TechCrunch is running a guest post of mine about the exciting new field of site-specific browsers. Needless to say, it’s a honor to be on TechCrunch, and I hope my article will help to increase awareness of what SSBs are and why they’re important. Personally I’m convinced that they represent the future of web apps.
I haven’t seen any sign yet of the “gaggles of groupies” that Mike promises in the post’s comments, but I’m sneaking out the back door to pick up a sombrero and some wraparound sunglasses, just in case.
Although AllPeers didn’t produce the kind of outcome that we had hoped for and expected, it’s been a tremendous learning experience. Hopefully others will be able to benefit from what I consider to be the main lessons.
Luck and ambition
Naturally the success of any startup is dependent to some degree on luck, and the luck factor rises in proportion to your ambitions. If your plan is to sell T-shirts online then execution is probably the main consideration. If you make really cool designs, have an easy-to-use website and do good marketing then you’ll probably make money, though you’re unlikely to be buying a private island in the South Pacific any time soon. If, on the other hand, you plan to dethrone Facebook by adding state-of-the-art social features to the fabric of the web, transforming the internet experience of billions of people, you’re going to have to execute to perfection and still get really really lucky if your company is to succeed. Of course, if you make it you’ll be assured a very comfortable early retirement.
Neither of these approaches is inherently wrong but you should be aware of what you’re getting yourself into. If you can’t stand the thought of failure, make sure you’re not tackling a problem that is too big and ambitious. In the case of AllPeers, we knew that there was going to be a lot of luck involved (as there is with any product that relies on network effects and viral adoption), and we were pretty well prepared for the challenges we would face. It is comforting to see failure in this way because we certainly wouldn’t have sacrificed our lofty ambitions to increase our chance of moderate success.
Raise as much as you can
I’m not the first one to say this, but let me express my wholehearted agreement: raise as much as you can, as soon as you can, and not a penny less. In early 2006, before we had released even a private alpha of AllPeers, we suddenly became a minor web star thanks to a couple of white-hot buzzwords (”Firefox” and “BitTorrent”) and a very positive writeup on TechCrunch. (And in fact we owe a great deal to Mike Arrington, who grasped our vision immediately and did a great job of articulating why it was exciting. It’s easy and intellectually lazy to be pessimistic before the fact and snarky afterwards, while it takes courage to go out on a limb and predict success.) We believed our own hype a bit too much, unfortunately, and didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to raise a lot of cash at a high valuation. Instead we brought in a very modest amount under the assumption that we’d be in a great position in a few short months to close a much bigger round.
As a result, we were under constant pressure to get user numbers up so we could raise more money. This isn’t the way to run a company, particularly one with an ambitious technological vision. We ended up making a string of tactical moves rather than taking a step back and looking at the big picture. As a consequence, we ran out of money before we could get the product to where it needed to be. Don’t make this mistake.
This shouldn’t be construed as a criticism of Mangrove Capital Partners, who led our series A investment round. They are a fantastic group of individuals whom I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to any entrepreneur seeking funding, and a classic example of a VC who really does offer much more than money to a budding startup (something they all claim to do). But only a company’s founder has a single-minded focus on the company’s success, and this includes acquiring a war chest to deal with unforeseen contingencies.
The inimitable Robert X. Cringely, who writes a much-read weekly tech column for PBS, brings new insights to the white-hot Microsoft/Yahoo merger story in this week’s piece. Cringely may or may not be talking out of his hindquarters with his speculation that Microsoft’s main motivation for the takeover attempt is to achieve a culture shift inside the company, but at least he brings something new to the party. Indeed, the most interesting part of the article is arguably the first paragraph:
It’s a challenge for a journalist coming late to a story like Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Yahoo. I had literally just pressed the SEND key on last week’s column when news hit the wire. What to do? The way things are structured at PBS I couldn’t just pump out another column (that structure may be changing by the way), so the big question was whether the passage of seven days would make pointless anything I would have to say. So I waited and waited, and it is a testament to the shallowness and endless repetition of both the tech and business media that there is still plenty to say about the deal, the true nature of which few people yet understand.
Quite. I’m not entirely sure whether I’ve simply become bored with the self-referential ranting of the tech blogosphere or whether it has actually become boring. I still read Techmeme every day, but I’m increasingly drawn to a select group of publishers: mainstream publications (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Business Week, etc.), a small handful of professional-quality tech news/analysis blogs (Ars Technica, Read/Write Web, sometimes TechCrunch), individuals with real credentials (Nick Carr, John Battelle, etc.), speciality blogs (The Unofficial Apple Weblog, TorrentFreak, etc.), company blogs and the occasional random article that catches my eye.
Granted, this is still a pretty broad group, but I don’t read all of them all the time. I try to get news about a given story from the best, most authoritative sources. For example, for analysis of the Microhoo sturm und drang, I read articles in the NYT and WSJ and the announcement on Microsoft’s web site. Why would I spend the time reading six or seven rehashings on all the “A list” tech news blogs out there? What purpose do these me-too pieces actually serve?
I predict a slow decline in the number of such blogs. It’s kind of harsh to put it this bluntly, but if you don’t do any real reporting, don’t write exceptionally well and stir up interest mainly through wild speculation, your long-term prospects probably aren’t great. Instead, the mainstream news outlets (and their blogging arms, like Bits and AllThingsD) will win the battle for general tech news and analysis. They’ll buy the best blogging networks, so TechCrunch and Read/Write Web are heading for a big payday. The other A listers will fade into oblivion as tech news junkies like me realize that they have better ways to spend their time.
The other area that has a bright future is specialty blogging. Rather than reading what some dude who has built up a big audience by blogging something generic about absolutely every story that crosses the wires has to say about the ruckus du jour, folks will seek enlightenment from the blog best placed to have inside information or true insights. Incidentally, that’s one of the main reasons I decided to set up my own specialty blog, Just Browsing, rather than continue to pen my own uninformed opinion pieces on random topics here on Peer Pressure. Yes, like this one.
Since Internet slang coinages based on “phishing” are apparently in vogue, I decided to try my hand at it. Whishing: “Posting an indirect comment about some problem you’re having on IRC in the hope that someone will chime in and help you without you asking directly.”
Examples:
plasticmillion wonders why he’s getting strange linker errors when building Spidermonkey on the latest trunk
plasticmillion can’t remember where he put his car keys
plasticmillion could sure go for a pizza
etc.
My friend and former colleague Frank Felix Debatin has posted an interview with me on Live On Air, the official blog of his company 1000 Mikes. The interview is in German (although I wrote the answers in English and asked Frank to translate them). We touched on a number of topics, including our upcoming plans for AllPeers and the basis of my new Just Browsing blog.
Uberpulse has posted a interview at CES with David Rosen, a developer at Opera Software. The interview is entitled “Opera Browser Coming To The iPhone”, but the first 99% of the video have nothing to do with the iPhone, proving yet again that like sex, the iPhone sells. David isn’t able to demo the Opera for Devices because of the lack of wifi (when will conferences finally get a grip on this?), but he gives a good overview of the new product’s features.
Read the rest…
When I started this blog in August 2004, I claimed that my main motivation was to learn about blogging as part of my broader investigation into the present and future of social software. I’ve certainly achieved that and a whole lot more over the past three years. I’ve met a lot of well-informed, articulate and opinionated people, I’ve developed my views on a broad range of topics and, more than anything perhaps, I’ve effectively taken a crash course in grassroots marketing. Budding marketers take note: you’ll find out more by starting a blog and trying to get noticed than any school could teach you.
But I’m the kind of person who gets bored if he doesn’t feel like he’s moving forward (insert shark cliché here), and lately I’ve been thinking about how to take my blogging activities to the next level. Peer Pressure is all over the map, serving as it does as the official AllPeers blog, a receptacle for my Mozilla-related posts and a vehicle for my (and Cedric’s) random musings on everything from online identity to paid content. What I want to do, I think, is to get more focused on a specific topic.
The posts that seem to attract the most attention (judging from the number of comments) concern web browsers and browser technology. Luckily that’s also the topic that interests me the most right now. So I’ve set up a new blog specifically on that topic: Just Browsing. Peer Pressure will live on, of course, but with a tighter focus on AllPeers-related posts.
Please take a minute to check out my description of what Just Browsing is all about and my first post. If you have a blog, I’d really appreciate a quick link if you think the content might be of interest to your readers. The hardest thing with a new blog is rising above the noise. Garnering some incoming link love is the best way to do so.
I can’t resist this one. I was already shaking my head in disbelief when prominent Wall Street idiot Henry Blodget pipped the blogging world at the post by publishing what is doubtless the worst idea of 2007 on December 29th. Does anyone still believe the laughable notion that a failed, tired brand has some great intrinsic value? If so, perhaps they should consider for a moment the purchase of the Napster brand by Roxio in 2002 for $5 million. Brands have momentum, and if someone had snapped up the Napster name in its heyday to launch a legal music service, it would doubtless have been worth much, much more. As it transpires, Napster was dead and gone in letter and spirit by the time Roxio bought it, and as of May 2006 the service had lost them a further $175 million. But hey, the Netscape brand has done so much for AOL, right? It takes some serious balls to make this proposal in the face of (nay, as a consequence of) direct proof that it has already resulted in one dismal failure.
His previous bout of Mozilla blathering having presumably resulted in a satisfying bump in traffic, Blodget is back with an even stupider idea: a Mozilla IPO. My issue with the post isn’t that an IPO would be counter to the open source ethos or that it would alienate the all-important Firefox community, although there are strong cases to be made for both of these. I’ve argued in the past that Mozilla would benefit from stronger capitalist motivations. Nor do I dispute his assessment of Mozilla’s value. If anything, $4 billion seems conservative for a company with its assets.
No, the real issue is his total lack of understanding of the Mozilla community ethos. Again, this mind set often frustrates me, but the reality is that Mozilla management would never, ever contemplate an IPO, anymore than they would plaster ads on the Firefox start page to generate more revenue (another of Blodget’s priceless suggestions). It’s more than a bit like suggesting that the Dalai Lama could make a mint by setting up an international “Dalai’s Lama Hut” franchise chain (”buy two tender Bodhisattva Burgers and get a Spiritual Strawberry Shake absolutely free of charge!”). Ain’t gonna happen. Sorry.
Even more to the point: isn’t this totally, utterly illegal? Can a non-profit launch a multibillion dollar IPO? Wouldn’t that amount to tax evasion on a stupendously massive scale? Maybe I’m wrong, but I would have thought that Blodget, supposedly a financial expert, would have at least addressed this.
But then let’s remember why he’s famous in the first place: for jumping on the dot.com hype bandwagon in front of the curve and looking like a genius for a total of, what, two odd years, until it all crashed back to earth around him? Why should we care that he turned out to be completely off target, or that he was then booted off Wall Street for securities-related improprieties? I guess it’s oddly appropriate that in the modern media environment, you can become famous and influential simply for being wrong on a sufficiently heroic scale.
In part one of this series I lamented Microsoft’s unwillingness to conform to web standards and the stifling effect this has on web innovation. I suggested two possible solutions: a paradigm shift (such as a move towards Rich Internet Applications) that makes it easier to deploy alternate runtimes without having to convince the user to switch browsers, or the use of ActiveX to integrate new web standards into Internet Explorer in spite of Microsoft. Yesterday Opera announced that it was adopting a third approach: sue the bastards.
It’s hard not to feel sympathetic to Opera’s cause. IE boasts a considerable majority of web users not through intrinsic merit but as a direct result of Window’s dominance. Like any market leader, Microsoft has the most to lose from browser interoperability, so it’s dug in its heels and refused to support fully standards such as CSS, JavaScript 2 and HTML 5. The main losers are not just browser vendors like Opera and Mozilla but anyone who uses the web, since much-needed improvement in web application infrastructure is massively hampered when the space’s two ton gorilla (with around 80% market share) refuses to play along.
Nonetheless, Opera’s tactics are problematic. First of all, it’s hard to shake the feeling that the litigation is at least partially a ploy on Opera’s part to garner publicity for its browser. Their CTO, Håkon Wium Lie, categorically denies this, but phrases like the following are bound to raise suspicions:
Opera has long held the position of innovator in the Web browser market, having introduced and pioneered features like tabbed browsing, Speed Dial, integrated search bar, mouse gestures, Opera Link™ and many others.
I have the greatest respect for Opera’s engineering prowess, and Håkon is a brilliant and genuinely nice guy. (Not to mention that he sports a cool little circle over his first name. Where can I get me one of those?) But even if there was no malice intended, it might have been a good idea to tone down the chest-thumping a bit in order to avoid a potential backlash from mean-spirited cynics like yours truly.
More critically, Mary Jo Foley is absolutely correct in pointing out that we don’t want the European Commission deciding what’s a proper web standard and what isn’t. The main web standards consortium, the W3C, doesn’t make real standards at all because it has no official standing. Instead it issues “recommendations”. There is thus no objective basis for deciding which technologies a browser vendor is supposed to support. As frustrating as this can sometimes be, we have to let the market make this determination.
Perhaps Opera will win its case and Microsoft will be forced to offer an IE-free Windows. This wouldn’t bother me one whit. But even were this to come to pass, I’m not sure how much it would accomplish. Both Firefox and Opera are free and could easily be bundled by hardware OEMs today if they felt this would offer them a competitive advantage. In fact, I predicted this would happen back in January 2006, and I’ve been sorely disappointed (for reasons I don’t entirely grasp). Microsoft’s intransigence is undeniably a tough nut to crack, but I’m not sure that litigation is the answer.
Consumer Reports provides a fascinating counterexample to the conventional wisdom that people won’t pay for content on the web, as reported by CNet (in some sort of vague collaboration with the New York Times). The author goes to great lengths to enumerate the unique factors that are enabling them to succeed with this model while other high profile purveyors of online paid content like the New York Times, the Economist and the Wall Street Journal have either eliminated their paywalls or are considering doing so. And indeed, I wouldn’t expect this article to change most people’s minds about the viability of charging for content on the web because it’s so easy to paint Consumer Reports as the exception that confirms the rule rather than a harbinger of things to come.
Yet there are many reasons to doubt that all future media will be financed by advertising. I’ve touched on this topic many times, notably in a March 2005 post in which I cited the ease of blocking online ads, among other things, as something that might motivate publishers to fall back on the more transparent mechanism of direct payments. The factor that led Consumer Reports to take this route, namely independence from corporate interests, is another that we might hope would be taken to heart by more publications. I mentioned one more the other day: it’s unclear that there is enough ad money out there to finance the entirety of content production as it moves online.
In the aforementioned piece from March 2005 I cited the arrival of mobile reading devices as one of the main triggers that I expected to force a shift in business models from advertising to paid content. This is starting to come true, most prominently with the Amazon Kindle, which famously embraces this approach even for traditionally free content like blogs. I’m not sold on the idea of a dedicated reading device, but I’m undeniably reading less and less printed pages now that the iPhone provides me with a usable portable device for consuming content online.
The main reason why publications like the New York Times broke down their paywall is that there is too much free content for readers to turn to rather than reaching for their wallets. The problem certainly isn’t that people are unwilling to pay for content: Consumer Reports proves that, as does the paradoxical success of the ring tone market, which has flourished in the absence of a free alternative. That’s why I hypothesized a tipping point in my musings on this topic two and a half years ago.
Here’s how this might pan out. More and more people will start to wonder, like me, why they pay to subscribe to the Economist when they can read the whole current issue online on their iPhone or other mobile reading device. As a result, publishers will see their overall revenues start to fall and will react by raising their advertising fees. Advertisers will take the hit for a while, but eventually they’ll start to fall back on other marketing techniques and use the savings to lower prices. Big web successes like Amazon, Google and Facebook don’t advertise, after all. Every newpaper and magazine out there will then find itself in the same position as Consumer Reports today, with no choice but to find a way to make paid content work. And the more publications that jump on this bandwagon, the less reason there will be for others to hold back.
Mark Zuckerberg’s mea culpa yesterday triggered a veritable tsunami of commentary on Facebook’s decision to atone for its sins by making its new Beacon advertising system less intrusive. The apology came too late to avert a medium-sized PR disaster, though I dare say there’s still plenty of life in them yet. And since the mere fact of piggybacking on a titular snowclone employed by the likes of Jobs and Zuckerberg makes me feel a teeny bit more important, I’ll chime in with a couple of thoughts of my own.
Now everyone knows that Facebook wants to be Google. Heck, everyone wants to be Google, but they’re the most plausible (or least implausible) contender right now. And that implies not just a great website and a lot of users but also an innovative, lucrative and scalable source of revenues. I can almost see their management team sitting down and brainstorming about the goose that would quack and waddle them forward in their quest for inevitable world domination amidst a pounding hailstorm of golden eggs. And what did they come up with? Advertising. Now where have I heard that before?
There are more than a few problems with this beyond the ham-handed way they handled Beacon’s rollout. As Tim O’Reilly points out, there isn’t enough ad money out there to finance the wholesale shift of media online. Facebook doesn’t share anything obvious with eBooks beyond the last five letters of its name, but I think the basic principle stills stands. Google has managed to go on minting ever greater sums to a large degree because its search engine drives such tremendous volumes of traffic. And that traffic is by nature intentional, as Alex Iskold rightly notes. I click on their ads because they might help me find that specific something I’m looking for.
Alex might be a bit harsh in condemning the whole notion of contextual advertising based on a flawed but ambitious product that is still only a few days old. But at the end of the day the whole idea that Facebook will justify its vaunted $15 billion valuation by pioneering the new new thing in targeted ads strikes me as unrealistic and facile. If I were them I would instead extend their application platform (which is truly innovative) to support paid services, taking a cut of partners’ revenues. I’m sure there are plenty of web developers out there who would love to take on eBay, Monster, iTunes and Match.com by leveraging Facebook’s gold mine of social features. Many would fail, of course, but who cares when the mother ship would book a percentage of whatever winning ideas an infinite number of monkeys scrappy startups can come up with?
On another note, did anyone else notice that Zuckerberg’s epistle of self-flagellation doesn’t mention the word advertising even once? Perhaps this is just another example of corporate spinmeistering at work, but I think there’s more to it than that. Ever since Jason Kottke’s seminal piece comparing Facebook to 1990’s AOL, freedom-loving folks (you know, the kind who wear sandals to business meetings and think they can hear the difference between FLAC and MP3) have lamented the rise of another online walled garden. How better for Facebook to counter this than to find a way to integrate their core functionality into the fabric of the web? The clever way that Beacon lurks in the background as you surf on other sites is an intriguing suggestion of the course they might take to make this happen.
As a newly minted Apple fan boy, I’m naturally enamoured with the iPhone, iMac (though I don’t own one) and all things “i”. But I have to say that with IMAP, Apple has really outdone itself. Thanks, Steve, you’ve totally revolutionized my email consumption experience.
(rim shot)
But seriously. Until very recently, I’ve been a fully POP-enabled shop, with Thunderbird as my mail client. My email has resided on my laptop and nowhere else, so I never had problems with synchronization. But I have had a number of issues that led me to seek a better solution. In particular, I don’t always want to be schlepping around my laptop. And Thunderbird lacks certainly capabilities like full-text indexing that have been looking more and more like necessities.
This came to a head when I finally got a smartphone (though an iPhone, not a Nokia E90 as I originally expected). Suddenly synchronization became a big issue, and last time I was traveling I ended up closing Thunderbird, configuring OS X’s Mail app to use my POP server (since TB can’t redirect mails based on a filter) and sending all new mails to Gmail, where I could pick them up from my phone. This was a clunky solution, to say the least; the cherry on the cake was that I had to clean out my Thunderbird inbox when I got home and loaded all the mails received during the trip (which I had instructed Mail to leave on the server) into what was (and is) still my primary email client.
Anyway, when Google announced that it had added IMAP support to Gmail, I was eager to give it a try. Sure enough, it’s brilliant. I can continue to use Thunderbird in exactly the same way as before when I’m sitting at my laptop. (Lifehacker has an excellent article about how to configure TB for optimal use with Gmail.) Setting up IMAP on my phone was a snap as well. I can access my mail from any web-enabled computer using Gmail directly, with its innovative handling of labels and threads, not to mention the fact that I can full-text search my entire email database in milliseconds. I’ve already unearthed a number of mails that I would never have found otherwise. I can even browse mails on my phone that I’ve filtered into other folders, like mailing lists and bugmails, something that would be impossible with POP. And obviously my mails are now synchronized across all these devices.
Kudos to Google for getting on the IMAP bandwagon, as I can imagine that this is a real challenge to implement in a way that scales.
I’ve had some time to reflect on my recent musings about how to push forward innovation on the web without ceding dominance to closed, proprietary technologies. Several people pointed out that I was embarrassingly uninformed with regard to ECMAScript 4 support in Internet Explorer. The ScreamingMonkey project has been around for a while with the aim of achieving exactly that. And I’m so open-minded that I still think this is a fantastic idea, even though it apparently isn’t mine.
I read more closely what the Microsoft people have to say about the situation, and I’m actually finding myself sympathetic to both sides of the argument. Microsoft’s line is that a substantially revised JavaScript language doesn’t make much sense since there are already mature languages like Python and Ruby that could serve our second-generation web scripting needs. Backwards compatibility is all well and good, but people are still going to be reluctant to use new language features if they aren’t widely supported by browser vendors. I’m not a language designer so I can’t speak definitively about the challenges of supporting both ES3 and ES4 syntaxes, but this is bound to introduce a fair amount of complexity and redundancy into the scripting engine implementation. Simply adding Python support might be a more sensible path.
On the other hand, JavaScript has amazing mindshare on the web, and from a pure marketing standpoint it may be easier to achieve widespread usage of modern scripting constructs if they are promoted under the JavaScript brand. Moreover, Brendan has undoubtedly forgotten more about language design than I’ll ever know, and he is obviously convinced that ES4 will provide a smoother transition path than an entirely new language like Python. On a strategic level, Microsoft considers JavaScript to be a Mozilla technology, explaining why the former is eager to jettison it while the latter wants to see it reinvigorated. That’s how the market works (and works well).
The other pillar of the future web (and another favorite topic here on Peer Pressure) is markup. The shortcomings of HTML for application development (as opposed to document representation) are clear. At the same time, I find it hard to get too enthusiastic about XUL. This may be a case of familiarity breeding contempt, but in my experience XUL user interfaces are more functional than attractive. I’m not crazy about certain XUL features like XUL Templates, whose syntax strikes me as obscure. There are some very cool XUL-related technologies like XBL (if it had better error reporting), but the bottom line is that the idea of XUL on the web hasn’t gained much traction.
In the long term, someone like WHATWG may address HTML’s shortcomings as a language for app development. But as with the scripting debate, it’s worth considering whether there isn’t an existing language that could fit the bill. The obvious choice is Adobe’s MXML, which is used by Flex to build user interfaces. Whereas XUL UIs tend to be rather drab, the flashier Flex demos I’ve seen had me positively drooling. Adobe has already open sourced Flex, and it has donated its open source Tamarin virtual machine to the Mozilla project (something that still warms my heart every time I think about it). I’ve already blogged about Brendan blogging about a potential harmonization of XUL and MXML. And while Flex is still a relatively recent innovation, Flash continues to be astonishingly successful, and it’s reasonable to expect that Flex will be able to leverage to great effect the huge Flash development community and near ubiquitous Flash runtime.
Brendan Eich delivers a vicious smackdown to Microsoft for dissembling their motives regarding ECMAScript 4 (JavaScript 2). In essence, Microsoft is pushing back against ES4, claiming it is unnecessarily complex, while simultaneously touting its own full-blown web development framework (C#, .NET, Silverlight and friends). The reeks of hypocrisy and serves as further proof that Microsoft is continuing to employ its famous “embrace and extend” strategy on the web.
I can’t resist pointing out that, when I made a similar argument for improving web markup, the very same Brendan smacked me down for pragmatic reasons:
jgraham already pointed out the Prisoner’s Dilemma facing browser vendors trying to gain market share. Cooperate with the purity police while IE continues to defect? You lose.
Be that as it may, we’re all on the same side here, and the real question is how to push forward innovation on the web despite the daunting inertia of a billion legacy web browsers, most of which are controlled by a corporate entity that is pursuing its own strategic agenda. Whether we’re talking about better markup or better scripts, we quickly bump up against the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” that Brendan evokes.
I can see two possible solutions. One is a true paradigm shift. If people stop using web browsers as we currently know them in favor of, say, Rich Internet Application platforms like AIR or Prism, there will be an opportunity to deploy superior technologies that break with the past. In this scenario backwards compatibility is nice-to-have but not essential. For example, Google might decide to implement some future generation of Gmail on top of an RIA runtime in order to provide a more compelling user experience. In this case, I could easily see them opting for Mozilla’s open Prism technology rather than Adobe’s or Microsoft’s proprietary stack. If most people end up with Mozilla’s runtime on their machines, strategic control of web technologies would slip from Microsoft’s grasp.
The other option is to out-embrace and out-extend Microsoft. This might involve taking a page out of Adobe’s book by developing an ActiveX for IE that let’s users run ES4 and other goodies without having to convince Microsoft itself to play along. As it transpires, an ActiveX control for the Gecko rendering engine already exists, so there may not be too many technical obstacles to achieving this. Much more of a challenge, of course, is getting the deployment story right so that enough people end up installing the control in their browser.
The sad fact is that cooperating with web standards efforts that threaten the viability of its own strategic web initiatives is simply not in Microsoft’s interest, maddening as this may be. It won’t be easy, but pulling an end run around the Evil Empire and beating them at their own game is probably the only real option. And it’ll be oh so satisfying if we can pull it off.
I’ve come out of the closet recently as a big fan of WebRunner, so it was incredibly exciting to see Mozilla officially take the project under its wing with a great new name and branding. As far as I’m concerned, this is where the future’s at.
Since I’m all about putting my money where my mouth is, this raises the intriguing question of what it would mean to port a complex extension like AllPeers to Prism. We’ve certainly got a lot of mileage out of AllPeers as an extension, leveraging the full functionality of Firefox including the relatively easy extension installation process. Nonetheless, the need for explicit downloading and installation of a lot of code (mostly compiled C++) is a drag. Turning AllPeers into a true web app would remove all of the remaining friction for potential adopters.
The first question is how much existing functionality could be rewritten in JavaScript. Clearly JavaScript 2 will ease this task since it brings a lot of new programming constructs to the party that simplify the implementation of complex application logic. Tamarin is also a virtual must since its just-in-time compilation will have a major impact on performance. It should theoretically be possible to implement our entire resource management framework and networking layer in JS (although this would be painful since it implies rewriting a lot of existing code). I’m pretty sure some additional low-level networking code would have to be exposed by Mozilla, since we make extensive use of NSS directly.
The only remaining essential binary code in AllPeers is our codec support: we embed both FreeImage and the FFmpeg libraries in order to extract metadata from media files (height, width, length, bitrate, etc.) and generate thumbnails. With the work that Stuart Parmenter has done on Mozilla’s support for image encoding/decoding and the planned video and audio tags, it isn’t too much of a stretch to imagine a future Firefox where codecs can be installed in a manner similar to plugins and made available to JavaScript code. (Mike Shaver touched on this during his talk on future browser features at Mozilla 24.)
We also need some way to store our data in an efficient local database. Something like Google Gears would presumably fit the bill. It doesn’t look to me like DOMStorage will scale for a large repository of highly structured data, but I might be mistaken about that. I’m not sure how much traction (if any) Google Gears has outside of Google itself, but if it doesn’t catch on then some other persistent storage mechanism will be needed that gives applications control over the database at the SQL level.
The other issue that springs to mind is how to overlay AllPeers-as-a-web-app onto Firefox. We’ve had many people express interest in running AllPeers in a separate process, but a lot of the product’s appeal, in my opinion, stems from the fact that it is right there in your browser when you need it. This means that web apps need to be able to modify browser chrome: adding a sidebar, toolbar and status bar panels, at very least. This raises all kinds of security concerns, I’m sure, but at the end of the day if the app is written entirely in JavaScript with standard web privileges, it can’t do anything too heinous. Perhaps the biggest barrier is cracking the nut of dynamically loading and unloading overlays. This is tricky and it doesn’t look like anyone’s working on it right now. Hopefully someone will pick up the ball since this is, in my opinion, one of the biggest barriers to adoption of Firefox extensions in general. Perhaps the best approach would be to start a green field effort to enable web apps to modify the browser’s chrome in controlled ways, rather than trying to adapt the existing extension mechanism.
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