[Also posted at hacks.mozilla.org.] I wrote The Open Web and Its Adversaries just over five years ago, based on the first SXSW Browser Wars panel (we just had our fifth, it was great — thanks to all who came). Some history The little slideshow I presented is in part quaint. WPF/E and Adobe Apollo, remember …
A small presentation I gave at SXSW asks what it means to be “Open” in the sense of open standards, open source, and a web whose major content formats are not controlled by a single vendor (I credited Nat Friedman’s amusing keynote from last year’s Free Software & Open Source Symposium for inspiration of the …
Background It is becoming increasingly difficult to trust the privacy properties of software and services we rely on to use the Internet. Governments, companies, groups and individuals may be surveilling us without our knowledge. This is particularly troubling when such surveillance is done by governments under statutes that provide limited court oversight and almost no …
As I noted last year, one of the biggest challenges to open source software has been the patent status of video codecs. The most popular codec, H.264, is patent-encumbered and licensed by MPEG LA, under terms that prevent distributing it with open source products including Firefox. Cisco has announced today that they are going to …
To lighten the mood: But actually, I’m serious. People are rightly concerned about what is going on in the W3C with DRM, as couched in the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) proposal. Please read Henri Sivonen’s explanation of EME if you haven’t yet. As usual for us here at Mozilla, we want to start by addressing …
Just under two years ago, we started Firefox OS as the Boot to Gecko (B2G) project, with little more than a belief that the Web should be the only platform you need to build an open mobile device ecosystem. This vision was so compelling that we found ourselves on a rocket, joined by developers and …
Last week started with a bang, with Mozilla’s Firefox OS launch at Mobile World Congress 2013. We announced that Firefox OS had won the support of 18 carriers, four device manufacturers, and a major chipset company (Qualcomm) at a barn-burner of a press conference in Barcelona on Sunday night. Pictures (the first shows the room …
Continue reading “MWC 2013, Firefox OS, and More Web API Evolution”
A short blog post to let everyone in the Mozilla community know the latest news. As the “About Brendan” sidebar says, I’m a founder of Mozilla, and since 2005 I have had the title of CTO. That job has entailed work on technical strategy, Web standards, influencing/partnering, Mozilla Research, public speaking, and talent-scouting. (Oh, and …
This is a follow-up to Video, Mobile, and the Open Web. As promised there, OS-based H.264 support for the HTML5 <video> element has already landed in Gecko, and it just released this week in Firefox Beta for Android. Firefox OS (B2G to the early adopters!) also supports H.264 from the HTML5 <video> element. The challenge …
Mozilla is happy to support Facebook in forming a Core Mobile Web Platform W3C Community Group in which to curate prioritized, tiered lists of emerging and de facto standards that browsers should support in order for the Web to compete with native application stacks on mobile devices. The W3C Community Groups do not create normative …