KEY POINTS:
Another successful Webstock internet talkfest took place in Wellington yesterday.
Aucklander Robert O'Callahan, who as a contractor to the Mozilla Corporation has been working on some of the new features that will be built into the upcoming Firefox 3.0 web browser, gave an interesting presentation on where browser development is going.
O'Callahan demoed some new Firefox features, such as the updated Gecko rendering engine and offline web browsing functionality that will be available in Firefox 3.0, but he used the bulk of his presentation to explain the philosophy around open source web development.
O'Callahan seems wary of the growing focus in web content development on Adobe's Flash player. That's because Flash and its new rival, Microsoft-developed Silverlight, operate on a different model to the web tools the open source community comes up with. They're essentially privately owned and controlled.
"We want to avoid people getting a monopoly on web clients. If you can control who can render web content, you control the platform," says O'Callahan, who has contributed to Mozilla since 1999.
He believes there's plenty of life left in HTML, the standard language of the web and that focus should be put on fixing the bugs in existing web pages and doing smarter things with HTML than trying to "supercede the web with shiny new design".
"You can add things to HTML that are harder to do if you don't control the platform," he added.
O'Callahan believes the dominant browser vendor, Microsoft "isn't so interested in the web at the moment ".
"We have to unseat their dominance and gain market share with browsers interested in pursuing our mission," says O'Callahan.
The mission of course is to keep development of the web open so that no one company or technology can control its evolution. O'Callahan seems pretty ambivalent about Apple's move to release its Safari web browser for Windows computers.
"We'd like Safari to take all of Internet Explorer's market share and none of ours," he says.
"I wouldn't trust Apple any more than Microsoft necessarily if they got the monopoly."
O'Callahan said developing open source alternatives to more sophisticated web tools was essential to keep browsers like Firefox competitive. One set of functionality that's viewed as being particularly important is offline browser capability.
The idea is that when you type a URL into the web address bar when you're not connected to the internet, the browser will search local storage for a cached copy of the page and allow a certain amount of functionality and data back-up. When you go back online, the local version of the application syncs with the version stored on the web and updates it.
"It's similar to cookies, but with more grunt and more storage," says O'Callahan. Google has developed similar technology to allow its applications to be used offline with the open source development tools, Google Gears.
New Zealand's association with the Firefox browser, which has rapidly gained market share at the expense of Microsoft's dominant internet Explore browser, is very strong. Ben Goodger, a lead Firefox developer who also works for Google is a kiwi and O'Callahan said there are three paid Firefox developers based in Auckland, with scope for the team to be expanded if people with the right skills can be found.
O'Callahan's blog can be found here.
