Andreas is currently working on various development of web technology

including the mobile operation system solution: Boot to Gecko

his topic is "Gaia: A modern smartphone user interface in HTML5 and JavaScript"

Let's welcome him

All right, um, sorry for the technical problems there

so let's get it started

OK. My name is Andreas Gal

I work for Mozilla, and I am the director of research and development

and my group is a bunch of different researchy and development projects from Mozilla

So basically the goal of my group is to identify things you can not do as the web

and find out why unit can not do that and then gonna fix that

and I want a year ago, we decided to find out why mobile phones or cell phones were in general mobile devices

are not really built as a web

If you look as the desktop, almost everything in desktop happens as the web

It's very rare these days that people make software for windows 32 APIs

Everything is delivered as the web and for some reason phones and mobile devices work very differently

so we.. we just set out to find out why

and as a part of that, we started to build a project called Boot to Gecko, that's what we'll talk about today

and let's start with some motivation and explain to you

why I think that it's so strange that we have Android and iOS

and why I think it doesn't even make any sense to me

those things should not be around when we usually have the web

so let's talk about that a little bit

so first of all, I am not sure how many of you know Mozilla

we have a very interesting history

so Mozilla is a non-profit entity

we are very distributed and global

we are in many different countries

amongst others we're in taiwan

and the main thing you people know us is from Firefox

it's the web browser product we are making

and the slide we have made we have more than 450 million users

I think now it's close to 500 million

and we are localized in lot of languages

and there are, mozilla foundation

which is the nonprofit entity

that really is mozilla, actually it also owns a company, the mozilla corporation

and that company has over 650 employees

again this slide is a little out of date. I think by now we have 700 employees

and we have subsidiaries in 15 different countries

ant this is just the core of mozilla, this is basically the mozilla foundation itself

and a bunch of people that mozilla foundation employs to implement firefox

but around that there's such a large community of people

so these thousands of people who actually help us to develop firefox

and there are couple of people who are in this room as well who have contributed to firefox

and in addition to that, to the, in addition to the actual core of firefox that people build the browser itself

there is also very large community of building add-ons

so we have more than 40000 add-ons people built, these are things that you can build to customize the browser with, and

you can build small than code snippets that make your browser behave as certain way that you would like

so we don't do all the customization ourselves

we don't have to be a browser with everything that you want to do

but we do as the platform for you, that you can go and customize the way you like

and much of that is done in javascript as all

so that's a very popular way of extending firefox

and that is also being built by thousands of contributers

now, mozilla's history goes back more than 10 years ago

so more than 10 years ago, there was a company called Netscape that made, uh, pretty much of the first commercially successful browser

and netscape's business model was, they were making a browser as a closed-source proprietary software product

and there were giving it out for free for people to use

and how the web really started growing

suddenly the web soon substituted the FTP and telnet, which are really boring race to attack as the web

they came just like lively things you can touch and colors, and

that's actually interesting. So netscape gives their browser away for free, if we are private user, but they charge money if you're a company

and, um, there's rapid development beginning after microsoft decided to make a browser as well

and at that point this entire model started working because microsoft made a browser as well, it was also closed-source

microsoft made it, and microsoft gave you the binary

but then microsoft gave away the browser completely for free, that was internet explorer

and this of course, is very difficult for netcape, because netscape was deriving its money from selling netscape

the Navigator browser

and microsoft did not need the money from IE, they just really making money on windows

so very quickly, netscape disappeared from the market place in the background of all this

and as netscape was kind of dying, the one of the last dying acts of netscape was create the mozilla foundation

and there was a very interesting rationale behind that

netscape observed that you can't really compete on the web, making a web browser

until the web is really open, and completely based on open standards

so when netscape ran into, the, the microsoft very quickly started to get a little market share

and microsoft started expanding the web as microsoft-only technology

a very famous example for that is ActiveX, who in here has ever heard something like ActiveX

so actually here in asia it's still even used a little bit more than it's used than other parts of the world

and that's a horrible piece of microsoft technology, it's completely non-standard, only mocrosoft can implement it

so this is actually often a problem still to this day, for firefox in some asian markets

and pretty good in mainland china, where ActiveX are still being used, because we can't implement it

nobody knows how it works. Only microsoft knows how it works

so based on those observations that netscape made 10 years ago, has ever kinda like dying, and

they realized that they have to make sure that the web is open

and that, everything is implemented within open standards

because only them can others implement the same standards

and this led to this core mission, of mozilla, that we wanna get people choice

so mozilla makes firefox so that's very likely when we use firefox

but firefox's even more important for us is that you have choice

you can decide what you want to use, you don't have to use internet explorer

there's couple of options for you

so this is the history of mozilla, and mozilla in couple of years, it turned the area with a very strong success

so now our 30% of people using the web are using firefox browser

and in many countries, we are the #1 browser amongst others, in european countries

now, compare the web today, it's more than it was 10 years ago when its journey started

so I am not sure how many of you here have used the really old version of internet explorer, alright, the IE6

that was really a miserable experience

the web really sucked, like that

you could barely look at documents, and everything was slow, and it was crashing all the time

and the browser has very few capabilities

you could display a document, kind of sort of, and you could render some fonts

but all the cool stuffs that it's part of web today, you can't do with IE

and, it's a bit of obvious why you couldn't do that, because

first of all, microsoft was the only party that could implement many of these standards in IE6 such as ActiveX

and also there was no competition there was basically only IE

98% of people have done when IE6 came out, they were all using internet explorer

so microsoft, and it wasn't a new pressure to really make the web better because people are using it epidemic

so compare that today, today everything is really really different

so today, most that pages that you go to are based on open standards

there is very little activex used in most parts of the world for example

and there's no longer just one browser, internet explorer

there's many many browsers now so there's firefox obviously which we make

but there's also chrome, and safari, and there's opera which is little more popular in europe than here

but then, also actually there's IE, IE's back

IE is in new version 9, and that browser is much much better than IE6

so even microsoft suddenly had to go back and provide a good browser

which have for many years then you'll feel it's neccessary

so how did this happen? how did we get from a really crappy web to awesome web as many browsers

so mozilla actually have a very big part in that

this cuz all back to our missions. So our mission is to make sure you can choose

you can decide which browser to use and ideally, you'd really like it when you choose firefox

but that's kind of like our secondary goal

the primary goal is to make sure you actually have a choice first of all

and, as how we said, the key thing for all of that is interoperable standards

if it's not based on standards, there's no real choice

because someone like microsoft can go ahead, and implement some other activex thing

and only microsoft knows how to implement that

and it sized how we are using that

that you can only use a microsoft browser to go there

so really the only way to ensure that you can use whichever browser you like as we make sure all the browsers implement the same technology

this of course is really nice for content providers

because if you are creating a web site, and you base everything in open standards

then suddenly, you write your code once

and it runs accross all these different browsers and all these different devices

but there's actually a very nice other effect of this

so do we explain that to you i'm gonna use a little example here

so you see here, su.. rather a blurry screen here

um.. a benchmark graph so in the last 3 or 4 years

the different browser vendors happened in a very vicious performance game

everyone is trying to build the fastest possible browser

why are we doing that

at first of all we want to build the fast browser and for sure

but also, there's competition

the press likes writing about benchmarks

alright then, every time new version of chrome comes out

they wanna benchmark and chrome must be fast here, chrome must be fast there

there firefox is faster and then you read that

and you might decide which browser to use based on which browser is faster

and you won't do to use all browser, you have to go and make a browser faster

so a couple of years ago, and then chrome came out, they really sent a new benchmark, that's called V8

uh, or V8Bench it's actually a really terrible benchmark

so it doesn't really represent what the web does but it doesn't really matter

the press started benchmarking with this benchmark, so chrome was out, and there was a benchmark

we were really slow on it

so on the left side of this it's August 3 (?)

um, oops August 3, um

you could see that, we were really slow

so saf.. um, safari and chrome some webkit thing 2000 3000 milliseconds

we were taking 7000 milliseconds so we were twice as slow as chrome

that's really bad the press's gonna say that wow the firefox is very slow in this benchmark

it didn't really matter much actually in practice like the web wasn't really slow because of the benchmark

but it doesn't really matter

the press was saying we are slower so we're, we're prom(?)

and you can see that vision of very.. short amount of time thing obvious turned on October 8

we besically invested a ton of engineers there were 20 or 30 people working as day and night

to make us fast on the benchmark and we very quickly baught to the point that we are fast as everyone else

so, this is why the web is moving this fast; this is why the web is so cool

because we're, everytime we are slow there we are under pressure to fix that

and this applies everyone else

so everytime we come out as a performance improvement, and we started being faster than chrome, then google has to do this

google has sent a bunch of people and build their browser to make it faster

so there's, there's strong competition between these browser vendors

everyone wants you to use their browser so they all have to make our browsers better

but the nice part is we are not doing that by adding some eh

random, mozilla-specific or microsoft specific stuff

instead we are all implementing the same standard and it's just better

so we're in the competition that is not about who has the strangest activex implementation

that's the most proprietary but who can implement the same open standard the best

so this, this is really great for users because you'll get a really fast browser all of it

that's also very great for developers because we don't really have to target any of these specific browsers

but it's target to any browser and it's gonna be really fast to them

so this is the desktop this is really cool

and this has been a very fantastic evolve

so of the last 10 years, pretty much the reason that you have all these browsers to choose from

is because mozilla of the last 10 years has worked very aggressively on making standards

so most of the standards you know today is HTML5 and many of these W3C standards

then we really did grow in creating those standards

and of course other browser vendors worked for this as well

so we pretty much, the fact we have competition today from safari or chrome