The World Wide Web Consortium has published a draft of an interface that browsers can use to manipulate files better, one of a series of steps aimed at gradually improving the sophistication and polish of Web site interfaces.
The draft File API (application programming interface) defines a number of ways that browsers and Web sites can handle files better. One big part of it: being able to select multiple files for upload, such as on photo-sharing sites or Web-based e-mail, a task that often relies on Adobe Systems' Flash today.
But there are other aspects, too. For example, the Files interface governs the use of "blobs," or packages of raw binary data such as video files. Google has touted blobs for its Gears browser plug-in as a way to divide large videos into small chunks so that uploads can be more easily resumed if a network problem interrupts the process.
Another benefit: files are handled asynchronously, which means the browser won't freeze up while a file is being uploaded or otherwise handled, and the browser reports progress on file transfers.
The technology is one example of work to transform the Web into a better foundation for interactive applications, a move that usurps some power from computer operating systems such as Windows and that's embodied most boldly in Google's Chrome OS project.
Here's one example of use of the Files interface provided by Mike Smith, who works for the W3C on matters relating to HTML--Hypertext Markup Language, the language used to describe Web pages:
A user uses a Web-based application for reading and sending e-mail. She wants to attach multiple files to particular messages. The Web application provides an user interface that allows her to select multiple files to attach at the same time. After she selects the files, they are uploaded to the Web application asynchronously, allowing the user to perform other actions while they are uploading (for example, finishing the rest of the message she was composing before you added the file attachments). As the attachments are uploaded, the Web applications shows progress bars to indicate how much of the contents of the files have uploaded thus far.
The interface can work in conjunction with various standards including the drag-and-drop support in the HTML 5 now under development and the Web Workers technology that lets browsers better perform multiple operations simultaneously.
The interface also can help Web applications process the contents of files. For example, Smith describes a lyrics finder:
A user has on her local file system a playlist file from her favorite desktop music player. The playlist contains a list of song titles and information, and she wants to be able to easily fetch the lyrics for particular songs without needing to manually search for the lyrics on the Web. So a site can provide a Web-based application that allows her to upload her playlist. The Web application then parses the file and then presents a user interface to her, show in the contents of the file as a hyperlinked, sortable list. She can then retrieve the lyrics for any given song just by clicking on a particular song title.
Arun Ranganathan, Mozilla's standards evangelist and chairman of the WebGL working group, wrote the specification, according to Chris Blizzard, Mozilla's director of developer relations.
Standards for the Web are advancing rapidly with W3C representatives including Microsoft working in conjunction with a parallel effort, WHATWG. New standards require actual implementation in browsers before they are accepted as finished, a fact that can lead to some chaos but that helps ensure the new ideas are tested in the real world.
Firefox 3.6, in beta testing now, will support most of the Files API, according to Blizzard.
Last week, Microsoft showed off some browser technology that could help Internet Explorer leapfrog the competition. But if Mozilla succeeds in its hope, Microsoft could be playing catch-up instead.
The technology in question is hardware-accelerated graphics and text using interfaces called Direct2D and DirectWrite that provide an easy way to use graphics cards' computing power. They're built into Windows 7, and Microsoft is bringing them to Windows Vista but not Windows XP.
The performance boost from Direct2D and DirectWrite was the centerpiece of Microsoft's demonstration of Internet Explorer 9 goodies shown last week. Online maps flashed on the screen quickly and tracked mouse movements responsively; text was clearer and changed sizes more gracefully.
But the day of Microsoft's demo, Mozilla evangelist Chris Blizzard had this to tweet: "Interesting that we're doing Direct2D support in Firefox as well--I'll bet we'll ship it first."
There's work to back up his rhetoric. On Sunday, Bas Schouten, the programmer who's been leading the work for Mozilla, posted a prototype of Firefox using the Direct2D and DirectWrite.
However, any Firefox fans tempted to crow about a victory should be cautious. Mozilla wouldn't commit to including the technology, much less to a release schedule such as Firefox 3.7 due in the first half of 2010. "We are currently investigating Direct2D for Firefox, but do not have a target for shipping it in Firefox at this time," the organization said in a statement..
Several Web pages arrive significantly faster using Direct2D rendering technology in Firefox.
(Credit: Bas Schouten) The race is on
Microsoft declined to comment for this story, referring readers just to last week's blog post about coming Internet Explorer 9 features. "While we're still early in the product cycle, we wanted to be clear to developers about our approach and the progress so far," the company said while sharing a Direct2D demonstration video.
There's no doubt the race is on, though, given the potential benefits of the new interface and the commercial success of Window 7. Microsoft is lighting a fire under its developers, but the company's browser has lagged Firefox and other rivals in many technological areas for years, and many Web developers loathe earlier versions of IE still widely used. IE's market share has steadily eroded, though it remains dominant overall.
The attention is giving Google ideas, too. In a Chrome issue logged Sunday, Chrome programmer Peter Kasting pointed to Chouten's blog post on the subject as "motivation."
"If we can speed up the rendering time, the most noticeable benefit will probably be smoother-feeling scrolling," Kasting said. He also directed attention in October to DirectWrite support in Chrome, though cautioning that it might not work with the browser's present "sandbox" design to isolate elements of the browser for security reasons.
Mozilla has its own results to show off, too. Schouten offered a graph showing improved performance displaying a variety of Web pages. Facebook, Google, and Twitter rendered on the screen in half the time using the Direct2D; Slashdot and a Wikipedia entry were barely changed. One taxing page using the Scalable Vector Graphics format (SVG) to show movable, resizable graphics showed more than twice as fast, dropping from about 11 milliseconds to less than 4 milliseconds.
Microsoft's DirectWrite permits smoother display of many fonts.
(Credit: Microsoft) What actually changes?
Direct2D replaces an older technology called Graphics Device Interface (GDI) used in Windows XP. Both offer a way for programs to tap into computing hardware without having to worry about the particulars of video card capabilities and settings, but Direct2D taps into hardware acceleration features.
The technology lets programmers control basic elements such as transparent boxes, curved lines, and resizable photos. Out of these, user interface elements are constructed; Direct2D calls upon a computer's graphics processor to speed that up. It's particularly helpful for dynamic situations that change element properties such as color, size, or opacity.
DirectWrite offers a similar graphics chip boost to the task of displaying text. That may not sound computationally intense, but some parts of it are. In particular, DirectWrite offers a more sophisticated mechanism for displaying text to take advantage of something called sub-pixel positioning of letters.
Each pixel on an LCD screen is actually made of three tiny slices--for red, green, and blue components--and sub-pixel technology subtly draws letters using pieces of these pixels to make the overall appearance smoother. The older GDI permitted some sub-pixel positioning, but only smoothed letters in the horizontal direction; DirectWrite smooths curves vertically as well.
Using the graphics chip in Direct2D and DirectWrite operations brings several advantages. Performance is the first: some operations are faster or smoother, and having more power on hand lets programmers tackle more ambitious projects. Second, the general-purpose central processor, relatively inefficient at handling graphics tasks, is unburdened, freeing it up for other tasks and saving battery power.
Firefox already has a graphics system of its own called Cairo. Schouten has been adding a Direct2D and DirectWrite.
Firefox is of course a browser that doesn't just work on Windows. The DirectWrite technology helps that operating system catch up to its rivals, said Mozilla's John Daggett in a blog post Sunday. "Platform APIs [application programming interfaces] on Mac OS X and Linux already do a good job rendering Postscript CFF [Compact Font Format] fonts," he said. "This just brings them up to parity under Windows 7."
Direct2D is used elsewhere in the browser. "We've made significant progress and are now able to present a Firefox browser completely rendered using Direct2D, making intensive usage of the GPU," or graphics processing unit, Schouten said. And because Cairo is used by other open-source software, other projects will benefit from the work, he added.
The Direct2D work is Mozilla's second hardware acceleration effort; the company also is working on one using a different hardware acceleration interface called OpenGL for mobile devices using Nvidia's Tegra chips, according to Mozilla.
This Mozilla demonstration of photos and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), with transparency and click-and-drag resizing, works more than twice as fast Direct2D graphics.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET) The interactive Web
Microsoft went out of its way to emphasize that the Direct2D and DirectWrite work will help existing Web pages without programmers having to change a line of code. Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer, contrasted that to other hardware acceleration efforts including Native Client and O3D from Google and WebGL from Mozilla and the Khronos Group.
Native Client, O3D, and WebGL are part of a long list of developments designed to transform the Web into a foundation not just for static pages but also for interactive applications. Those technologies, though, require new programming skills and tools.
Mozilla, Google, Apple, and Opera have been pushing this interactive Web agenda, and Microsoft is showing signs of interest, too. However, for now, Microsoft emphasizes that Direct2D support will help the existing Web. But the browser makers have their eyes on interactive technology as well. Direct2D will help with complex sites that use 2D graphics interfaces such as SVG and Canvas, Mozilla said.
Added Schouten, "As Web sites become more graphically intense, dynamic graphics will start playing a larger role, especially in user interfaces."
Google wants to catalyze the era of Web applications with its Chrome OS project, but Mozilla has no plans for its own browser-based operating system, at least for now.
"We're really focused on making the Web the right platform of whatever operating system one is using. That's a fair amount of work," Mozilla Foundation Chairman Mitchell Baker said. "I think we're going to continue to focus for quite awhile on the Web itself as a platform and the capabilities of the Web rather than build an operating system of our own and pull everybody into our world."
Mozilla Foundation Chairman Mitchell Baker
(Credit: Mozilla)Baker shared the thoughts in an interview about the Mozilla Foundation's report of $79 million. The foundation isn't strapped for cash, but it is financially tiny compared to the three main rivals in the browser market today, Microsoft, Apple, and Google.
Microsoft was largely dormant when Firefox was getting its start five years ago, but the company is lighting a fire under its Internet Explorer developers for IE 9. Among the features the company touted are faster execution of Web-based JavaScript programs, better compliance with Web standards, and higher performance in general.
Internet Explorer remains the dominant browser in use today. Today, the elderly IE 6, dating from 2001, still is the most widely used version, and its widespread use is an anchor that keeps Web developers and therefore other browsers from advancing as fast as they might. So, unsurprisingly, Baker was comfortable with the prospect of a higher-powered IE being resurgent.
"If it could resurge enough to pull the hundreds of millions of people still using IE 6, we'd all be ecstatic," she said. "A lot of people are going to continue to use IE. They get it on their machine. If Microsoft makes that product more capable so the Web can move forward, there's good in that."
The Mozilla Foundation, of which Firefox developer Mozilla Corp. is a taxable subsidiary, gets the bulk of its revenue from Google through a search-ad deal that runs through 2011 at present. Search traffic that stems from Firefox's built-in search bar is set by default to go to Google, and a portion of the resulting Google search-ad revenue goes back to Mozilla.
Mozilla is looking to diversify its revenue sources, though, Baker said, and has taken some small steps.
"We did some small diversification in search, for example in Russia," using Google rival Yandex's services, she said. "We look at diversification, but we're not rushing into it."
And she's comfortable with today's funding situation because it doesn't force Mozilla to take Firefox in a direction it doesn't want to go.
"We have search in the product because we want it. We don't have any other discussions with Google about what the product is," she said. "The search and revenue relationship is completely distinct from the product development relationship."
Though Mozilla's revenue grew only at 5 percent from 2007 to 2008, compared to 12 percent the year before, Baker isn't concerned. "It matches our projections" of slow, steady growth, she said. "We're pretty much in line."
Digging into the financial statement, it should be noted that the foundation's $79 million in revenue is after a $7.8 million unrealized loss in the value of its investments. As the economy improves, it's possible those investments will recover some of their value.
The foundation is making more money than it loses. Expenses were $49 million for 2008, according to the financial statement.
"We have adequate resources to do what we have planned, plus save a little bit," Baker said. "Right now we're not bumping up against the ceiling. Our revenue is adequate to meet our needs. We try to be careful with money."
The Internal Revenue Service is scrutinizing Mozilla's corporate structure--a foundation with two taxable if not exactly for-profit subsidiaries. The foundation disclosed the scrutiny a year ago, and that investigation is continuing, Baker said.
"The IRS can be a very slow-moving organization. It's still an open discussion," she said, and the foundation is taking the matter seriously. "We don't have a clear idea what the IRS is thinking."
Two years ago, the Mozilla Foundation established its second taxable subsidiary, Mozilla Messaging, which focuses on the Thunderbird e-mail software and more recently on the Web-based Raindrop universal communications service. For now, that project gets its funding from the Firefox side of the house, but Baker plans to increase its financial focus once the near-final Thunderbird 3 is finished.
"The task now is to ship first Thunderbird 3. We expect to see that this year," Baker said. Mozilla overall is set up to be sustainable, not to be a money machine, but Mozilla Messaging will need to generate more revenue on its own eventually to help with that sustainability effort.
The Mozilla Foundation's revenue grew 5 percent to $79 million in 2008, with its Firefox search-ad deal with Google still the biggest benefactor, the organization said Thursday.
The figure is notable for an open-source effort, but the growth tapered off significantly. For 2007, by comparison, the Mozilla Foundation reported $75 million in revenue, a 12 percent increase over 2006.
Mozilla Chairman Mitchell Baker revealed the latest Mozilla figures on her blog Thursday.
Update: for further details and commentary from Baker, check this follow-up interview.
Firefox has won over about a quarter of the world's users of Web browsers, taking most of that share from Microsoft's still dominant Internet Explorer. The browser faces new challenges, though, in the form of newcomer Google Chrome and Microsoft's resurgent effort to improve Internet Explorer. On Wednesday, Microsoft showed off some elements of the forthcoming IE 9, and Thursday, Google released the source code underlying its Chrome OS, a browser-based operating system for lower-end computers.
Google supplies "the bulk" of the Mozilla Foundation's revenue through a deal that currently lasts through 2011, the foundation said. Under that deal, people performing searches through Firefox using the default Google search engine see and sometimes click on search ads at Google; Google and Mozilla share the resulting revenue. In 2007, Google supplied 89 percent of Mozilla's revenue.
Google isn't the only revenue source, though. Here's how Mozilla described its sources in an FAQ:
"The majority of this revenue is generated from the search functionality in Mozilla Firefox from partners such as Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, and others. Mozilla takes in additional revenue from donations, online affiliate programs, the Mozilla Store, and income on our invested assets. In 2008, we expanded our Firefox partnerships with new firms such as Yandex (Russia Search), Canonical (Ubuntu), and Nokia (Mobile).
Earlier in November, Firefox surpassed 25 percent usage share of Web browsers, according to Net Applications.
(Credit: Net Applications)Mozilla released a third beta of Firefox 3.6 on Wednesday, adding stability and performance features, and said it hopes to lock down the code soon for its first release candidate.
The new beta, for Windows, Mac, and Linux, includes a component directory lockdown that makes it harder for other software to meddle with the open-source browser's state by preventing that software from sidling into the same folder as the browser's own components. The result should be fewer crashes, said Mozilla's Johnathan Nightingale in a blog post, and Firefox still is open to third-party extensions via its official add-on mechanism.
The change should improve security, too, added another Mozilla programmer, Vladimir Vukecevic, who wrote in his own blog post that Mozilla is considering bringing the change to Firefox 3.5, too.
"Creating binary components to interface with the operating system or with other applications is fairly straightforward, though ultimately dangerous. Binary components have full access to the application and OS, and so can impact stability, security, and performance," Vukecevic said.
Also in the latest beta of 3.6 is a feature that lets the browser run some Web-based JavaScript programs asynchronously, which is to say without being so picky about the order the scripts run. This can improve the speed that Web pages load, Mozilla said.
The biggest Firefox 3.6 feature most folks will notice is Personas, the reskinning add-on that's now being built in. More than 10 million Personas have been downloaded so far, Suneel Gupta and Myk Melez of the Personas team said Wednesday.
Mozilla is working to release a final version of Firefox 3.6 before the end of the year, and one sign the project is wrapping up is that the developers are locking down the features and changes that can be added into the release candidate 1. Code freeze for RC1 is scheduled for Wednesday but might be at risk, a Mozilla planning site said this week.
Firefox is steadily gaining in use. Last week, Web traffic monitoring firm Net Applications announced Firefox cleared 25 percent share of those using browsers worldwide--not dethroning Internet Explorer by any means but still winning over new users. Mozilla estimates there are more than 300 million Firefox users total, and this week said there are more than 300,000 testers using the Firefox 3.6 beta
Google's Chrome, meanwhile, is appealing to some of the same browser enthusiasts who were Firefox's first users. One of its big selling points is speed, and Google is working on other ways to make the Web faster, too. Chrome gives it a vehicle to test such ideas out in the real world, a strategy that Apple, Opera, and Firefox have employed to advance the Web state of the art.
One Mozilla programmer, Alexander Limi, revealed a speedup technology called Resource Package for Mozilla, too, on Tuesday. His proposal calls for bundling many Web page elements up into a single compressed file that can be retrieved in a single Web-page request action. Browsers are limited in the number of such actions they can take in parallel, so consolidating the interactions can make pages load faster. The approach is backwards compatible with existing browsers that don't support the feature, he added.
"If the feedback is good we're likely to try and get this implemented for Firefox 3.7," said Mozilla evangelist Christopher Blizzard in a blog post Tuesday.
Mozilla, racing to release Firefox 3.6 before the end of the year, has released a second beta of the open-source browser for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Firefox 3.6 beta 1 introduced most of the new features, most visibly the ability to customize Firefox's look through Personas, less than two weeks ago. But among the 190 patches in the new beta is what Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's director of Firefox, described in a blog post as "a mechanism to prevent incompatible software from crashing Firefox."
There also are a number of deeper changes in Firefox 3.6 that Web developers likely will be more interested in. Note that one of them, the ability to use color gradients with formatting technology called Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), has changed syntax in between Firefox 3.6 beta 1 and beta 2.
Mozilla is trying to accelerate the pace of Firefox releases; Firefox 3.7 is set for release in the first half of 2010 and 4.0 some time later that year. The project faces new competition from Google's Chrome browser.
Five years ago, Mozilla made it clear that the browser wars weren't over after all.
In the 1990s, Netscape had lost its dominance in the browser market to Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and the Netscape-spawned open-source project called Mozilla had sunk into obscurity. Even a federal antitrust suit accusing Microsoft of anticompetitive practices with its browser and Windows was not enough to turn the tide.
But on November 9, 2004, Firefox 1.0 emerged to fight back again.
The project, originally named Phoenix to symbolize rebirth from Netscape's ashes, has now clawed its way back to account for nearly a quarter of the browser usage today. Microsoft may not be on the run, but it's on the defensive, gradually building its browser development effort back up into fighting form.
... Read more
Mozilla may have released the first beta of Firefox 3.6 nearly two months late, but the organization believes the final version still will arrive on schedule before the end of the year.
The Mozilla wiki page on version 3.6, code-named Namoroka, listed early September for the scheduled release of the first beta, but it actually arrived October 30. Despite that, Mike Shaver, vice president of engineering, said Mozilla wants to release the browser before the holidays and is sticking by the overall schedule for the open-source Web browser.
"We're still looking at a release candidate in November and (final) release in December at this point," Shaver said in a Tuesday interview.
That means Mozilla has a compressed schedule for producing the final version, but Shaver said coders are working hard. "We're not going to coast into it," he said. "We're going to continue shipping beta updates aggressively."
Those involved in open-source projects, with different motivations and pressures than those in the traditional proprietary software industry, sometimes have an attitude of "we'll ship it when it's done." Mozilla, though, recognizes that time matters even for an open-source project.
"We've always been more quality-driven than time-driven," Shaver said. "But we understand timing in the market matters to our users and our competitiveness."
Google's Chrome is still the fourth-place browser in terms of usage, but it gained more than others in October when it comes to stealing usage away from the dominant Internet Explorer.
According to Net Applications' browser usage share statistics, Chrome gained from 3.2 percent to 3.6 percent from September 2009 to October. The company bases its statistics on visits to a global network of 40,000 Web sites, dusted with some statistical processing.
Next was Mozilla's Firefox, which rose from 23.8 percent to 24.1 percent. Apple's Safari rose from 4.2 percent to 4.4 percent. Opera was essentially flat at 2.2 percent.
The big loser was IE, which dropped from 65.7 percent to 64.6 percent, according to the statistics.
... Read moreThose keen to try out Mozilla's latest browser--and its new process to update the software more frequently--now can try Firefox 3.6 beta 1 for Windows, Mac, or Linux.
Among the features in the new version, according to Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's director of Firefox, and Mozilla evangelist Chris Blizzard:
• Personas, which lets people customize the browser appearance. Personas has been available as an add-on, so there are plenty of Personas skins to choose from.
• Faster execution of Web-based JavaScript programs, better browser responsiveness, and faster startup time. Mozilla has been working on JavaScript performance for many months, but the urgency of that and other performance improvements increased with the arrival of Google's Chrome browser.
• The ability to drag and drop files from the computer to the browser. This is useful for uploading files to Web sites, as will a feature not in the beta but planned for the final version, support for the multiple-file input tag so more than one file can be added in Web forms.
• Expanded support for geolocation technology so it can provide a Web site with an approximate physical address of the user, not just latitude-longitude coordinates.
• The ability to detect the computer's orientation for machines that offer accelerometer support.
• Video built into Web pages with the HTML5 "video" tag now can be viewed full-screen.
Mozilla also released a full list of Firefox changes developers should know about with more details.
Firefox is at the vanguard of the second generation of browser wars. Although it competes with Google's Chrome, Apple's Safari, and Opera, all those browsers are also allied in a way against Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which though dominant is relatively slow at some tasks and only now complying more fully with Web page standards of yesteryear. The rivals, meanwhile, are pushing ahead with new features in HTML5 in development right now.
Mozilla released the alpha version of Firefox 3.6, code-named Namoroka, in August.
The organization plans to release the final version by the end of the year, with Firefox 3.7 in the first half of 2010 and Firefox 4.0 in about a year.
One complication of the upgrade is compatibility of add-ons that extend Firefox's features; the new browser version makes some changes. Mozilla is debating whether to release Firefox 3.6 as a minor update automatically distributed to 3.5 users or as a major update that requires those users to actively retrieve it.
One major element of Firefox 4.0 is a new add-on technology called Jetpack that eases this compatibility problem.
