By glazou on Monday 8 February 2016, 10:52 - Mozilla - Permalink

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the native class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” -- Android and iOS, blatantly stolen from Warren Buffet

Firefox OS tried to bring Web apps to the mobile world and it failed. It has been brain dead - for phones - for three days and the tubes preserving its life will be turned off in May 2016. I don't believe at all myself in the IoT space being a savior for Mozilla. There are better and older competitors in that space, companies or projects that bring smaller, faster, cleaner software architectures to IoT where footprint and performance are an even more important issue than in the mobile space. Yes, this is a very fragmented market; no, I'm not sure FirefoxOS can address it and reach the critical mass. In short, I don't believe in it at all.

Maybe it's time to discuss a little bit a curse word here: strategy. What would be a strategy for the near- and long-term future for Mozilla? Of course, what's below remains entirely my own view and I'm sure some readers will find it pure delirium. I don't really mind.

To do that, let's look a little bit at what Mozilla has in hands, and let's confront that and the conclusion drawn from the previous lines: native apps have won, at least for the time being.

Brains! So many hyper-talented brains at Mozilla!

Both desktop and mobile knowledge

An excellent, but officially unmaintained, runtime

Extremely high expertise on Web Standards and implementation of Web Standards

Extremely high expertise on JS

asm.js

Gaia, that implements a partial GUI stack from html but limited to mobile

We also need to take a look at Mozilla's past. This is not an easy nor pleasant inventory to make but I think it must be done here and to do it, we need to go back as far in time as the Netscape era.

Technology Year(s) Result Anya 2003 AOL (Netscape's parent company) did not want of Anya, a remote browser moving most of the CPU constraints to the server, and it died despite of being open-sourced by its author. At the same time, Opera successfully launched Opera Mini and eventually acquired its SkyFire competitor. Opera Mini has been a very successful product on legacy phones and even smartphones in areas with poor mobile connectivity. XUL 2003- Netscape - and later Mozilla - did not see any interest in bringing XUL to Standards committees. When competitors eventually moved to XML-based languages for UI, they adopted solutions (XAML, Flex, ...) that were not interoperable with it. Operating System 2003- A linux+Gecko Operating System is not a new idea. It was already discussed back in 2003 - yes, 2003 - at Netscape and was too often met with laughter. It was mentioned again multiple times between 2003 and 2011, without any apparent success. Embedding 2004- Embedding has always been a poor parent in Gecko's family. Officially dropped loooong ago, it drove embedders to WebKit and then Blink. At the time embedding should have been improved, the focus was solely on Firefox for desktop. If I completely understand the rationale behind a focus on Firefox for desktop at that time, the consequences of abandoning Embedding have been seriously underestimated. Editing 2005- Back in 2004/2005, it was clear Gecko had the best in-browser core editor on the market. Former Netscape editor peers working on Dreamweaver compared mozilla/editor and what Macromedia/Adobe had in hands. The comparison was vastly in favor of Mozilla. It was also easy to predict the aging Dreamweaver would soon need a replacement for its editor core. But editing was considered as non-essential at that time, more a burden than an asset, and no workforce was permanently assigned to it. Developer tools 2005 In 2005, Mozilla was so completely mistaken on Developer Tools, a powerful attractor for early adopters and Web Agencies, that it wanted to get rid of the error console. At the same moment, the community was calling for more developer tools. Runtime 2003- XULRunner has been quite successful for such a complex technology. Some rather big companies believed enough in it to implement apps that, even if you don't know their name, are still everywhere. As an example, here's at least one very large automotive group in Europe, a world-wide known brand, that uses XULRunner in all its test environments for car engines. That means all garages dealing with that brand use a XULRunner-fueled box...

But unfortunately, XULrunner was never considered as essential, up to the point its name is still a codename. For some time, the focus was instead given to GRE, a shared runtime that was doomed to fail from the very first minute.

Update: XULRunner just died...

Asian market 2005 While the Asian market was exploding, Gecko was missing a major feature: vertical writing. It prevented Asian embedders from considering Gecko as the potential rendering engine to embed in Ebook reading systems. It also closed access to the Asian market for many other usages. But vertical writing did not become an issue to fix for Mozilla until 2015. Thunderbird 2007 Despite of growing adoption of Thunderbird in governmental organizations and some large companies, Mozilla decided to spin off Thunderbird into a Mail Corporation because it was unable to get a revenue stream from it. MailCo was eventually merged back with Mozilla and Thunderbird is again in 2015/2016 in limbos at Mozilla. Client Customization Kit 2003- Let's be clear, the CCK has never been seen as a useful or interesting project. Maintained only by the incredible will and talent of a single external contributor, many corporations rely on it to release Firefox to their users. Mozilla had no interest in corporate users. Don't we spend only 60% of our daily time at work? E4X 2005-2012 Everyone had high expectations about E4X and and many were ready to switch to E4X to replace painful DOM manipulations. Unfortunately, it never allowed to manipulate DOM elements (BMO bug 270553), making it totally useless. E4X support was deprecated in 2012 and removed after Firefox 17. Prism (WebRunner) 2007-2009 Prism was a webrunner, i.e. a desktop platform to run standalone self-contained web-based apps. Call them widgets if you wish. Prism was abandoned in 2009 and replaced by Mozilla Chromeless that is itself inactive too. Marketplace 2009 Several people called for an improved marketplace where authors could sell add-ons and standalone apps. That required a licensing mechanism and the possibility to blackbox scripting. It was never implemented that way. Browser Ballot 2010 The BrowserChoice.eu thing was a useless battle. If it brought some users to Firefox on the Desktop, the real issue was clearly the lack of browser choice on iOS, world-wide. That issue still stands as of today. Panorama (aka Tab Groups) 2010 When Panorama reached light, some in the mozillian community (including yours truly) said it was bloated, not extensible, not localizable, based on painful code, hard to maintain on the long run and heterogeneous with the rest of Firefox, and it was trying to change the center of gravity of the browser. Mozilla's answer came rather sharply and Panorama was retained. In late 2015, it was announced that Panorama will be retired because it's painful to maintain, is heterogeneous with the rest of Firefox and nobody uses it... Jetpack 2010 Jetpack was a good step on the path towards HTML-based UI but a jQuery-like framework was not seen by the community as what authors needed and it missed a lot of critical things. It never really gained traction despite of being the "official" add-on way. In 2015, Mozilla announced it will implement the WebExtensions global object promoted by Google Chrome and WebExtensions is just a more modern and better integrated JetPack on steroids. It also means being Google's assistant to reach the two implementations' standardization constraint again... Firefox OS 2011 The idea of a linux+Gecko Operating System finally touched ground. 4 years later, the project is dead for mobile. Versioning System 2011 When Mozilla moved to faster releases for Firefox, large corporations having slower deployment processes reacted quite vocally. Mozilla replied it did not care about dinosaurs of the past. More complaints led to ESR releases.

Add-ons 2015 XUL-based add-ons have been one of the largest attractors to Firefox. AdBlock+ alone deserves kudos, but more globally, the power of XUL-based add-ons that could interact with the whole Gecko platform and all of Firefox's UI has been a huge market opener. In 2015/2016, Mozilla plans to ditch XUL-based add-ons without having a real replacement for them, feature-per-feature. Evangelism 2015 While Google and Microsoft have built first-class tech-evangelism teams, Mozilla made all its team flee in less than 18 months. I don't know (I really don't) the reason behind that intense bleeding but I read it as a very strong warning signal. Servo 2016 Servo is the new cool kid on the block. With parallel layout and a brand new architecture, it should allow new frontiers in the mobile world, finally unleashing the power of multicores. But instead of officially increasing the focus on Servo and decreasing the focus on Gecko, Gecko is going to benefit from Servo's rust-based components to extend its life. This is the old sustaining/disruptive paradigm from Clayton Christensen.

(I hope I did not make too many mistakes in the table above. At least, that's my personal recollection of the events. If you think I made a mistake, please let me know and I'll update the article.)

Let's be clear then: Mozilla really succeeded only three times. First, with Firefox on the desktop. Second, enabling the Add-ons ecosystem for Firefox. Third, with its deals with large search engine providers. Most of the other projects and products were eventually ditched for lack of interest, misunderstanding, time-to-market and many other reasons. Mozilla is desperately looking for a fourth major opportunity, and that opportunity can only extend the success of the first one or be entirely different.

The market constraints I see are the following:

Native apps have won

Mozilla's reputation as an embedded solution's provider among manufacturers will probably suffer a bit from Firefox OS for phones' death. BTW, it probably suffers a bit among some employees too...

Given the assets and the skills, I see then only two strategic axes for Moz:

Apple must accept third-party rendering engines even if it's necessary to sue Apple. If native apps have won, Web technologies remain the most widely adopted technologies by developers of all kinds and guess what, that's exactly Mozilla's core knowledge! Let's make native apps from Web technos then.

I won't discuss item 1. I'm not a US lawyer and I'm not even a lawyer. But for item 2, here's my idea:

If asm.js "provides a model closer to C/C++" (quote from asmjs.org's FAQ), it's still not possible to compile asm.js-based JavaScript into native. I suggest to define a subset of ES2015/2016 that can be compiled to native, for instance through c++, C#, obj-C and Java. I suggest to build the corresponding multi-target compiler. Before telling me it's impossible, please look at Haxe. I suggest to extend the html "dialect" Gaia implements to cross-platform native UI and submit it immediately to Standard bodies. Think Qt's ubiquity. The idea is not to show native-like (or even native) UI inside a browser window... The idea is to directly generate browser-less native UI from a html-based UI language, CSS and JS that can deal with all platform's UI elements. System menus, dock, icons, windows, popups, notifications, drawers, trees, buttons, whatever. Even if compiled, the UI should be DOM-modifyable just like XUL is today. WebComponents are ugly, and Google-centric. So many people think that and so few dare saying it... Implementing them in Gecko acknowledges the power of Gmail and other Google tools but WebComponents remain ugly and make Mozilla a follower. I understand why Firefox needs it. But for my purpose, a simpler and certainly cleaner way to componentize and compile (see item 1) the behaviours of these components to native would be better. Build a cross-platform cross-device html+CSS+JS-based compiler to native apps from the above. Should be dead simple to install and use. A newbie should be able to get a native "Hello World!" native app in minutes from a trivial html document. When a browser's included in the UI, make Gecko (or Servo) the default choice. Have a build farm where such html+CSS+JS are built for all platforms. Sell that service. Mozilla already knows pretty well how to do build farms.

That plan addresses:

Runtime requests

Embedding would become almost trivial, and far easier than Chromium Embedded Framework anyway... That will be a huge market opener.

XUL-less future for Firefox on Desktop and possibly even Thunderbird

XUL-less future for add-ons

unique source for web-based app and native app, whatever the platform and the device

far greater performance on mobile

A more powerful basis for Gaia's future

JavaScript is currently always readable through a few tools, from the Console to the JS debugger and app authors don't want that.

a very powerful basis for Gaming, from html and script

More market share for Gecko and/or Servo

New revenue stream.

There are no real competitors here. All other players in that field use a runtime that does not completely compile script to native, or are not based on Web Standards, or they're not really ubiquitous.

I wish the next-generation native source editor, the next-gen native Skype app, the next-gen native text processor, the next-gen native online and offline twitter client, the next native Faecbook app, the next native video or 3D scene editor, etc. could be written in html+CSS+ECMAScript and compiled to native and if they embed a browser, let be it a Mozilla browser if that's allowed by the platform.

As I wrote at the top of this post, you may find the above unfeasible, dead stupid, crazy, arrogant, expensive, whatever. Fine by me. Yes, as a strategy document, that's rather light w/o figures, market studies, cost studies, and so on. Absolutely, totally agreed. Only allow me to think out loud, and please do the same. I do because I care.

Updates:

E4X added

update on Jetpack, based on feedback from Laurent Jouanneau

update on Versioning and ESR, based on feedback from Fabrice Desré (see comments below)

XULrunner has died...

Clarification: I'm not proposing to do semi-"compilation" of html à la Apache Cordova. I suggest to turn a well chosen subset of ES2015 into really native app and that's entirely different.