Browsers – Factory Joe

Musings on Chrome, the rebirth of the location bar and privacy in the cloud

Imagine a browser of the web, by the web, and for the web. Not simply a thick client application that simply opens documents with the http:// protocol instead of file://, but one that runs web applications (efficiently!), that plays the web, that connects people across the boundaries of the silos and gives them local-like access to remote data.

It might not be Chrome, but it’s a damn near approximation, given what people are used to today.

Take a step back. You can see the relics of desktop computing in our applications’ file menus… and we can intuit the assumptions that the original designer must have made about the user, her context and the interaction expectations she brought with her:

This is not a start menu or a Dock. This is a document-driven menubar that’s barely changed since Netscape Communicator.

Indeed, the browser is a funny thing, because it’s really just a wrapper for someone else’s content or someone’s else’s application. That’s why it’s not about “features“. It’s all about which features, especially for developers.

It’s a hugely powerful place to insert oneself: between a person and the vast expanse that is the Open Web. Better yet: to be the conduit through which anyone projects herself on to the web, or reaches into the digital void to do something.

So if you were going to design a new browser, how would you handle the enormity of that responsibility? How would you seize the monument of that opportunity and create something great?

Well, for starters, you’d probably want to think about that first run experience — what it’s like to get behind the wheel for the very time with a newly minted driver’s permit — with the daunting realization that you can now go anywhere you please…! Which is of course awesome, until you realize that you have no idea where to go first!

Historically, the solution has been to flip-flop between portals and search boxes, and if we’ve learned anything from Google’s shockingly austere homepage, it comes down to recognizing that the first step of getting somewhere is expressing some notion of where you want to go:

The problem is that the location field has, up until recently, been fairly inert and useless. With Spotlight-influenced interfaces creeping into the browser (like David Watanabe’s recently acquired Inquisitor Safari plugin — now powered by Yahoo! Search BOSS — or the flyout in Flock that was inspired by it) it’s clear that browsers can and should provide more direction and assistance to get people going. Not everyone’s got a penchant for remembering URLs (or RFCs) like Tantek’s.

This kind of predictive interface, however, has only slowly made its way into the location bar, like fish being washed ashore and gradually sprouting legs. Eventually they’ll learn to walk and breath normally, but until then, things might look a little awkward. But yes, dear reader, things do change.

So you can imagine, having recognized this trend, Google went ahead and combined the search box and the location field in Chrome and is now pushing the location bar as the starting place, as well as where to do your searching:

This change to such a fundamental piece of real estate in the browser has profound consequences on both the typical use of the browser as well as security models that treat the visibility of the URL bar as sacrosanct (read: phishing):

The URL bar is dead! Long live the URL bar!

While cats like us know intuitively how to use the location bar in combination with URLs to gets us to where to we want to go, that practice is now outmoded. Instead we type anything into the “box” and have some likely chance that we’re going to end up close to something interesting. Feeling lucky?

But there’s something else behind all this that I think is super important to realize… and that’s that our fundamental notions and expectations of privacy on the web have to change or will be changed for us. Either we do without tools that augment our cognitive faculties or we embrace them, and in so doing, shim open a window on our behaviors and our habits so that computers, computing environments and web service agents can become more predictive and responsive to them, and in so doing, serve us better. So it goes.

Underlying these changes are new legal concepts and challenges, spelled out in Google’s updated EULA and Privacy Policy… heretofore places where few feared to go, least of all browser manufacturers:

5. Use of the Services by you

5.1 In order to access certain Services, you may be required to provide information about yourself (such as identification or contact details) as part of the registration process for the Service, or as part of your continued use of the Services. You agree that any registration information you give to Google will always be accurate, correct and up to date.

. . .

12. Software updates

12.1 The Software which you use may automatically download and install updates from time to time from Google. These updates are designed to improve, enhance and further develop the Services and may take the form of bug fixes, enhanced functions, new software modules and completely new versions. You agree to receive such updates (and permit Google to deliver these to you) as part of your use of the Services.

It’s not that any of this is unexpected or Draconian: it is what it is, if it weren’t like this already.

Each of us will eventually need to choose a data brokers or two in the future and agree to similar terms and conditions, just like we’ve done with banks and credit card providers; and if we haven’t already, just as we have as we’ve done in embracing webmail.

Hopefully visibility into Chrome’s source code will help keep things honest, and also provide the means to excise those features, or to redirect them to brokers or service providers of our choosing, but it’s inevitable that effective cloud computing will increasingly require more data from and about us than we’ve previously felt comfortable giving. And the crazy thing is that a great number of us (yes, including me!) will give it. Willingly. And eagerly.

But think one more second about the ramifications (see Matt Cutts) of Section 12 up there about Software Updates: by using Chrome, you agree to allow Google to update the browser. That’s it: end of story. You want to turn it off? Disconnect from the web… in the process, rendering Chrome nothing more than, well, chrome (pun intended).

Welcome to cloud computing. The future has arrived and is arriving.

Google Chrome and the future of browsers

News came today confirming Google’s plans for Chrome, its own open source browser based on Webkit.

This is big news. As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t get much bigger than this, at least in my little shed on the internet.

I’ve been struggling to come to grips with my thoughts on this since I first heard about this this morning over Twitter (thanks @rww @Carnage4Life and @furrier). Once I found out that it was based on Webkit, the pieces all fell into place (or perhaps the puzzle that’s been under construction for the past year or so became clearer).

Last May I ranted for a good 45 minutes or so about the state of Mozilla and Firefox and my concerns for its future. It’s curious to look back and consider my fears about Adobe Air and Silverlight; it’s more curious to think about what Google Chrome might mean now that it’s been confirmed and that those frameworks have little to offer in the way of standards for the open web.

I read announcement as the kid gloves coming off. I just can’t read this any other way than to think that Google’s finally fed up waiting around for Firefox to get their act together, fix their performance issues in serious ways, provide tangible and near-term vision and make good on their ultimate promise and value-proposition.

Sure, Google re-upped their deal with Firefox, but why wouldn’t they? If this really is a battle against Microsoft, Google can continue to use Firefox as its proxy against the entrenched behemoth. Why not? Mozilla’s lack of concern worries me greatly; if they knew about it, what did they do about it? Although Weave has potential, Google has had Google Browser Sync for ages (announced, to wit, by Chrome’s product manager Brian Rakowski). Aza Raskin might be doing very curious and esoteric experiments on Labs, but how does this demonstrate a wider, clearer, focused vision? Or is that the point?

Therein lies the tragedy: Google is a well-oiled, well-heeled machine. Mozilla, in contrast, is not (and probably never will be). The Webkit team, as a rhizomatic offshoot from Apple, has a similar development pedigree and has consistently produced a high quality — now cross-platform — open source project, nary engaging in polemics or politics. They let the results speak for themselves. They keep their eyes on the ball.

Ultimately this has everything to do with people; with leadership, execution and vision.

When Mozilla lost Ben Goodger I think the damage went deeper than was known or understood. Then Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt went over to Facebook, where they’re probably in the bowels of the organization, doing stuff with FBML and the like, bringing Parakeet into existence (they’ve recently been joined by Mike Schroepfer, previously VP of Engineering at Mozilla). Brad Neuberg joined Google to take Dojo Offline forward in the Gears project (along with efforts from Dylan Schiemann and Alex Russell). And the list goes on.

Start poking around the names in the Google Chrome comic book and the names are there. Scott McCloud’s drawings aren’t just a useful pictorial explanation of what to expect in Chrome; it’s practically a declaration of independence from the yesteryear traditions of browser design of the past 10 years, going all the way back to Netscape’s heyday when the notion of the web was a vast collection of interlinked documents. With Chrome, the web starts to look more like a nodal grid of documents, with cloud applications running on momentary instances, being run directly and indirectly by people and their agents. This is the browser caught up.

We get Gears baked in (note the lack of “Google” prefix — it’s now simply “of the web”) and if you’ve read the fine-print closely, you already know that this means that Chrome will be a self-updating, self-healing browser. This means that the web will rev at the speed of the frameworks and the specifications, and will no longer be tied to the monopoly player’s broken rendering engine.

And on top of Gears, we’re starting to see the light of the site-specific browser revolution and the maturing of the web as an application platform, something Todd Ditchendorf, with his Fluid project, knows something about (also based on Webkit — all your base, etc):

In spite of its lofty rhetoric in support of a free Internet, Chrome isn’t Mozilla’s pièce de résistance. Turns out that it’s going to be Apple and Google who will usher in the future of browsers, and who will get to determine just what that future of browsers are going to look like:

To put it mildly, things just got a whole lot more exciting.

Citizen Garden #6 on site-specific browsers featuring Jon Crosby and Todd Ditchendorf

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it here before, but Larry Halff (Ma.gnolia) and I have been recording a series of podcasts with a bunch of interesting folks on topics ranging from data portability to data interop and authorization patterns to API-driven web services.

The intended audience of this podcast is really us, since it came out of lunches that Larry and I were having at Out the Door in downtown San Francisco. We realized that, while a lot of what we were talking about might be interesting to a wider audience, more importantly, starting a podcast of our conversations would give us a great pretext to invite folks who are inspiring us with their work to come out for some daikon cakes and Vietnamese ice coffee (following in the steps of Peter Rukavina et al’s Live from the Formosa Tea House podcast of course).

This past week, Larry and I brought together Todd Ditchendorf of Fluid.app and Jon Crosby of Actiontastic and recently Kloudkit to discuss site-specific browsers and related trends in cloud computing.

Obviously the question looms large about the competition between the open web, Adobe’s AIR platform and Microsoft’s Silverlight framework. With both Adobe and Microsoft jockeying for supreme “open” status with their platforms, we need to start asking the question differently: it’s no longer about whether a platform is “open”, but who controls its features, its priorities, and to what degree it facilitates interoperability by supporting industry-wide non-proprietary standards. Of course there’s always going to be proprietary development leading the way ahead of open development, and that’s fine. The difference, however, is that efforts like Mozilla’s Prism, Todd’s Fluid.app and Jon’s Kloudkit give us completely open stacks for implementing a lot of compelling ideas and features using tools and technologies without having to pick a corporate partner. They also provide us with the flexibility to innovate independently and see which ideas stick, while also pushing and pulling on the future of browser technology directly.

In any case, you should probably just listen to this episode and let us know what you think.

If you want to subscribe to Citizen Garden, you can grab listen in iTunes, grab our feed or follow Citizen Garden on Twitter.

Fluid, Prism, Mozpad and site-specific browsers

Matt Gertner of AllPeers wrote a post the other day titled, “Wither Mozpad?” In it he poses a question about the enduring viability of Mozpad, an initiative begat in May to bring together independent Mozilla Platform Application Developers, to fill the vacuum left by Mozilla’s Firefox-centric developer programs.

Now, many months after its founding, the group is still without a compelling raison d’être, and has failed to mobilize or catalyze widespread interest or momentum. Should the fledgling effort be disbanded? Is there not enough sustaining interest in independent, non-Firefox XUL development to warrant a dedicated group?

Perhaps.

There are many things that I’d like to say both about Mozilla and about Mozpad, but what I’m most interesting in discussing presently is the opportunity that sits squarely at the feet of Mozilla and Mozpad and fortuitously extends beyond the world-unto-itself-land of XUL: namely, the opportunity that I believe lies in the development of site-specific browsers, or, to throw out a marketing term: rich internet applications (no doubt I’ll catch flak for suggesting the combination of these terms, but frankly it’s only a matter of time before any distinctions dissolve).

If you’re just tuning in, you may or may not be aware of the creeping rise of SSBs. I’ve personally been working on these glorified rendering engines for some time, primarily inspired first by Mike McCracken’s Webmail.app and then later Ben Willmore’s Gmail Browser, most recently seeing the fruition of this idea culminated in Ruben Bakker’s pay-for Gmail wrapper Mailplane.app. More recently we’ve seen developments like Todd Ditchendorf’s Fluid.app which generates increasingly functional SSBs and prior to that, the stupidly-simple Direct URL.

But that’s just progress on the WebKit side of things.

If you’ve been following the work of Mark Finkle, you’ll be able to both trace the threads of Web Runner’s transformation into the full-fledged Prism project, as well as the germination of Mozpad.

Clearly something is going on here, and when measured against Microsoft’s Silverlight and Adobe’s AIR frameworks, we’re starting to see the emergence of an opportunity that I think will turn out to be rather significant in 2008, especially as an alternative, non-proprietary path for folks wishing to develop richer experiences without the cost, or the heaviness, of actually native apps. Yes, the rise of these hybrid apps that look like desktop-apps, but benefit from the connectedness and always-up-to-date-ness of web apps is what I see as the unrecognized fait accompli of the current class of stand-alone, standards compliant rendering engines. This trend is powerful enough, in my thinking, to render the whole discussion about the future of the W3C uninteresting, if not downright frivolous.

A side effect of the rise of SSBs is the gradual obsolescence of XUL (which already currently only holds value in the meta-UI layer of Mozilla apps). Let’s face it: the delivery mechanism of today’s Firefox extensions is broken (restarting an app to install an extension is so Windows! yuck!), and needs to be replaced by built-in appendages that offer better and more robust integration with external web services (a design that I had intended for Flock) that also provides a web-native approach to extensibility. As far as I’m concerned, XUL development is all but dead and will eventually be relegated to the same hobby-sport nichefication of VRML scripting. (And if you happen to disagree with me here, I’m surprised that you haven’t gotten more involved in the doings of Mozpad).

But all this is frankly good for Mozilla, for WebKit (and Apple), for Google, for web standards, for open source, for microformats, for OpenID and OAuth and all my favorite open and non-proprietary technologies.

The more the future is built on — and benefits from — the open architecture of the web, the greater the likelihood that we will continue to shut down and defeat the efforts that attempt to close it up, to create property out of it, to segregate and discriminate against its users, and to otherwise attack the very natural and inclusive design of internet.

Site specific browsers (or rich internet applications or whatever they might end up being called — hell, probably just “Applications” for most people) are important because, for a change, they simply side-step the standards issues and let web developers and designers focus on functionality and design directly, without necessarily worrying about the idiosyncrasies (or non-compliance) of different browsers (Jon Crosby offers an example of this approach). With real competition and exciting additions being made regularly to each rendering engine, there’s also benefit in picking a side, while things are still fairly fluid, and joining up where you feel better supported, with the means to do cooler things and where generally less effort will enable you to kick more ass.

But all this is a way of saying that Mozpad is still a valid idea, even if the form or the original focus (XUL development) was off. In fact, what I think would be more useful is a cross-platform inquiry into what the future of Site Specific Browsers might (or should) look like… regardless of rendering engine. With that in mind, sometime this spring (sooner than later I hope), I’ll put together a meetup with folks like Todd, Jon, Phil “Journler” Dow and anyone else interested in this realm, just to bat around some ideas and get the conversation started. Hell, it’s going on already, but it seems time that we got together face to face to start looking at, seriously, what kind of opportunity we’re sitting on here.

Wither web standards? And a call for new browser wars

There’s been a flurry of activity in web standards land lately, with Opera taking on Microsoft in Europe over their failure to conform to web standards, while Andy “Malarkey” Clarke calls BS on the whole CSS Working Group thing, pointing to the complicity and corruption that comes with entrenched vendors having little to no incentive to innovate at the speed of the web and Mozilla’s Dave Baron getting fed up with backdoor dealings. In support of his case, Alex “Dojo Toolkit” Russell suggests that we abandon the W3C altogether (and Zeldman-kind too) and start burning [our] standards advocacy literature and start telling [our] browser vendors to give [us] the new shiny. Jeff Croft jumps in as well, asking whether we should return to the browser wars of yore.

I attempted to leave a comment on Jeff’s blog, but since I was over his 3000 character limit, I’m blogging it here, without the normal care that I usually take with posts here. Take it as you will:

As much as I appreciate your perspective and agree with the goals that you, Andy M and Alex share, I am at the same time dismayed that it means we’re going to end up essentially with “privileged web experiences” and “unprivileged web experiences” if you take this path.

It also means that the fight against Silverlight and Flash essentially comes to a draw and developers have to pick sides (if they haven’t already) and “standardize” their own work to one of four choices: either two of the above or, confusingly, HTML-compliant and HTML-incompatible. So while you might be able to do some shiny things into the forceable future, it does seem to me that you’re going to wind up creating more work for developers to have to test against and support both HTML variants (not to mention the long history of browser incompatibilities), in which case they might as well just jump the open web standards ship altogether and get in bed with Microsoft or Adobe, given their ability to crank out tools AND formats that rival most of their open alternatives.

It seems to me that rather than necessarily abandoning web standards or, as Alex said, “start burning their standards advocacy literature”, I suppose I’d like to see how we can begin to commoditize the more attractive aspects of Silverlight and AIR/Flash with open formats and standards. Unfortunately we are up against massive marketing dollars and entrenched positions, but in the end, open always wins.

If you’re really serious about this, and I think Alex, with his relationship to the Dojo project is in the perfect position to do so, I think the job of folks who have grown disillusioned with the web standards path should begin to develop “community conventions” that can be implemented today, using what leading browsers support (Opera, Firefox and WebKit/Safari) (see microformats, leading this approach, as well as OAuth). I think rewarding those browser makers by exploiting the features that they ARE implementing is a good way to go, and I also think that developing rich interface libraries in CSS and Javascript will continue to be important to advancing the state of the “unprivileged web”. We’ve made a great deal of progress in a relatively short amount of time with jQuery and similar libraries that deliver effects previously unthought of in regular web pages… it’s just a matter of time before we approach this as a more concerted effort to make web applications compete with their proprietary brethren.

With site-specific browser generators like Todd Ditchendorf’s Fluid and Prism coming out, I think we’re also moving much more quickly towards local desktop integration than you’ll be able to get out of full-fledged generic browsers. In fact, I’m most hopeful about those kinds of application for the kind of innovation you’re talking about.

I think I’m just about as fed up as you with the centralized, top-down web standards process. But then again, I never believed in it from the beginning. Your frustrations to me only indicate that the way of old skool, top down bureaucracies have had their day; the way forward is the way of open source and open communities that produce results. And given that we do already have a body of standards that we can build on top of, I do worry that a lot of effort will be wasted paving a new path towards an uncertain future, when there is still so much potential and opportunity to be had with the technologies that are available today but are simply underutilized and have yet to be exploited.

Site-specific browsers and GreaseKit

There’s general class of applications that’s been gaining some traction lately in the Mozilla communities built on a free-standing framework called Web Runner.

The idea is simple: take a browser, cut out the tabs, the URL bar and all the rest of the window chrome and instead load one website at a time. Hence the colloquial name: “site specific browser”.

Michael McCracken deserves credit for inspiring interest in this idea early on with his Webmail app, that in turn lead to Ben Willmore’s Gmail Browser application. Both literally took WebKit — Apple’s open source rendering engine (like Mozilla’s Gecko engine) — had it load Gmail.com and released their apps. It doesn’t get much more straight-forward than that.

For my own part, I’ve been chronically the development of Site-Specific Browsers from the beginning, setting up the WebKit PBWiki and releasing a couple of my own apps, most recently Diet Pibb. I have a strong belief that a full featured rendering engine coupled with a few client side tweaks is the future of browsers and web apps. You can see hints of this in Dashboard Widgets and Adobe’s AIR framework already, though the former’s launching flow conflicts with the traditional “click an icon in my dock to launch an application” design pattern.

Anyway, in developing my Site-Specific Browsers (or Desktop Web Apps?), I became enamored with an input manager for Safari called Creammonkey that allows you to run Greasemonkey scripts inside of Safari (ignore the name — Kato, the developer, is Japanese and English is his second language). An input manager works by matching a particular application’s .plist identifier and injecting its code (via SIMBL) into the application at run-time, effectively becoming part of the host application, in turn giving it access to all the application’s inner workings. When it comes to a rendering engine, it’s this kind of injection that allows you to then inject your own CSS or Javascript into a webpage, allowing you to make whatever modifications you want.

This is what Creammonkey did for Safari. And thank god it was open source or else we never would have ended up with today’s release of the successor to Creammonkey called GreaseKit.

Let me step back a little.

When I found out about Creammonkey, I contacted Kato Kazuyoshi, the developer, and told him how excited I was about what he had created.

“But could I use this on Site-Specific Browsers?” I wanted to know.

In broken English he expressed his uncertainty and so I went about hacking it myself.

I ended up with a crude solution where I would recompile Creammonkey and aim it at a different application every time I wanted to make use of a different Greasemonkey scripts. It was tedious and didn’t really work the way I envisioned, but given my meager programming skills, it demonstrated the idea of Site-Specific Browsers with Site-Specific Hacks.

I called this collection of site-specific scripts with a properly crafted Input Manager a “GreaseKit” and let the idea sit for a while.

Some time later, Kato got in touch with me and we talked about rereleasing Creammonkey with the functionality that I envisioned and a new name. Today he released the results of that work and called it GreaseKit.

I can’t really express how excited I am about this. I suspect that the significance of this development probably won’t shake the foundations of the web, but it’s pretty huge.

For one thing, I’ve found comparable solutions (Web Runner) clunky and hard to use. In contrast, I’m able to create stand-alone WebKit apps in under 2 minutes with native Apple menus and all the fixins using a template that Josh Peek made. No, these apps aren’t cross-platform (yet), but what I lose in spanning the Linux/PC divide, I gain in the use of Xcode, Apple’s development environment, and frankly a faster rendering engine. And, as of today, the use of Greasemonkey scripts centrally managed for every WebKit app I develop.

These apps are so easy to make and so frigging useful that people are actually building businesses on them. Consider Mailplane, Ruben Bakker’s Gmail app. It’s only increments better than McCracken’s WebMail or Willmore’s Gmail Browser, but he’s still able to charge $25 for it (which I paid happily). Now, with GreaseKit in the wild, I can add all my favorite Greasemonkey scripts to Mailplane — just like I might have with Firefox — but if Gmail causes a browser crash, I only lose Mailplane, rather than my whole browser and all the tabs I have open. Not to mention that I can command-tab to Mailplane like I can with Mail.app… and I can drag and drop a file on to Mailplane’s dock icon to compose a new email with an attachment. Just add offline storage (inevitable now that WebKit supports HTML5 client-side database storage) and you’ve basically got the best of desktop, web and user-scriptable applications all in one lightweight package. I’ll have more to write on this soon, but for now, give GreaseKit a whirl (or check the source) and let me know what you think.

Thoughts on Mozilla

http://www.viddler.com/player/9af5f4d6/

You can now directly download the video or the audio.

Spurred by a conversation I had today, I thought I’d post some wide-ranging and very rough thoughts on Mozilla. They’re pretty raw and uncensored, and I go for about 50 minutes, but it might be somewhat thought-provoking. At the least, I’d love to hear your thoughts — in agreement or vehement disagreement. Educate me!

And, here are the basic notes I was working from:

the future of the web: silverlight, apollo, JavaFX — where are you?? where’s mozilla’s platform for the future?
build tools. xul tools are in the crapper. look at webkit and xcode.
dump spreadfirefox; get your focus back. power to the people — not more centralization. where’s the college teams? run it like a presidential but stop asking for donations. events, mash pits… MozCamps… whatever… I know something is happening in Japan with Joi Ito… but that’s about all I know about.
out reach… mitchell is out there… but i feel like, with all due respect, she’s too coy… i think segolene royale — who recently lost the french election set a very good example.
and, the press have no idea what mozilla is up to… where the money’s going… there’s work and a roadmap for FF3… but it’s all about FF3.
joe six pack is not your audience. look at africa, non-profits, international audiences. green audiences. MozillaWifi… work with Meraki networks! Firefox + Wifi in a box. Bring the web to everyone stop being a browser company.
Mozilla the platform… stop thinking of yourself as a browser company. stop competing with flock. start promoting platform uses of mozilla and treat these folks like GOLD! think of joost and songbird. as Microsoft has done, build an ecosystem of Firefox browsers…! And build the platform of support to nurture them. Make it possible for people to build sustainable businesses on top of Mozilla… provide all that infrastructure and support!
CivicForge… like an ethical Cambrian House… the new sourceforge that works for non-developers… where’s the mozilla social network? sure they’re on Facebook, but it feels like a chore.
leadership opportunities… Boxely… microformats… openid…. start prepping web designers for HTML5 if that’s the future.
IE has caught up in the basics. They have tabs. They fixed popups and spyware. Firefox as an idea can sell; as a browser, not so much.
Browsers are dead. They’re not interesting. Back to Joe Six Pack… he doesn’t care about browsers. He’ll use whatever is pre-installed. Need to get Firefox on Dells.. on Ubuntu… on the Mac. Songbird too. OEM for Joe Six Pack.
Browsers are a commodity. People are happy with Safari, Firefox 2 and IE7. What comes next goes beyond the browser — again, Adobe, Microsoft and Sun are all betting on this.
mobile. minimo is used by whom?
Firefox as a flag — as a sports team… rah… rah! where’s the rebel yell? where’s the risk? where’s the backbone? Why can’t Firefox stand for more than web standards and safety? I don’t think Mozilla can afford to be reluctant or to pull any punches. They need to come out swinging every time. And be New York’s Babe Ruth to IE’s Boston Red Sox.
open source is immortal; it’s time that mozilla starting acting open source. at this point what DON’T they have to lose? the world is not the world of 2005. i want to know what the mozilla of 2010 looks like. we’re blake ross? where’s parakey? where’s joe hewitt? where’s dave barron? there’s so much talent at mozilla… are things really happening? thank god kaply is in charge of microformats now. (but, firefox is NOT an information broker!)
lastly… great hope for the future of firefox, despite what sounds like negative commentary.

Browsers, the future thereof

When I first realized the web as a medium — like artists found clay — I was someone who built websites. I grew up an artist, dabbling with pastels, sculpture, painting; I took lessons in all the classics. Back when I started out on the web, well, I threw my paint against the wall, watched it dry differently; tried watercolor and salt; mixed in color pencil. I created on someone else’s canvas, beholden to the whims of the Internet Explorers and Netscapes.

It wasn’t until I grew frustrated trying to create a publishing and composition tool for regular folks in CivicSpace that I realized that it wasn’t that the brushes or paint that I was using that were flawed — but that the canvas itself could be streched so much further. And so when the opportunity arose to go work on and set the direction of Flock, I jumped at the chance. The thought that I could take a number of the ideas on content creation that I’d been trying to implement in regular webpages into the browser itself was too irresistible to pass up.

And that’s how it started for me — working first on the side of web content developers — and then on the side of the actual rendering context and application. I doubt that I was qualified to work on either, but that’s besides the point, since that’s where I found myself (and artists worth their weight are hardly what I would call experts).

So now, a few months out after leaving Flock, a few heady announcements about microformats, a new Firefox Beta to toy with, a number of webkit-based apps to ponder over and an emerging identity standard coming to the fore, I’m starting to see the future materialize in front of me. From where I sit though, there is a lack of clarity as to what it’s all about, what’s really going on and what’s missing in between to glue it all together and — perhaps most importantly — a sense for what we can learn by focusing on the negative space of our current situation.

I’ve been reading about Doug Engelbart lately and the stuff he was doing in the 60s with his Augment system. He’s now collaborating with my buddy Brad Neuberg on a system he calls “Hyperscope”. I can’t help but see disjoint parallels between his ideas and what’s emerging today. Simply put, there is no grand theory or unifying concept that will bring it all together, just as there’s no single design for a tree — in fact, it takes many to make a forest, and we’re only now beginning to see the emergence of the forest in spite of the individual trees that seem oh-so-important.

And we don’t even have the benefit of LSD. Man, how are we to escape what we already know to imagine what’s possible? Oh well.

Anyway, lemme get down to brass tacks, coz I can tell you’re getting bored already. I almost am, striking out at some kind of point out of this rambling.

When I was at Web 2.0™ (I think) I mentioned to Jason Fried — as I’ve done to others since — my desire to have a webwide conversation about what the future of web browsers should look like. This was the work that I thought I’d started at Flock, but the reality is that they’re a business and not an academic institution and need to pay their employees (a harsh reality that I’m now realizing owning my own company and having a payroll). I left because of this — and maybe for other personal reasons — but primarily because my vision for the future wasn’t exactly compatible with where they needed to go in the short term. Hey, bills, remember?

Anyway, let me put it out there: I don’t get where Firefox is going. I don’t think it’s going anywhere actually. I think it’s strong, it’s stable, it’s a great platform. But it’s not innovative. It’s not Quicksilver. It was a response to IE and now IE7 will come out, co-opt everything that makes Firefox great or interesting and we’ll run through another coupla years of stagnation. Blah.

There is a solution though — you’d be surprised maybe, but you can find it in Safari and I’m dead serious about this. The number of webkit-based apps being released is growing by the week. Pyro, Gcal, Webmail, Hiker (thanks Josh!). There was talk about the future of the merged Internet-desktop as, quite clearly, this is where we’re going — but the choice of user agent is sadly coming down to facility over featureset or robustness. Why isn’t this happening with XUL Runner or Firefox (you figure it out)?

At Flock, this is where I saw things going. I didn’t see Flock as a monolithic package of integrated apps like Netscape or Office — bundled up with unmaintainable software sprawl… but with a solid underlying platform that these secondary apps could be built upon (yeah, Lucene, yeah, Microformats, yeah IM, yeah video and audio and all the rest). Speaking RSS, microformats, Atom and other syndicated content natively, you’d be able to universally star anything for later sharing… you’d be able to upload anything… be able to have any AJAX’d experience offline with a super-cache that could handle the sporadic network connectivity that most of the world puts up with (or that we put up with when we travel). And hell, with OpenID, we’ve even got a way to sync it all up together. Toss in a platform that is built on and around people people people and you’ve got something to really take us forward into the next evolution of Things As We Know Them™.

I wanted Firefox to be my Chariot, Flock to be my Sun.

Such as it is with Open Source, trying to inspire end-user interface innovation is often a losing battle.

(As an aside in parentheses, I think this is biological; I met Tara’s 2-year-old niece this weekend and she mimicked everything we did; thus it’s developmental and inherent — yet the problem remains: how do we bring the majority of user interface innovation to the open source space?)

So anyway — Safari; webkit apps… the future.

For the benefit of everyone involved, whether Mozilla, Flock, Microsoft, Opera, and so on implements any of this stuff… there needs to be some major advancements made in browser technology, both for normal humans and for web… um… painters. This stuff, seriously, is still way too opaque, and way too obscure for most humans for whom “delicious” still means “tastes good”. I want to have that web-wide conversation about the future of the web but somehow, my instincts tell me that the venue to have that conversation isn’t going to be on the web… it’s going to be in barber shops and gas stations and restaurants and the places where normal people really hang out.

If we’re ever going to bear witness to the promise of Doug Engelbart’s achievable vision, it has to be this way. And, to paraphrase walkway wisdom: nothing worth doing is easy. And so I challenge you — those who give a shit — look at what’s out there — and more importantly — what’s not out there — and begin to think seriously on what comes next… on what’s missing… on where this medium needs to be stretched in order to make the most of what’s possible.