Standblog

As always on this blog, this article does not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.

In the light of the recent Google announcements about Chrome, Chrome OS and the Web App Store, I am getting questions from people around me and from reporters. Many people seem to forget how Google and Mozilla differ. While both of us- like Apple and Microsoft - are browser vendors who care a lot about speed and security, Mozilla is different by nature. Mozilla is a non-profit, mission-driven organization who cares about the health of the Open Web. I recognize that this may be hard to understand, as it's not very concrete. So let's see in very concrete ways how the Mozilla approach differs from the other browser vendors, who are all commercial ventures^[1]

An App Store for the Open Web, not for a specific browser

Mozilla has recently announced a Prototype of an Open Web App Ecosystem. Let's see how this differs from Google's announcement on a similar topic.

In Mozilla's approach, Open Web Apps:

• work in all modern Web browsers
• Support portable purchases: An app purchased for one browser works in other browsers, and across multiple desktop and mobile platforms without repurchase
• Can be distributed by developers directly to users without any gatekeeper, and distributed through multiple stores, allowing stores to compete on customer service, price, policies, app discoverability, ratings, reviews and other attributes.

Fore more details, go read Pascal Finette's recent post: Building the Open Web App Ecosystem.

On the other hand, Google's App Store requires Chrome and centralized, two things that differ from the principles of the Open Web (choice of browsers and services to use)^[2].

Getting a personalized experience without losing your privacy or control over your data

The promise of the cloud is that our data is accessible from anywhere. Like many other people, I love this idea! Now it does not necessarily mean that everything has to be stored centrally. As an individual, I want my data to stay private and not data-mined, while enjoying the benefits of the cloud.

Firefox Sync is one of these services. Built into Firefox 4 for both mobile and desktop and available as an extension for Firefox 3.6, it enables people to store their browsing history on a server so that they can access history, passwords, bookmarks and even open tabs across all his/her devices.

Mozilla understand that people expect things to work right out of the box, so we offer a server to host people's data in order to make their life easier.

• User data, when hosted by Mozilla, is encrypted on the client side, so it cannot be data-mined by Mozilla (what Mozilla hosts is encrypted data that cannot be analyzed).
• Users - should they want to - can run their own server: the protocol is public and extensible, the code is free and open (for both client and server).

Some other browser vendors offer similar services, but you cannot run them on your own server and data is not encrypted.

Conclusion

All Browsers are making significant progress in terms of performance and some of them also offer more when it in terms of security and standards support. But when it comes to choosing which browser you are going to use, one should consider the reasons of the organization who's producing it, and how it relates to keeping the Web Open and user data private.

The holiday season is upon us, which means that the Mozilla team is hard at work preparing our participation to FOSDEM! For those who live on a different planet (or just a continent other than Europe), FOSDEM is the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting. The event is as nice as it's a mouthful, and Mozilla has been participating to it since almost forever. I think my first FOSDEM was in 2002, but other European Mozillians were there the year before, while it was called OSDEM. Mozilla started having a developer room officially in 2003.

FOSDEM entrance

So Mozilla will be at FOSDEM once again, for its 2011 edition, but in a slightly different format. Both FOSDEM and Mozilla have grown very significantly over the years, and we have increasingly been facing the following issues:

1. It's becoming harder to accommodate the needs of the Mozillians with the resources of the FOSDEM team. We've been struggling with the size of the room, despite the huge efforts by the FOSDEM organizers to help.
2. To be more productive, we need several rooms, but we don't want to steal them from other FLOSS projects
3. Participating Mozillians have been facing a dilemma: either participating to the Mozilla dev room or attending the sessions led by other projects.
4. Since the schedule is pretty packed, it's hard to make it appealing to contributors from other projects.

In order to solve these issues, we have decided to change the way Mozilla participates to FOSDEM. We'll still have a dev room, but the goal is to use it as an opportunity to engage with participants to the other FLOSS projects, while using the future Mozilla Camps Europe (like Barcelona and Prague?) and other local community events for the Mozilla communities to gather.

To this end, we are going to invest more in upcoming Mozilla contributor events and less in FOSDEM. We will only sponsor Mozillians giving talks at FOSDEM this year, as opposed to sponsoring all Mozillians like in previous years. This will enable us to focus our energy and financial resources on improving future Mozilla contributor events and ensuring that more of our contributors can participate in more events.

Those who want to give a talk in the Dev Room this year should get in touch with Brian King like every year before Friday, 15th January 2011 at: brian at mozdev dot org.

Should you have questions, please connect with William (william at mozilla dot com) - who has just posted on his blog too - or myself!

• How Facebook Connect Freaks Me Out. Ce qui est dangereux, c'est qu'on s'habitue à ce genre de message, et on autorise sans lire et sans comprendre. ;
• What's wrong with proprietary IM (ICQ, AIM, YIM, MSN/WLM) ;
• L'Europe ouvre une enquête contre Google pour "des soupçons d'abus de position dominante dans la recherche en ligne et la publicité" ;
• «La vie privée, un problème de vieux cons?», un livre sur la société de surveillance et ses remèdes, avec ce soir une conférence animée par Thierry Noisette et à laquelle participera Jean-Marc Manach, cofondateur des Big Brother Awards ;
• The erosion of privacy ;
• Who will win the battle for control of the web? J'espère bien que personne ne va gagner la bataille du Web. Ni Apple, ni Google, ni Facebook, ni Adobe...
• Mobile OS usage splits the world (chart), avec un joli graphique d'utilisation du Web depuis un mobile, qui partage le monde en deux parties : l'occident (plus Australie et Nouvelle Zélande) qui utilise iOS d'Apple d'un coté, et le reste du mond e de l'autre, qui est encore sous Symbian. Android est en forte croissance en terme de vente d'unités comme je l'indiquais récemment, et devrait donc logiquement passer devant BlackBerry et iOS prochainement ;
• Résultats du sondages developpeurs Web sur Hacks.mozilla.com ;
• Le plus puissant des ordinateurs européens tourne sous GNU/Linux (en l'occurence Red Hat) ;
• Il y a quelques semaines, Mozilla annonçait Open Web Apps. Voici une mise à jour : Open Web Apps – An Update ;
• Hands-on: a first look at Diaspora's private alpha test ;
• je serai présent à Digital 4 Change, avec des tas de gens biens, dont Mitchell Baker (Mozilla), Muhammad Yunus (prix Nobel de la paix) et Martin Hirsch.
• Une nouvelle vidéo sur le progrès sur ces 200 dernières années : Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes ;