The Future of Mozilla Matters
What does a microformat-aware web browser look like? Richard MacManus has some of the answers, summarizing this presentation made by Alex Faaborg at the Web 2.0 Expo event a couple of weeks back. Cool, eh?
Interesting, but this use of microformats in the browser is only a small fraction of the overall story in the future of the 'interesting' web. The web's possibilities, the web's multiple possible futures and the role the browser has to play in the future of the dynamic web moving forward isn't entirely clear today (the web's future is always somewhat hazy - it's what makes it interesting). There are many paths we could go down, some better than others.
To this point, Richard also points to Chris Messina's vlog post, where Chris shares his thoughts and concerns regarding Mozilla's future, in particular proprietary web tech trends / stacks such as Silverlight, Apollo and the more recently announced JavaFX by Sun - each offering is essentially acting as an alternative to AJAX.
Chris also discusses Mozilla the platform and not Mozilla the browser (see Ryan Stewart's reaction here and Anne Zalenka's thoughts here on this topic), XUL in Mozilla, the spreadfirefox effort, HTML5, Mozilla as a platform (again), the civicforge idea, XForms, HTML5 (again), XHTML2.0, microformats and Mozilla's leadership role with these technologies amongst the web dev community, IE's progress, mobile browsers - minimo vs. webkit, openid and more.
The video provides a great insight into how a key Mozilla community member sees the future of Mozilla as a product platform and the role Mozilla has to play in defining the future of the web. It is also a fairly frank assessment of Mozilla's progress and role the Mozilla community has in its future. Thanks for recording and sharing this Chris, I learnt a lot here.