The Future of Mozilla
Brendan Eich, Mozilla CTO, has posted a detailed manifesto on the future of the Mozilla platform, specifically the 2.0 release slated for 2008. There’s a lot to like here. In particular, I’m pleased to see that there are those in the upper echelons of the organization who see the weaknesses of the platform (in addition to its many strengths) and are willing to take ambitious steps to address them. I’ve written about the potential of Mozilla to be a .NET competitor, and I think that improvements to the JavaScript language and runtime are exactly the right way to achieve this.
The idea of reducing overhead for DOM calls is a good one and will doubtless lead to considerably improved performance for AJAX-style apps, as Brendan postulates. The fact that Mozilla allocates an object for every DOM node is in itself a big issue. By all accounts, Firefox memory consumption and performance aren’t great when compared to Opera, and using some sort of hashtable-based representation for the entire DOM, spinning off proxy objects for specific interfaces, might go a long way towards resolving this. Since I’ve heard more than one organization express hesitation about embedding Mozilla as a result of these factors, it seems a no-brainer to go for quantum leap improvement in DOM footprint in the context of a major upgrade.
Another issue is better IDE support for Mozilla developers. This has been a hobby horse of mine for a good long while. Brendan cites an amusing rant about the lack of decent tools for client-side web app development, but doesn’t delve into how a major Mozilla upgrade might address this. I don’t agree with Stevey that we have to forgo the web’s natural markup vs. code dichotomy in the name of homogenity, but he’s right that developing Firefox extensions involves way too much grunt work. And debugging JavaScript really, really sucks.
Oh, and one last thing: why not take advantage of the major upgrade to harmonize Mozilla and Firefox version numbers (Firefox/Mozilla 2008, anyone?). A minor detail, perhaps, but if I have to explain to one more person why Firefox 1.5 uses Mozilla 1.8.0 and Firefox 2.0 uses Mozilla 1.8.1, while Firefox 3.0 will use Mozilla 1.9 and so forth, I may go postal. And no one wants to see that.
Overall, very promising stuff. I totally love Mozilla already, and with the prospect of a major upgrade in the offing it has the potential to be a truly revolutionary platform.
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