Archive for November, 2006

This is the week of our second annual Firefox Summit, where we gather a set of the people who make Firefox possible to plan what comes next. It’s an exciting time, especially since this is our opportunity to meet people face to face after long online collaboration.

Yesterday I arrived at Mozilla just as the bus arrived bringing people from the hotel. It’s an odd moment. My first reaction was, “Hmm, there’s a giant bus parked in front of the office.” Then people started to get out, and I realized “Ah, that’s the Firefox Summit bus.” And there’s Tristan, there’s polvi, there’s three, four, no, five people I don’t even recognize yet. Sometimes when we’re introduced I don’t recognize the name, and we have to get to the email name or IRC or IM name to recognize each other.

We’ve long described the mission of the Mozilla Foundation as “promoting choice and innovation on the Internet.” I’ve been thinking about how to make this more concrete. How to answer questions like:

• Is all choice equally useful? How do we figure out which choices we actively try to accomplish?
• Is all innovation good? Or are some types of innovation more likely to promote the goals of an open Internet?

I’ve found these questions harder to answer than it might seem.

More and more I come back to the concept of participation. One of the things that makes the Internet so exciting is the ability for many people to participate in the development, use and direction of the Internet. People can participate in many ways, in many languages, on many machines, in many different activities. Also, people can participate in a highly decentralized way, making their own choices about if, when and how to participate. Some participate by creating content, some by creating software, some by building communities, some by creating websites. Those who participate help determine the direction in which the Internet develops.

So, what kinds of choice matters to the Mozilla project? What kinds of innovations should the Mozilla project focus on? My current thinking is that we should focus on:

• Innovations which promote widespread, decentralized participation in online activities; and
• Choices — in technologies, products, community projects — that make it easier for people to participate in building the online experience that works for them.

Does this resonate with you? Is this a helpful way to think about our goals? Please let me know.

Today we welcome the Tamarin project to the Mozilla world. Tamarin is the JavaScript virtual machine created by Adobe for use with the Adobe Flash Player. JavaScript — the language of the web — and the Mozilla project have always been intimately tied. JavaScript was originally created by Brendan Eich in 1995. A few years later Brendan was one of the founders of the Mozilla Organization. The Mozilla project has hosted the development of key JavaScript technologies since its founding in 1998. (Originally known as JavaScript, the technology was given the name ECMAScript when submitted to the ECMA standards body.)

More specifically, the Tamarin project means:

• Adobe has contributed Tamarin to the Mozilla project
• The source code is now open source (MPL, with the tri-license option) and available from Mozilla source code repository
• The Mozilla Foundation now hosts the development of Tamarin as part of the Mozilla project and development process
• Adobe and Mozilla developers will work together to create a version of Tamarin that will be used both in Adobe’s products and in Mozilla’s products, including Firefox.
• Mozilla contributors will be able to participate in development of Tamarin as they do in all other aspects of Mozilla open-source development.

This is an exciting development. It represents many years of work, and highlights several important developments.

1. Convergence on a key technology. We will be sharing resources to build a single community working on a single version. That’s good news. Web developers will be able to focus on a single, more robust technology. That’s great news.
2. The Mozilla project is about creating a vibrant, open Internet. We are best known for Mozilla Firefox, but our goal is much broader — to promote development of an open, standards-based Internet, with low barriers to participation and useful innovation. Firefox is one tool in this effort. Technologies such as JavaScript are another. JavaScript provides a low barrier to entry, uncountable people and websites use JavaScript quite separately from any focus on Firefox, and improving JavaScript improves the capabilities of the Internet itself.
3. Vitality of the Mozilla project. The Mozilla project is undoubtedly the correct home for Tamarin. The Mozilla project has demonstrated a long-term ability to host and lead JavaScript development. We have the community, the infrastructure, the will and the experience to welcome a new project like Tamarin, and to help a company like Adobe make a transition into our project. We’ve been around for a good while and we demonstrate both staying power and leadership in innovation.
4. Resources. The Mozilla Firefox web browser generates revenue. This revenue has allowed the Mozilla Corporation to fund an increasing number of developers. This in turn has allowed us to devote more of time to forward-looking ECMAscript design and development. Brendan is the convenor for the ECMAscript working group on ECMAscript Edition 4, in which Adobe is also playing an active role. Improvements in ECMAscript are a significant part of our Mozilla 2 technology roadmap. Brendan is leading work on both the specification of the language itself and on Mozilla’s future implementation. The ability to do so and simultaneously deliver high quality JavaScript capabilities in Firefox is a demonstration of the degree to which the Mozilla project has been able to scale our efforts.

The Internet is still new. Our Mozilla 2 roadmap lays out areas where we can help improve the overall usefulness of the Internet. It’s a challenging roadmap with a lot of great work to be done. The challenge matches the benefit -– an Internet where user experience is improving, where key technologies are both open standards and open source, and where increasing numbers of people can participate. It’s exciting, it’s fun and it’s worthwhile.