragunath Jawahar on the experience
• Manish’s breakdown of things
• And thoughts from a self-professed Chrome user in India

We may not have a dedicated office in India (yet), unlike other browser companies, but we do have a vibrant community of volunteers. They showed up in numbers to our Bangalore event, and I’m absolutely thrilled. We can’t succeed in India without them.

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.