The Open Web

What's at Stake

Brendan Eich

Mozilla

What Does "Open" Mean?

• Unencumbered, Cross-Platform Standards
• Open Source / Free Software Implementations
• No Single-Vendor "Lock-In"
• User Innovation Network Effects
• Distributed Extensibility

What Is Not "Open"

• Cubic equation wars (16th century Italy)
  
  
• iTunes
• Flash, Adobe Apollo
• WPF, WPF/E

"Open" Examples

• The "New English Dictionary" (1857-1884)
  
• Extreme Sports Gear (Windsurfing, 1978-1998)
• Ajax Libraries (Prototype, Dojo, jsQuery, etc.)
• Most of the Public Web, Still (2007)
• The WHAT Working Group

User Innovation Networks

• Eric von Hippel, MIT
  
• User-only innovation networks can flourish when
  1. "Lead Users" have incentive to innovate
  2. Users voluntarily reveal their innovations
  3. Diffusion of innovations is low cost

Hard Questions

• Will the W3C HTML WG use WHATWG specs?
• Will Microsoft handicap the Web vs. WPF*?
• Will Adobe open up Flash?
• What's Apple up to?
• Can Mozilla make a difference (again)?

Mozilla's Position

• We want to move the Web forward quickly
  • Offline Web Apps (Firefox 3)
  • 2D and 3D (OpenGL/ES) Canvas tag
  • JavaScript 2 / ECMAScript Edition 4
  • Better text via CSS3 and beyond
• Working with Opera via WHATWG on <video>
  • Unencumbered Ogg Theora decoder in all browsers
  • Ogg Vorbis for <audio>
  • Other formats possible
  • DHTML player controls
• For all browsers, not just Firefox

Finis