A reporter recently asked me the following questions: “Many people think that Google Chrome could kill the innovation into the browser field. Does it mean game over? How is the internet user experience is going to change? Will there will be another browser war?”

As I get asked questions like this frequently, here’s my answer:

Mozilla’s mission—to ensue that the Internet is a global public resource that remains open and accessible—is enhanced by the release of Google Chrome. The more smart people are thinking about how to improve the open Web, the more innovation we’ll see. Expect the speed at which the web is improved to accelerate dramatically, not die away.

Competition is a cross-pollinator for ideas. In 2007, Mozilla Labs launched Prism, which lets users split web applications out of their browser and run them directly on their desktop. This feature made it’s way to Chrome and is slated for Safari 4. Chrome made significant advances in Javascript performance with V8, which will be leaped frogged in Firefox 3.1 by Tracemonkey. Competition is fundamentally good for the Web and for its users.

The next couple years will be a fruitful time for cross-the-board improvements. A couple things that the community has got brewing in Labs:

Weave

For the Touch Generation that’s never lived without the internet, having a continuity across all devices is key. You should be able to look at restaurant reviews on your computer, head out the door while continuing to make a reservation on your phone, and have your car automatically have that entered in your GPS. That’s the kind of experience that the Lab’s project Weave enables. Expect to see some exciting news on this front for Fennec 1.0 (i.e., Firefox Mobile).

Ubiquity

As the browser becomes smarter, it will be able to connect the Web with language. Ubiquity is an experiment in finding new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily. The web will move to empower users to being controlled naturally: With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.

When the browser understands who your friends are, and what your preferences are (all, of course, without having to tell your browser explicitly), all of the tedious parts of getting to information go away. What’s left is the core of the activity. You’ll be able to say things like “get me a flight on Thursday to Toronto, returning next Tuesday and email the itinerary to the Toronto office” and the browser will be able to present you with options, sorted by personalized metrics based on previous trips.

Ubiquity is an early prototype, but already people understand where it’s going and why connected the web with language is so powerful. We’ve had over a thousand commands written in a few short days — commands that fundamentally enhance the browser and the browsing experience. Imagine what’s possible when it becomes possible for millions of people to innovate on the browser level.

That level of innovation in community is unique to Mozilla.

This is a guest blog from Grant Jones.

In the Algorithm Ink blog post, I mentioned that I’d be interested to see if a Flash implementation of ContextFree.js would be faster than the pure Javascript, and if so, how much faster. Would an implementation of the Canvas API done in Flash make a better solution for Canvas in IE than Google’s excanvas? Within days, Grant had jumped in, wrote some slick code, and answered those questions!

My hat is off to Grant for the awesome work he’s done, as well as for writing this post.

Intro to Internet Explorer Canvas-Emulation

Before we go into the current state of Internet Explorer canvas-emulation, here’s a brief look back at the history – or the history as far as I could tell from blog posts:

1. Manish Jethani mentions something about the canvas tag being used for a 3D game, John Dowdell from adobe responds in Nov. 2005
2. Manish Jethani suggests a way to do a SWF-based Canvas on Dec 1st, 2005
3. iecanvas from Emil A Eklund released December, 2005 (uses VML)
4. excanvas from Google released March, 2006 (uses VML)
5. AFLAX (uses ExternalInterface) adds canvas emulation in March 2006

Overall, interest in this area seems to die off after that. Only recently with things like Processing.js and ContextFree.js has there been a renewed interested in backwards compatibility for the canvas tag.

What is FlashCanvas?

FlashCanvas is a canvas tag to flash bridge for browsers which do not support the canvas tag like Internet Explorer. FlashCanvas is an experiment to see if any performance improvement could be realized by using flash technology. The javascript code is a fork of the ExplorerCanvas project:

Firefox, Safari and Opera 9 support the canvas tag to allow 2D command-based drawing. ExplorerCanvas brings the same functionality to Internet Explorer. To use, web developers only need to include a single script tag in their existing web pages.

Back in July I was using the canvas element to create simple ‘platformer’ style games. The original idea was to create one basic game every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The first few were Flash-based but the rest were done in javascript and HTML. The problem is that Internet Explorer still has a major percentage of the market share and couldn’t play my games. I tried excanvas from Google, found it was too slow, and in the grand tradition of rolling-my-own created FlashCanvas. (more…)