Mozilla

The Browser By Many Other Names

July 26th, 2011

In my last post I wrote about Mozilla creating more than a browser. There are many topics in that post to be explored further. I’d like to start with a discussion of the various aspects of Firefox that are important to bringing interoperability and user sovereignty to the Internet. Then we can think about how we make these various aspects effective in changing settings.

Let’s think for a minute about what the browser does. My particular focus in this post is item 4 below, but it takes a bit of context to get there. A browser:

  1. finds, accesses and transmits information to a web application or website and translates the response to a user’s device
  2. renders that content on the user’s device in a way that people can respond to
  3. provides a UI so people can interact with content from a web application
  4. provides mechanisms for people to customize the way they interact with the web and web applications.

Items 1 and 2 above are generally lumped together and identified as the “platform” or “rendering engine” or “back-end” or “infrastructure” part of the browser. In the Mozilla world this part of the browser is called Gecko. The engine is incredibly important and I’ll post something on this specific topic shortly.

Item 3 is generally called the “browser application layer.” If one thinks of the URL bar, back and forward buttons, the dialog boxes asking about password management, security warnings — these are all element of the “application layer” of the browser.

Item 4 is generally overlooked. We don’t have an accepted industry-wide term for this part of the browser. I think of this as the “user-sovereignty core.” The browser causes things to happen on my behalf in order to tune the Internet to the experience I want. For example, in Firefox the Do Not Track feature broadcasts my preference to be left alone across all websites I visit. The Pop-Up Blocker allows me to control pop-up windows from across the Internet as well as for individual sites. The Permissions Manager (under development now) allows me to manage how web applications interact with me — location, passwords, cookies. The “Awesome Bar” makes my browsing history across multiple websites available to me, for easier navigation. (In the Mozilla case we do this without making my history available to any one else.) For those of us with poor eyesight, the browser can increase fonts sizes for all the web applications I use, even if the web application does nothing itself.

The user-sovereignty core is not overlooked at Mozilla. It is a fundamental product criteria.

 

User-sovereignty spans all aspects of our offerings, from the platform layer to the browser application layer to everything else. Firefox has been the pioneer in many now common user-sovereignty features. Without the user sovereignty core the browser is a tool for websites to deliver content to people, but not a tool for individual human beings to control their overall experience.

The user-sovereignty core of the browser allows people to:

  • explore
  • integrate
  • filter
  • manage
  • interact
  • change
  • control

their experience in a unified fashion across all the many applications we use. This is how we create a unified experience unique to me that applies across multiple applications. Mozilla has a unique ability to put user sovereignty first. We’re organized as a non-profit precisely so that this is our key focus. Our stakeholders care about the values we build into the Internet, not the economic value we create for ourselves.

We have a powerful force for user sovereignty advocacy in Firefox, and through Firefox across vast portions of the Internet. We need to continue this with Firefox. We also need to make sure this exists for other aspects of Internet life, from the mobile world to data to apps. Bringing user-sovereignty to the different ways people use the Internet is a key to fulfilling the Mozilla mission.

 

Upcoming Posts::  The App Model and the Web, Let’s Talk Gecko

Categories: Mozilla

12 comments for “The Browser By Many Other Names”

  1. 1

    Tony Mechelynck said on July 26th, 2011 at 3:11 pm:

    Another aspect of user sovereignty which seems to be given less importance by “Core” developers nowadays than it used to is cutomizability. Some people seem to see it as “cruft” or as “an obstacle to desired streamlining”, but when I came from IE to Firefox 1.0PR, what seduced me was its wealth of preferences and, beyond that, of Extensions and Themes which allowed the user to customize the browser in ways that IE users could hardly even think of.
    Nowadays some powerful extensions (such as Lightning for Thunderbird and SeaMonkey) and even some apparently less powerful ones (such as HTML Validator) have to be recompiled every six weeks because they happen to use precompiled binaries, and that even if nothing has changed in the API they use except the “XPCOM version number”; there has been some talk of deprecating “classical” extensions and themes (which need a reload on install) in favour of Jetpacks and Personas (which don’t, but are far from able to do everything that we are used to be able to do). Such deprecation seems to have been bushed away to an as yet undetermined future time, but has it really been abandoned, or are its partisans just biding their time? If ever “fully powered” extensions and themes become a thing of the past (in favour, maybe, of aping what Google Chrome is doing rather than making Mozilla products something really original as I think they are still now, though less than five years ago), it would IMHO be a loss for “user sovereignty”.

  2. 2

    Adimchi Onyenadum said on July 27th, 2011 at 7:23 am:

    I am one of those professionals that know little or nothing about computer technonology, but that need the PC to be relavant in today’s world. I stumbled acroos you because my Yahoo Messenger asked me to download Firefox as a first step in solving a “crash” problem. So I decided to find out first what “Firefox” is all about. I am glad I did. For the first time in my life, I now have an idea what a browser is! Even though I don’t understand exactly what you talking about on your #4 point, something however tells me that whatever you are discussing must be very important indeed. We “cyber illiterates” need more education from motivated people like you.

  3. 3

    Mitchell said on July 28th, 2011 at 3:58 pm:

    Adimchi: thank you! I have something in mind i’ve been thinking of writing that explains how a browser works (and why it is fundmantally different from tv, for example) for people not familiar wit the basics of the technology. You are encouraging me to do this!

  4. 4

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  5. 5

    bitmonki said on July 30th, 2011 at 3:05 am:

    Aloha, Mitchell,

    Outstanding! I am *so* glad that you are framing these issues in these terms! After reading this they are much more in focus for me.

    As a veteran (30+ years) developer, my first internet exposure was to an email via what was then a ‘classified/restricted access’ and highly-controlled military system: DARPAnet. Even in the military — I’m a former Marine — people were blown away by how cool the sharing part was via email and Usenet.

    When DARPAnet was handed into the public domain and became the internet, my opinion of humankind went up tens of percentage points. 😀

    People like to share and help, communication is sharing and one way of helping, one needs (inter)networks to communicate. (Haven’t I read that sharing and helping help optimize groups for survival?)

    Since then, I have watched the commercialization run rampant, with profit-maximizing entities attempting to limit and control:

    a) public perception of what the internet is ‘for’ (according to them, either primarily ‘content delivery’ a la television or various forms of demographic data collection (I’m looking at you, Facebook and Google!) for sale or for use in product development and marketing campaigns),
    b) how it may be ‘physically’ accessed (e.g., increasingly usurious 3G rates for ever-decreasing amounts of bandwidth, ‘paywalls’), and
    c) how one interacts with/experiences the resources available on the net, i.e. limited and limiting proprietary protocols and apps.

    In this context, user-sovereignity is vital to counterbalance these limiting effects, *especially* regarding access to and control of the personal data ‘trail/tail’ we seemingly inevitably leave behind online: most people are unaware of the extent of our data ‘tails’, and would be appalled if they considered the possible ramifications of the near-total lack of sovereignity we have over them.

    I really, really like and appreciate what you are discussing here, and I also see personal data as an integral part of this.

    Isn’t user-sovereignity also the core principle behind Free-As-In-Speech software?

  6. 6

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  11. 11

    Ilyas Sahi said on August 14th, 2011 at 1:27 am:

    Hearing of planning to tackle issues like these is just great. There are many browsers in the market but I think it is not the competition it is the innovation that makes Mozilla unique.

  12. 12

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