Open Letter to Mozilla: Put up or Shut up

I have been using Firefox since it was Phoenix 0.1. It was the best browser then, and it is the best browser now. The first computer language that I ever learned was HTML, and I learned it largely by hitting "View Source". Without it, who knows if I would be a programmer today?

Today, though, the world is a different one than it was back in 1998 when I was plunking around with HTML. Broadband has (finally!) gotten widespread adoption, and with it the web has gotten past animated rollover effects. Youtube serves millions of crappy videos per year, pandora.com sends millions of bits worth of music over the wire every day, and you can head over to espn.com and check out the highlight's of tonight's Red Sox - Yankees game.

And do you notice something that all three of those sites have in common? All of them use Flash to serve their content. So, while I'm not a big fan of people developing in a closed environment that costs ungodly amounts of money to develop in, and leaves *nix developers in the dark, I'm a bigger fan of innovative products and services continuing to crop up on the internet.

Mozilla, information may want to be free, but it won't be if it can't outcompete the closed kind. You are in a unique position to make that happen, but you're falling behind. We all know about Java applets, and Flash has been around for a while, but with the release of Silverlight and Apollo, the web is threatening to sneak away from us. It's awfully tempting that one lets me write rich web interfaces in my favorite language, and the other lets me bring my applications offline.

So while it's all well and good to post about the high cost of free tools, and talk about how important Freedom is, you need to bring us a viable alternative. Give me the tools to write a file upload box that doesn't suck; Give me the tools to show my users video and audio; Give me the tools to put the closed-source developers to shame. Maybe someday SVG won't suck, or <canvas> will be a viable answer to flash.

If that day doesn't come soon, it may come too late.

Update: jerf at reddit takes a slightly different angle, but says some things that I think but that I failed to get across.