Mobile and the Mozilla manifesto
November 1, 2007In my last couple of posts, I’ve tried to provide a little context about mobile and how changes in technology are creating an opportunity for a transformation of how we use the Web on mobile phones from that of a dumbed-down, non-standards-based “mobile Web” to the Web.
Coming back to Mozilla’s manifesto, and the changes happening in mobile, where is there an opportunity for Mozilla?
Not an opportunity, a responsibility
My read on the Mozilla manifesto tells me that there’s not only an opportunity presented by mobile, but that we have a responsibility to help crack open the mobile environment. Why?
- For millions of people, mobile phones will be the primary way, if not the only way, to access the Web; for this reason alone, we need to be involved to meet our mission of protecting an open Web
- Firefox and the Mozilla platform are being targeted by developers as a primary platform for the development of rich Web-based applications; we have a responsibility to those developers to help them extend their reach to mobile
- Many of the issues in migrating toward a toward a better Web experience on mobile phones will be intertwined with technology that Mozilla is deeply involved in: for example, JavaScript and its manipulation of XHTML, CSS and DOM to enable Ajax applications
Some goals
If our mission commits us to playing a role in mobile, what should some key goals be? Here’s my initial take:
- We should build versions of Firefox that provide access to the (standards-based) Web from phones and other non-PC devices, while recognizing that this doesn’t necessarily mean forcing developers into a one-size-fits-all-devices user interface for their Web sites and apps
- We should support our developer community with a migration path, guidelines and tools that help them deploy their apps to mobile devices; done properly, this will spur broad innovation in Web-based mobile phone apps
- Just as on the PC, anyone should be able to incorporate Mozilla technology to build branded browsers (as Nokia has done for the N810) and applications
What would you like to see us do?
November 1, 2007 at 9:33 pm
I like the sound of this. I liked this and the second post (one web) in this series much better than I did the first (mobile web).
The question I would like to pose to you is one of numbers… what percentage of web sites are “Web 2.0″ ?
It’s a safe bet the big web players like Google, Digg, Facebook, etc are going to provide a mobile experience either way. I am more concerned about myself and the *other* gazillion web sites out there.
Have you ever tried to write a *single* moderately simple web page that scales from a 2″ cell phone to a 30″ desktop screen? I have, and I can say this… it’s pretty much impossible! *That* (me) is the market I think Mozilla needs to target! You need to enable the thousands of regular web developers out there to easily write web pages that work everywhere.
I think that goal has two parts… first there needs to provide a technical platform capable of delivering, and second, there needs to be education and tools enabling developers to easily build such sites.
So, what is stopping this today? Well, if I start with a simple linear text page, maybe with a heading and a few paragraphs, it works great everywhere! Yay. But then I add a menu.. and that sucks up a bunch of valuable screen real-estate which is a pain to scroll past or zoom around on a mobile device! If browsers (desktop and mobile) supported something like meta “rel” tags for navigation, I wouldn’t need to always have navigation elements on the page itself. Is there some standard for marking menus as navigation enabling users to easily/automatically hide or skip over this if it fills their whole mobile device screen (tech and education remember)? Then comes another big problem… what if I want to take the next step up from text, and have a sexy looking page with graphics? Well, guess what, the scalability of bitmaps fall over in a big way. SVG is clearly the answer here, but ten years on from it’s standardization and I still can’t use it from CSS! And then suppose you want to go even further, beyond graphics and a simple linear page, and have side boxes or columns or something on your site? Almost every single layout technique there is utilizes some form of measurement unit that doesn’t scale well to small screens… the worst being pixel level control, but em’s don’t really cut it either - a 20 em wide side column doesn’t do wonders for users on a 3″ screen! Have you tried building such a site using *only* percentage units? Does support for CSS 3 type layout stuff (columns, etc) help web developers manage this? I don’t know… cuz I’m still trying to get basic graphics to work!
The Web 2.0 and AJAX stuff might be where all the hype is today… but the real need is to help all the thousands of average dev’s like myself build our gazillions of normal old pages in a way that works well for all browsers and devices. This is what the web was designed to do, help it finally fill that promise.
November 2, 2007 at 9:23 am
Hi Jay,
You said:
“We should support our developer community with a migration path, guidelines and tools that help them deploy their apps to mobile devices; done properly, this will spur broad innovation in Web-based mobile phone apps”
How do you think we should support developers, or at what level in the mozilla stack? There are plenty of places to “plugin”:
1) as a code embedder (think mozilla/embedding)
2) as a xul app on xulrunner
3) as a xul addon on mobile firefox
November 2, 2007 at 2:28 pm
Chris, I have been there. Supporting Web “pages” is a necessary step, I agree with you there we need to be good at walking before we can run. But I think we need to do a superset of that. I believe that work is being done on the SVG/CSS issue, it’s not being ignored. Thanks for the feedback.
Doug, I think that all three of those scenarios need to be supported. The needs of embedders seem to me a little different from the needs of XUL app and add-on developers:
Embedders: In the conversations I’ve had to date with those working actively on embedding, they have been proactive about getting and building the code and working with it. They mostly seem interested in understanding how we would like to work with them, in terms of reviewing and accepting bug fixes they’ve made along the way, how often they should sync with our source control, etc. They want to make sure that we lay no claim to any IP that they provide as part of their app (we don’t). You’ve been there, so can guide us with the lessons learned.
XUL app and add-on developers: Since there is plenty of XUL knowledge out there, one way to do this would be to focus on augmenting existing materials and evangelism with FAQs/docs that explain the differences between building XUL desktop apps and XUL mobile apps; how to package them for deployment to devices and test them; how to use any additional mobile-specific APIs; any differences in MIME type support; evangelizing about best practices for mobile.
Jay
November 2, 2007 at 7:58 pm
Provide a standards-compliant browser (and/or the underlying browser components like XUL and Gecko), and encourage well-thought out standard ways for content to degrade for small screens. Then just accept that some web sites will do a better job in the mobile area. (Even Blazer and Novarra on my 4-year old Palm smartphone are fairly usable on sites that make an effort, like Wikipedia and BBC news.)
Also, one extremely simple obvious thing: there MUST BE a standard way to pass a location in the query string to ANY web page! Just as clicking an image submit button in a form passes click locations &x=42&y=666 in the query string, if I permit location-based browsing, my mobile device (or my desktop) should pass a standard parameter, e.g. “&geolatlong=37.39,-122.08″ in the query string of every URL it sends. Web sites that are good mobile citizens will respond to this information, others will ignore it. My phone already has a preference to “turn location on”, yet it doesn’t do anything in the phone browser, it just “makes some Sprint applications easier to use”. We need a simple standard URL convention to make location universal, instead of a proprietary way for phone companies to rent location-based apps.
November 10, 2007 at 8:14 pm
[...] Mozilla starts down the path to running in the mobile space we are spending time looking at memory pressure issues more closely. Stuart and Vlad spent time [...]
November 12, 2007 at 12:51 pm
[...] into the mobile space. Writes Blizzard: “As Mozilla starts down the path to running in the mobile space we are spending time looking at memory pressure issues more closely. . . (I)t sounds like the early [...]
November 12, 2007 at 1:21 pm
[...] Mozilla starts down the path to running in the .mobile space we are spending time looking at memory pressure issues more closely. .Stuart and .Vlad. spent time [...]
November 12, 2007 at 1:52 pm
[...] Mozilla starts down the path to running in the .mobile space we are spending time looking at memory pressure issues more closely. .Stuart and [...]
November 13, 2007 at 10:02 am
[...] Mozilla is a little flummoxed by the birds memory appetite, and is going on a crusade to hunt down the issues, which are even more of an issue in mobile. [...]
November 18, 2007 at 10:12 am
[...] en la WEB dijo en su blog: “Writes Blizzard: As Mozilla starts down the path to running in the mobile space we are spending time looking at memory pressure issues more closely. . . (I)t sounds like the early [...]
November 20, 2007 at 2:24 pm
[...] Mozilla is a little flummoxed by the birds memory appetite, and is going on a crusade to hunt down the issues, which are even more of an issue in mobile. [...]