Opera: Single-minded about widget development
Jon von Tetzchner is the chief executive of the Norwegian browser company Opera. (Download for Windows and Mac.) Although Opera first became known for its desktop product, the company has also become well known for its Opera Mini handset-based Web browser.
Opera has become heavily involved in the development of standards for widgets--the lightweight, Web-based applications that are starting to become prevalent on new handsets. It has also been working hard on the development of HTML 5, which has more built-in rich media functionality than the current version of the Web standard.
ZDNet UK caught up with von Tetzchner at the Wireless '09 event in London on Wednesday to discuss standards processes and how Flash may soon become unnecessary.
Jon von Tetzchner
(Credit: ZDNet UK)
Q: Tell us about the work Opera has been doing with widget standards.
Von Tetzchner: We work mostly through the W3C, which is where the widget standard per se is being worked on. The widget standard (as far as it has been established) is more about the packaging--on the relation of how you connect to the underlying device, it hasn't been standardized fully. Bondi is trying to standardize that, and we have engaged with Bondi and with (the Joint Innovation Labs). (Editors' note: Bondi is a Web/widget specification endorsed by the LiMo Foundation.)
There are already quite a few initiatives, and there is a risk of fragmentation, and obviously our goal is always to try to make things migrate...to a single standard. Sometimes, on the way, people are eager to get started, but we try to engage as much as possible to make sure that this gets standardized in a way that works for everyone.
What does Opera gain from these widget standards bodies?
Von Tetzchner: I don't want to say this is a philosophical thing for us, but we do believe the Internet is too important to be limited. There is a significant risk of the fragmentation of technology. It'll be like on the PC: you'll write an application for a platform, and it will only run on that platform. We're already seeing some of this (in widget development), where Web technologies may be in the mix. But you're mixing all those things in, and suddenly you have to write for the platform instead of for the technology.
Our goal is to try and make this work because we believe that's the right thing to do. We've seen the benefits of this from the PC side, where there are differences between the different operating systems, but you can still run all the applications. That's the benefit of having things standardized.
We have a lot of people that know how to write standards, how to implement standards and how to engage in the standards bodies. We have the biggest active group in the W3C to do just that. Considering that our competitors tend to be a lot bigger than us, that shows our commitment to this.
You see fragmentations--in the worst-case scenario, you'll think they are lobbying towards a single-vendor lock-in again, and I don't think anyone really wants that.
In what way could that happen?
Von Tetzchner: Clearly, if there is one vendor that wins, then (lock-in) is the potential outcome. It keeps people on their toes to have competition. If there are multiple vendors implementing the solution, then you'll see innovation. To me, again, it doesn't matter whether it's open or closed source, because if everyone was using a single piece of open source, that wouldn't solve it either.
Currently, we are seeing competition in the browser space. There are four browsers, basically; there's Microsoft--they have multiple (browsers), but let's simplify the picture a little--there's Mozilla, there's Apple and there's us. The competition there is leading to innovation and improvement in the different browsers. We've seen that so many times in history, that competition leads to better quality products.
You didn't put Chrome in that list.
Von Tetzchner: This is more about the engine. Chrome is based on
Safari--they're based on the same piece of code. But again, if WebKit wins the market or the Mozilla code where there are a few vendors that are building on top of it, I think that would stifle innovation in that particular field.
Tell us about Opera's involvement in the development of HTML 5.
Von Tetzchner: We are very engaged in this. In some ways, we had a period of time when HTML was kind of not being worked at. There was HTML 4 and a lot of work on XHTML--these are technologies that are beautiful, but you are almost restarting (with each version), and they are not totally compatible. XHTML has not really been used very much, which is sad, but that's the way it is.
For a while there, we actually worked outside, together with Mozilla and Apple, in the WHAT (Web Hypertext Applications Technology) working group. This is a group where we were basically looking at Web standards. This was done because there was no other forum to do this. A fair amount of the work that we did there has then gone in to the W3C and is now part of HTML 5, then changed because there have been more people, including Microsoft, having input on that.
That's the way we like it--you like the competitors to be in there. You also have the browser vendors, you have the people who are actually writing the content and you have people (with) input who clearly think it is important to promote their different causes.
In your presentation earlier, you were talking about what HTML 5 can do as a replacement for Flash.
Von Tetzchner: I think you can do most things with the Web standards today. In some ways, you may say you don't need Flash. On the other hand, I like Adobe--they're a nice company. I hope they flourish and do well, so this is not about killing Flash. I think Flash will be around for a very, very long time, but I think it's natural that Web standards also evolve to be richer. You can then choose whether you'd like to do it through Web standards or whether you'd like to use Flash.
What we definitely don't need is more proprietary technology, that's the main thing. We have Flash. It's there--fine. Let's not get anything more.
Are you talking about Flash becoming more niche?
Von Tetzchner: It's more of a choice of what you like doing.
Where's the line between what Web standards can do and what Flash can do?
Von Tetzchner: You can do everything, I believe, through Web standards--you don't need to use something else. But there might be something where you believe Flash is better; then you choose to use Flash.
When Vodafone announced this month that it was going to launch a cross-platform app store, analysts noted it may be time for a switch back from native widgets to Web-based widgets. Where do you see Web-based widgets working better than native apps and vice versa?
Von Tetzchner: For most things, Web is better. As you're seeing the browser getting more powerful and better at executing, I think you'll find that someone can maybe code a more efficient piece of code in machine language than they can in a more high-level language. But it becomes very difficult, and you need a really good programmer to make the most of it.
The benefits of doing it Web-based are just so much bigger, especially the fact that you can get something that runs across all the different platforms. Now, if you really, really want to make the most of the device, and you need to code at the lowest, lowest level, then nothing beats native, right? But it will mean that (the application) will only run on that device, and it's not very portable. So it's not a scalable model, which is why everything has moved to the web on the PC.
Palm has said its new WebOS widgets will be built on Web standards such as JavaScript, HTML and CSS, but will run natively. Is it doing it the right way?
Von Tetzchner: I need to look closer at it. It is a question of how pure it is. As soon as you start doing a combination of native and Web, it becomes difficult. This is why it's important to standardize on those elements as well, because if you do a combination of Web and native and you end up having something that is proprietary, you lose the benefit of the portability.
You can implement Web solutions incorrectly. You will have a time--and this is not about Palm; they may be doing it right--where we will see a little bit of fragmentation. We're already seeing that with the iPhone and the like. I think people will move towards the center point again, because the benefits are just too big. You want to reach everyone. The iPhone may be cool, but if it's one or two percent of the market, that still leaves a lot of people that you're not reaching.
This story was originally posted on ZDNet UK.
The sad fact is that it is always going to be the big-money bigshots that get all the attention and all the media coverage when it comes to web implementations. As Von Tetzchner says, it's all about lock-in, and the big-money players like Microsoft, Apple and Adobe aren't about to give up on their respective efforts to lock us all into their proprietary products/APIs/implementations as long as they see a potential competitive advantage in doing so.
http://twitter.com/pixlr/status/1859929280
Native browser video support is also coming, eliminating another reason to use Flash. Using Flash for video playback is more cumbersome due to the need to convert to a Flash format before playback.
Ironic since it was Tim who first punched the big hole in standards by insisting on homegrown HTML and a self-run consortia back when such things actually mattered. It is always the case that standards are always made better by adding a little local secret sauce to make up for the 'glacial pace of standards organizations', or at least, that will be the story until the shoe shifts feet. It worked for Tim and company back when ISO was The Establishment and they were the upstarts. Now it is the W3C's time to be the whipping boy as WHAT demonstrated.
I sincerely doubt Adobe is worrying about HTML5 yet. The joy of having full control over the codebase is that it takes very little time and people to add an extra feature that is 'got to have'.
Standards only matter when they apply to the other guy's product and your guys have to use it. I'm for standards. I'm dubious when dismissing Microsoft from the browser competition, incentivizing insurrections (see ODF) and insisting on starting the conversation by marginalizing the incumbent (say Adobe) are the opening moves. It devolves to Spy vs Spy fast and what we get is the very fragmentation mentioned.
The web is meant to be fragmented. OTW, it would die.
Re: some corporate "secret sauce" - there's nothing wrong with contributing your proprietary technology to a standard, and in some cases even protecting your IP somewhat. However you cross the line when you start expecting the whole world to pay you a license-fee to use an "open standard", or in the case of Adobe/Microsoft/etc, expecting to foist a completely closed, undocumented API on the world that you have SOLE control over, that no one has any input on, no one can see the code, no one can write an alternate implementation, etc.
I don't have to explain what things would have been like if we had 5 different competing wireless networking protocols. Many companies contribute "secret sauce" to open-standards without expecting lock-in and royalties on every user. Netscape for example developed javascript (now immortalized as ECMAscript) and SSL, but isn't making a royalty from every browser user out there. Etc.
- by Efrow May 26, 2009 9:53 AM PDT
- Go Opera!!! I've been using it since 3.6 and it's still the best choice for me. No other browser does mouse shortcuts better.
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