The Mozilla Corporation, the commercial vendor behind the popular Firefox browser, is pushing out a new policy for third-party cookies - a policy that's gotten Internet advertisers in a bit of a snit.

The new cookie policy, announced Feb. 25 on the Mozilla Privacy blog, will accept third-party cookies when a user is surfing the Web only if the user has directly interacted with the site or company trying to install the cookie on the browser's machine. Cookies from other parties served through those sites will not be accepted. 

The benefits of this policy change - for users, at least - are immediately apparent: Instead of collecting a myriad of cookies from random sites' ads as they move through the Web, users will pick up cookies only from the sites they actually visit, explained Alex Fowler, who leads privacy and public policy for Mozilla.

"In my own use of this release this morning, I followed one of my typical browsing paths, starting with a look at surfing conditions, then local news, a major national news site, and a popular site covering the tech industry," Fowler wrote.

Fowler charted out his before-and-after results after applying the patch, and came up with a startling difference: he collected 385 first- and third-party cookies with Firefox using the old default policy that allows all cookies. Using the new default policy, Fowler's browser collected just 75 first-party cookies.

IAB: Cookies Mean Freedom

Of course, not everyone is thrilled by the move. In an open letter to Mozilla, Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) president and CEO Randall Rothenberg took issue with the new policy. And understandably so from his perspective, since the default blocking of third-party cookies in a major Web browser could put a big crimp in potential ad revenue.

But that is not the argument Rothenberg makes. Instead, he somehow casts third-party cookies as user-protection issue:

"If Mozilla follows through on its plan to block all third-party cookies, the disruption will disenfranchise every single internet user," Rothenberg writes. "All of us will lose the freedom to choose our own online experiences; we will lose the opportunity to monitor and protect our privacy; and we will lose the chance to benefit from independent sites like RightWingNews.com LiberalOasis.com, MotherhoodWTF.com, and SuburbanDaddy.com because thousands of small businesses that make up the diversity of content and services online will be forced to close their doors."

One of Rothenberg's arguments, that users will lose the capability to protect their own privacy, has some legs. Referring to the opt-out policy that the Digital Advertising Alliance (which includes the IAB) promotes, Rothenberg points out a potential flaw in Mozilla's plan: once a user opts out of receiving a certain ad, it's third-party cookies that keep that ad from appearing again. Remove the capability to track such cookies, and that unwanted ad will appear again and again, the IAB executive reasons.

Is Choice Removed?

For all of Rothenberg's exhortations about Mozilla clamping down on freedom of choice, though, it is important to remember that Mozilla isn't completely banning third-party cookies in Firefox at all. If a user wants to allow such cookies to be installed on their browser again, they can easily go into Firefox's privacy settings and make the change. The choice is still in the hands of the users.

Even if third-party cookies do provide some positive benefits, there are clearly quite a few negative effects, and for now Mozilla seems to be erring on the side of caution on behalf of Firefox users. Given the track record of how security-ignorant most Web surfer is, that's probably a good approach.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia.

It started with a gecko, of sorts. It then became a fennec, a type of winter fox. Now, it is a smartphone, and soon it will be available all over the world.

We are, of course, talking about Firefox OS, the open source, Web-based smartphone operating system created by Mozilla. The company announced Sunday at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, that it has partnered with device manufacturers and mobile operators across the world to launch Firefox smartphones in 2013. 

Mozilla also officially launched the Firefox Marketplace, an app store featuring mobile Web applications and websites that will be able to operate on the new smartphones. Both the Firefox OS and Marketplace are optimized towards HTML5 development and open Web standards using Mozilla’s Firefox browser as its backbone. 

Mozilla claimed three initial manufacturers ready to build and deploy Firefox OS smartphones: LG, Alcatel and ZTE. These devices will be distributed to 17 global carriers in nine countries, including Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Serbia, Montenegro, Poland, Spain, Hungary and Venezuela. (Note that these are largely developing markets, and the list does not include the United States.) Since the announcement yesterday, Sony has also said that it would build and release Firefox OS smartphones in 2014. On the other hand, market leader Samsung has said that it is not interested in building smartphones for Mozilla (likely due to its investment in the similar Tizen platform).

Mozilla’s Evolution

The seed of Firefox OS came from Mozilla’s first ventures into the mobile browser wars against Android. Mozilla started with its rendering layout engine, Gecko, and applied it to Android as a third-party browser. Initially, the Gecko-boot of Firefox for Android was named Fennec. 

Mozilla then started thinking bigger.

As HTML5 has evolved into the newest open Web standard, Mozilla became a leading developer and evangelist for HTML5 websites and apps. The problem that Mozilla had with smartphones, though, was that it was not possible to tie smartphone hardware capabilities to mobile browsers. If you ever hear of the “Web vs. Native” argument when it comes to apps, the issue of tying Web browsers to smartphone and tablet hardware (like a camera, accelerometer etc.) is central to the issue. Mozilla wanted to fix that and created what it calls Web APIs (application programming interfaces) to access hardware through a browser. 

(See more ReadWrite coverage of HTML5.)

That goal was what ultimately led Mozilla to announce its own smartphones this year at Mobile World Congress. It has dedicated itself to open Web standards and mobile evolution, all in the name of consumer choice. Firefox OS smartphones will be extremely affordable and targeted at emerging smartphone markets where there is still a lot of potential to make a dent in the industry. 

Building The Marketplace

As shown in the rise of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, the name of the game in smartphones is apps. Mozilla plans on leveraging the power of the Web to build out its app store by enabling websites and app developers to create apps for the mobile Web that can easily be integrated into Firefox OS. 

To start, Firefox announced that a variety of content and app partnerships with the likes of AirBnB, Box, Disney Mobile Games, EA Games, Facebook, Pulse News, Sound Cloud, Twitter and others. Mozilla stated that it will have a variety of games, news and media, productivity and business apps.

When it comes to apps built for the likes of iOS, Android, Windows Phone and BlackBerry, many already have a core of HTML5 and Web-based technology powering them. Apps are often built as mobile websites and then “wrapped” with native properties to help them connect to device hardware before being deployed to the various native app stores. Mozilla’s plan is to eliminate that need to “wrap” apps and let developers build straight for the Web. The potential  is that almost any app that will work in browser can easily be deployed to the Firefox Marketplace, reducing the cost for developing and distributing apps.

We will see the first Firefox OS smartphones in developing markets later this year. Does Firefox OS excite you? Let us know what you think of the project in the comments. 

The privacy-obsessed don't seem to think much of Google.

A survey of consumer confidence found Mozilla to be the most trustworthy pure Internet company when it comes to user privacy, the organization eagerly announced. Out of companies generally, Mozilla broke into the top 20 in the study, which was conducted by the Ponemon Institute.

The top 20 includes plenty of other tech firms, including Amazon, eBay, Intuit, IBM, Microsoft, HP and even oft-loathed telecom carriers Verizon and AT&T.

Notably absent? Google.

It's worth noting that this survey is a measure of consumer sentiment, not actual privacy features. Google gets very high ranks from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in its annual Privacy Scorecard, which tracks how major tech companies score on major issues of privacy. Twitter and the ISP Sonic.net topped the EFF's list last year, but Google ranked third thanks to its privacy policies, transparency about user data requests from governments and legal and legislative advocacy on behalf of protecting user privacy.

The EFF doesn't include Mozilla in its Privacy Scorecard and declined to offer an off-the-cuff score for the nonprofit. 

Mozilla vs. Google - Who Can You Really Trust More? 

Mozilla is making a big deal of its ranking, and has been making user privacy a very public priority for some time. Despite questions about its effectiveness, the organization has been proactive in incorporating Do Not Track technology in its browsers. Mozilla espouses a six-point philosophy when it comes to user privacy and generally tends to be transparent about its intentions and activities related to how it shares and protects user data. 

At the same time, Google - which has more complex privacy issues to contend with as a search engine, email provider and major player in mobile computing - has itself been pretty transparent on privacy, doing things like publishing regular transparency reports outlining the growing number of government requests it receives. Google tends to comply with those inquiries, but does so judiciously and has decried the ease with which governments are legally able to snoop on users' electronic communications. 

At the end of the day, both Chrome and Firefox are secure, privacy-friendly browsers - as are their other competitors. But defending privacy for Google is inherently more challenging given the company's enormous size and broad product line. And it appears that Google is not doing a great job of portraying itself as a privacy-friendly organization.

That could be a big problem. Moving forward, such perceptions - even more than objective actions and policies - could be crucial competitive differentiators.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock. 

Top: Keon Bottom: Peak Mozilla is turning its dreams of a smartphone running its own custom-built mobile operating system into a reality. In conjunction with Geeksphone, Mozilla announced two developer preview mobile devices today, dubbed Peak and Keon. Running Mozilla’s Firefox OS, neither of the phones are much to look at from a hardware perspective and are designed to bring the Web back to the forefront of the mobile ecosystem. 

Keon is a low-range hardware option running a 1-GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor with a 3.5-inch screen, a 1580 mAh battery and a 3-megapixel camera. If that sounds basically like an iPhone 3G, well, it's really close to one from a hardware perspective. 

Peak is slightly more powerful. It runs a 1.2 GHz Snapdragon processor with a 4.3-inch screen, 8-MP back and 2-MP front camera with a 1800 mAh battery. This phone would have been very happy at the top of the smartphone market… in 2011.

Keon and Peak do not need to be powerful devices to serve Mozilla’s purposes. Foremost, these are developer preview phones designed to allow publishers to get a sense of how their Web apps will perform on Firefox OS. Second, and most importantly, the way that Firefox OS is designed means the phones do not need to be incredibly powerful to run the operating system or the apps that go with it.

Beyond Native Apps

Firefox OS is of the Web, for the Web. There is no such thing as a “native” app to Firefox OS. If an object exists as a web page, it can easily be turned into an app for Firefox OS by essentially turning it into a shortcut for the browser-based operating system to access. Instead of having to develop specifically for mobile platforms like iOS, Android or Windows Phone, the Web is the platform for Firefox OS. 

Mozilla’s plan for Firefox OS is to target emerging markets that are not already saturated with smartphones. Hence, do not expect Keon or Peak (or their equivalents when official consumer devices become ready likely later this year) to have a major market presence in the United States. Mozilla’s approach is evident by looking at the schedule for its Fire OS App Days developer tour. The events, designed to get developers building Web apps for Firefox OS, only had one stop in the U.S., in Mountain View on Jan. 19. The rest of the tour takes Firefox OS around the world to places like Bogota, Bangalore, Nairobi, Taipei, and Jakarta, as well as cities like Seoul and Rome. 

Mozilla’s next goals with Firefox OS are two-fold: get more developers on board to flesh out the Web app ecosystem and entice smartphone manufacturers to get on board to build and ship the devices. Those goals go hand in hand with each other as the more apps are built for Firefox OS, the more attractive it looks to manufacturers and vice versa. 

If you are a developer, you can build an app for Firefox OS by making some small changes to your website. You can then test the app by downloading the Aurora Marketplace onto your Android or using the browser-based Firefox OS Simulator. 

Developers – are you going to test out Firefox OS on Keon or Peak? Let us know in the comments. 

Apple's stock is taking a beating as analysts and investors are waking up to the very real likelihood that market share matters, and Google's Android is dominating mobile market share with its one-two punch of zero license fees and open source flexibility.  Meanwhile, Microsoft has been attempting to insert itself into the mobile conversation with a slick, Apple-esque Windows Phone 8 strategy, which seems unlikely to work, given that Apple has already claimed the high end and Google has taken the mass-market, commodity middle ground.  What's left for Microsoft?

How about Mozilla's Firefox OS?

No, I'm not insane.  Yes, I know there's a fair amount of history and bad blood between the two organizations.  But Mozilla is building a mobile OS that could prove disruptive enough to carve out a serious chance for Microsoft. 

Firefox OS: (Much) More Than Just A Browser

First things first.  It's a given that for Microsoft, or anyone else, to work with Mozilla, they're going to have to give up any fetish for control.  Mozilla's great gift to the industry, as I've written before, has been to insist on open source and open standards, with no single organization, including Mozilla, dominating the browser market.

But as Samsung has shown with Android, one needn't own an OS to profit from it.  Samsung's operating profit in its fourth quarter rose 89% to hit $8.3 billion.  That's real money that even Apple can't sniff at.

Firefox OS: Sample Screen (Credit: Mozilla)

What, exactly, is Mozilla building? 

Firefox OS is an attempt to make the web a first-class citizen on mobile devices.  In some ways, it's similar to Canonical's aims for Ubuntu Mobile, but it's arguably much more ambitious.  Mozilla wants to eradicate the walled-garden, native app approach popularized by Apple and Google, replacing it with a completely open mobile OS that frees carriers, developers, and users from locked-down app stores.  

To turn this ambition into reality, Mozilla is heavily investing in advancing the state of the art for HTML5 and device APIs. Mozilla isn't blind to the performance hit that web apps have historically faced on mobile.  But as Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich told me in a phone interview, the organization feels confident that it can change this, delivering "60Hz, artifact-free rendering under touch control."

Historically, HTML5 has fizzled when serious graphics or low-bandwidth were involved.  And for those devices without hardware acceleration?  Forget about it.

Which is why Mozilla's approach is so intriguing.  The company isn't going after high-end smartphones, but rather after low-end, emerging market phones.  To accomplish this, Mozilla can't wait around for hardware to get better.  Instead, it needs to make the web stack better - now - such that it can work on even barebones phones, including in areas of limited or no bandwidth.  Mozilla has therefore developed its web apps to be offline from the start, and to use equal-or-less bandwidth than native apps.  

This is groundbreaking stuff, and it appears to be working.

Importantly, it's working not just for Mozilla, but for everyone.  I asked Eich whether Firefox OS development will benefit anyone beyond Mozilla.  His response?  Mozilla is trying to rid the industry of its "end-to-end" mentality, so everything it's building is highly modular.  In particular, its standards work with the W3C requires multiple implementations, and Samsung and others have been picking up Mozilla-developed APIs like its battery status bite-sized API.  Mozilla knows it can't win alone: Mozilla's idea of winning is a highly competitive industry where mobile users and developers are in control.

Mozilla + Microsoft

Which brings us back to Microsoft, and its need to disrupt an industry that has already been disrupted by Google's Android.  It's not going to be enough to ape Apple.  Microsoft needs to do something different.

Microsoft has actually been a big proponent of HTML5, perhaps sensing that it needed to embrace the web in order to compete with Apple.  But I think it needs more than just great support for HTML5.  It needs a clear HTML5 strategy, and that has to be more than ensuring WP8 is a great platform for HTML5 development.  

Why not throw its weight behind Mozilla?  Mozilla has taken on a huge task, one that Microsoft's engineering and financial resources can help to accelerate.  And while Mozilla is unlikely to give any special favors to Microsoft in terms of distribution, the very fact of embracing and distributing Firefox OS would give Microsoft influence in the Firefox OS community.  That's how open source works: being the source of code matters as much or more than owning source code.  

None of which is to suggest that Microsoft attempt to "own" Firefox OS.  Mozilla wouldn't allow that.  Rather, it's a suggestion that Microsoft could both help Firefox OS development and be helped by having a disruptive mobile OS strategy, one that still allows Microsoft plenty of room for profit through mobile advertising, applications, etc.  It's not as if Microsoft has a future of licensing Windows for mobile: no one makes money that way in the mobile OS world. 

An Open Mobile Future

The economics of the web favor its chances in mobile, just as they have on the desktop.  Mozilla is the web's laboratory for the next generation of mobile, and Microsoft and others looking to compete with Android or iOS need to think seriously about working with Mozilla.  Unlike any other player in the industry, its interests are not selfish.  Microsoft and Mozilla may historically have been at odds as Microsoft fought off Mozilla's attempts, ultimately successful, to open up the browser market, but the two organizations are perfectly aligned in wanting and needing the web stack to free up the mobile market.  They should work together.

At the end of 2011, the mobile industry believed that HTML5 was on the cusp of ubiquity. Everybody would be using it to build apps and mobile websites and we would finally see real operating systems based on HTML5 start creeping towards acceptance. HTML5 was to become the dominant development stack, taking the mantle from all those native apps that had come to dominate the iOS App Store and Android’s Google Play. 

What actually happened is that HTML5 more likely took a step back in developer acceptance in 2012. 

Facebook Goes Native, Apple Cripples Webview

Facebook has long been a proponent of HTML5. The social network’s “native” apps on iOS and Android were actually mobile websites “wrapped” to give native fixtures to the apps for Android and iOS (among other platforms). Yet, Facebook eventually came to find that this system was not optimal for the performance of the apps. Yes, using the m.facebook.com mobile website as a base that could be updated multiple times a day made for efficient development cycles, but in reality the apps were slow and buggy and users often complained that Facebook’s native apps were simply not very good.

Facebook decided to change that in 2012. In August the social network relaunched its iOS app to straight native code, improving its performance. More recently, Facebook redid its Android app as native code in December. 

Facebook and its “hacker culture” is, like it or not, a beacon for mobile developers. If Facebook is going native for performance reasons, then others will follow in the footsteps of a company that serves nearly a billion users, over half of them on mobile. 

Apple has some blame in the blowback against HTML5 in 2012, too. The iPhone maker has limited UIWebView in iOS Safari, causing hybrid and Web apps to perform slowly in comparison with native apps. It behooves Apple to limit the functionality of HTML5 and Web-based apps, as its App Store is one of the primary reasons that people buy iPhones and iPads. Mobile Web apps that circumvent the App Store are, in several ways, dangerous to Apple’s bottom line. 

Hybrid The Name Of The Game

Despite Facebook's move to native apps, more and more developers are incorporating at least a little bit of HTML5 into their apps. For instance, the new LinkedIn app released in 2012 was almost entirely HTML5 and Node.js with only a thin native wrapper that made up about 5% of the code. 

According to the fourth quarter survey of mobile developers by Appcelerator and IDC, about 63% of mobile developers are "very interested" in using HTML5 to build their apps. Many developers are building 50% or more of their apps with HTML5 code. Many apps are including some type of Webview into their apps (for instance, see how social news reader Zite lets you read an article on through the browser or in the app). With the app economy exploding, we now see thousands of apps use the hybrid wrapper model to increase the efficiency of building an app and lower the overall development costs. 

One reason for hybrid development is that it is easier for many companies to find developers who are versed in HTML/CSS than it is to find coders who have the specific knowledge on how to create comprehensive native apps in C, Objective-C etc. By working with HTML5 and wrapping apps, companies (that may not necessarily be tech companies per se) can get more length from their developers and hit more devices in one shot.

Dealing With The Problem Of Hardware

The biggest difference between HTML5 mobile Web apps and native apps are that the native variety have quick an easy access to a smartphone’s hardware features. That means functions as simple as the clock, vibrator, gyroscope, storage, camera and power management are much more difficult to implement in pure HTML5 apps. Developers have dealt with this problem in the past through services like PhoneGap or Brightcove’s App Cloud and wrapping Web apps for native purposes (like Facebook used to do). 

Companies are beginning to crack the hardware puzzle for HTML5 apps. Mozilla is on the forefront with its Firefox OS, expected to be shipped on smartphones sometime in 2013. Mozilla has created what it calls Web APIs that will tie its browser-based HTML5 mobile operating system to hardware components like power management and the camera. Sencha and appMobi are also working on ways to bridge the device APIs. As of yet though, progress in this realm was not as robust in 2012 as many expected.

The Responsive Design Revolution

Responsive design saw a boom in 2012. Responsive design is built from a Web technology stack that includes HTML5 and CSS to create websites that respond to a variety of screen sizes by automatically resizing windows to fit a particular screen. The purpose is to build one set of code for a website that allows it to work on multiple devices without having to build separate sites for individual devices or mobile operating systems. 

For instance, take ReadWrite. This year we launched a new website in October that is fully responsive. Check it out. In this story, make the browser window bigger or smaller and you will see the content respond accordingly. Or try zooming the browser view in or out and note the same thing. The same goes for mobile. Read this article in smartphone and note how it perfectly fits your screen. On a tablet, look at it in both landscape and portrait modes and see how it adapts to each set. 

In conjunction with our responsive design relaunch (and subsequent rebranding from ReadWriteWeb to ReadWrite), we ditched out native apps on iOS and Android apps in favor of the simpler, easier to update mobile Web presence. 

We are not alone. BostonGlobe.com rolled out its responsive design site in 2011 and About.com is now fully responsive. The New York Times has built a responsive site and large companies like Microsoft and Apple use responsive design on aspects of their websites. 

The Leaders Are Changing

In 2011, we said that the game developers of the mobile world were taking the lead in HTML5 development. At the time, that seemed true. Yet, the game makers lost interest in HTML5 as a default platform in 2012. True, companies like appMobi are pushing game makers toward HTML5, but most of the best games of 2012 were built with native code. 

To a certain extent, the leaders in HTML5 adoption are now media companies and news organizations. Those in the business of content are more apt to take a Web-centric view of the world. By doing so, they can avoid the 30% tariff from Apple’s App Store, while still optimizing content towards mobile devices. This trend is not precisely tied to HTML5, but the current evolution of the technology stack makes it much easier for media companies to achieve this objective. 

Facebook was seen as the quintessential leader in HTML5 development in 2012. Yet, with its move to native for iOS and Android, it has ceded that role to the community. As such, open source developers spearheaded by the likes of Mozilla are now the leaders that will drive HTML5 for the foreseeable future. 

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

For Mozilla, 2012 was a year to start transitions. The browser maker started its biggest transition since releasing Firefox in 2004 when it started building Firefox OS, a HTML5 Web-based mobile operating system for smartphones.

Mozilla also focused a lot of attention on its Firefox for Android browser as a bit of a proving ground for its fledgling operating system. It has almost everything in place to make a big push in the mobile sector come 2013.

Mozilla calls Firefox OS the operating system “to power the world’s first Open Web Device.” That is an interesting statement. Mozilla is putting together four elements that are not usually thought of in the same breath: open, Web, mobile and operating system.

You can put any two or three of those elements together and make a world of sense. Open + Web is the most obvious, as open standards rule the Internet and are the basis of Firefox itself. Open + mobile could point to (in some ways) Google’s Android operating system or technology stacks like HTML5. Mobile + operating system points to iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, BREW, Tizen, Bada, Palm, Symbian and so on. Even Web + operating System makes a certain amount of sense, if you look at Google’s Chrome OS. 

An open mobile Web-based operating system? That does not exist. 

Chrome OS may be the closest to what Mozilla is trying to build, but as yet it can only be found on laptop and notebook-like PC devices. Tizen, the bastard offspring of MeeGo and supported by the Linux Foundation, may come close. Palm OS, ostensibly supported by Hewlett-Packard, is Web-based and open source, but the poor remnants of Palm are an ill-formed zombie. 

Mozilla’s biggest challenge has been to bridge the capabilities of a mobile browser with the features and functions of a smartphone. Part of that challenge is tying the browser to the hardware features of a smartphone, like the camera or internal storage. To tackle this issue, Mozilla has created what it calls Web APIs (application programming interfaces) to tie the browser to the hardware. To this point, Mozilla has 30 Web APIs that command features like the proximity sensor, phone vibration, push notifications and power management.  

See the infographic below from Mozilla to view progress the company made in both its mobile and desktop browser spaces in 2012. 

A Firefox couple highlights:

• Do Not Track was adopted by 19% of Firefox mobile users and 8.6% of desktop users
• New Firefox is 50% faster with four times less memory used than the previous version
• Firefox added new social APIs including Facebook integration
• 50 billion items were synced through Firefox in 2012

On November 9, 2004, President George W. Bush was still glowing a week after his successful re-election bid and preparing for his second term in the White House. Xbox game Halo 2 had the most successful opening day sales of any video game, topping $125 million. 

And the Mozilla Foundation released the first version of the Firefox browser.

Yes, Firefox turns eight years old today. Begat from the ruins of Netscape and the evolution of the Mozilla Navigator browser, Firefox had a very specific aim: topple the near monopoly of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Beginnings: A Simple Mission

In the beginning, though Mozilla did call its browser "Firefox." The original name (in April 2003) was meant to be Phoenix, but Mozilla ran afoul of Phoenix Technologies, which had a semblance of its own browser at the time. Mozilla then thought it would call the browser "Firebird." but that did not work either, as the Firebird database server already had the name. Firefox was chosen for its similarity to Firebird, but Mozilla then learned that a group in the United Kingdom owned the trademark to Firefox, which delayed the browser's release. Mozilla worked out a licensing agreement and Firefox was born.

What Firefox 1.0 looked like in 2004

Firefox was developed as a branch of the open source Mozilla Suite as a cross-platform browser that would work anywhere. Firefox’s original space within the Suite was known as Navigator - next to other features such as Communicator (Mozilla Mail and Newsgroups), IRC chat (ChatZilla) and a webpage developer (Mozilla Composer). It was developed using XUL markup language, which essentially created the market for browser extensions and themes.

After Firefox 1.0, Mozilla released new versions of the browser about once a year (or so) until 2011, when Mozilla went to the “rapid release” schedule, issuing new versions of Firefox every six weeks or so. Firefox for the Web is now on version 16.2, which was released on Oct. 26, 2012. 

The core goal of Mozilla through Firefox was to create an open source community that gives developers and consumers a choice in how they want to interact with the Web. Firefox continues to meet that goal. 

Firefox was an essential piece in the evolution of the Web. Before there was Google Chrome, before there was iOS Safari, the browser landscape was pretty much Internet Explorer and Firefox. The two diametrically opposed organizations  - a closed system with few choices versus an open system with many choices – have defined, in parallel, the evolution of the Web. 

The Web is a lot different place in 2012 than it was in 2004. Yet that same open/closed dichotomy still defines how the Web evolves.

Firefox In The Mobile Era

Firefox for Android Beta The Mobile Revolution put enormous pressure on organizaions focused specifically on Web browsers. Mozilla looks after many open-source projects, but the bread-and-butter of the non-profit organization has always been Firefox.

As more smartphones reach consumers hands, the less time they spend on the Internet through their PCs and laptops. Smartphones come with default browsers, such as Android’s browser (and Chrome for Android, which will become the default browser for Android in successive releases of the operating system) and Apple’s Mobile Safari. Many other third-party mobile browsers are available (such as Opera and Dolphin) for both iOS and Android, but most smartphone owners stick with the default browser. Unlike the PC world, where installing your preferred browser is one of the first things that people with a new machine, third-party browsers are not yet pervasive on mobile devices. 

That could be because unlike on PCs - where the browser is basically the only way to interact with the Web - the browser is not as central to how mobile users interact with the Internet. Native apps, as found through Apple’s App Store or Android’s Google Play, consume as much time for users as do the default browsers. Whereas I might use Firefox to visit The Huffington Post on my computer, I am more likely to use The Huffington Post app on my tablet or smartphone. 

The native environments inherent to mobile operating systems belie the open principles that Mozilla was founded on. Hence, Firefox finds itself in a position shared by many Web companies in the Mobile Era: evolve or die.

That is easier said than done. Especially if you want to make a significant impact in how people fundamentally interact with the Web through their mobile devices. Third-party mobile browsers are important to the mobile app landscape because they give users choice, but ultimately the likes of Opera, Dolphin, Skyfire or Miren remain niche options for users with specific tastes. 

Sure, Mozilla has released Firefox as a third-party browser for Android. But Mozilla is thinking bigger than just being another third-party browser on some other company’s operating system.

The future of Firefox will be as its own operating system, based on HTML5 and shipped on its own devices. Firefox OS is based on the open source Boot2Gecko project and will be a browser-based mobile operating system built to be optimized towards the Web. ReadWrite has covered Mozilla’s ambitions in mobile extensively in the past. See the stories listed below for context:

• HTML5 Does Have A Mobile Future: Mozilla's Chris Heilmann Goes Mythbusting
• Mozilla Close To Cracking HTML5 Mobile Hardware Integration for Android
• Firefox For Android Reveals The Future Of The Mobile Web
• Mozilla Putting All The Pieces Together To Be A Smartphone Contender
• Mozilla's Plan For Keeping Firefox Relevant In A Post-Browser Web

A look back at eight years of Firefox makes it clear while Mozilla challenges have remained constant, but the context has changed. While Google, Apple and Microsoft try to control the user experience through their (mostly) closed native ecosystems, Mozilla wants to bring the Web back as the central user experience in mobile. The first Firefox OS devices are due to ship sometime in 2013 and will initially be focused on foreign markets, such as Latin America. 

Mozilla is adapting to the evolution of computing, but it remains to be seen if its new plan will be enough to keep Firefox relevant.

Top image: Phoenix version 0.1, Historical browser images courtesy Wikipedia.

2012 may well be remembered as the year when application developers turned against HTML5. Which will be ironic, as HTML5 has evolved more in 2012 than in any other year since it became a reality. But with companies like Facebook dropping HTML5 in favor of native mobile apps, the hype cycle around the standard has turned. Some developers have become disappointed and disillusioned with HTML5. They have come to believe the myths that HTML5 may be, ultimately, untenable.

Chris Heilmann, principle developer evangelist at Mozilla, aims to bust some of the negative myths that have cropped up around HTML5. In a recent blog post, Heilmann gives an impassioned and pragmatic breakdown of the so-called myths surrounding HTML5. He touches on contentious issues of performance, monetization, developer tools and debugging, offline use and capabilities. 

For the most part, Heilmann’s argument is not wrong. His crux is that HTML5 is of the Web and for the Web - and that the Web is everywhere. He leans heavily on the “write once, run everywhere” principle and the problems of “native” apps that are optimized to perform and monetize through a closed application-store model. The HTML5 vs. Native app argument isn't new of course, but Heilmann effectively counters many of today's most popular misconceptions around HTML5 - discoverability, user experience, performance and monetary viability for developers.

This isn't an academic argument. In the long run, the emergence and evolution of HTML5 affects where mobile users get their mobile apps and the perception of how they perform. For the most part, users do not care how their apps were built, as long as they work. But how developers view these choices can change the course of how apps are made, where consumers find them and the tools that app creators choose to use for building for mobile devices. 

Monetization

Pundits like to say that HTML5 app developers are not able to monetize their apps. Heilmann, correctly, disproves this as a general theory. 

“Saying that HTML5 has no monetization model is like saying the Web can not be monetized (which is especially ironic when this is written on news sites that show ads),” Heilmann wrote. 

There is a nasty little secret hidden here that applies to all app developers, mobile or otherwise: Most apps make no money. For every runaway success (Angry Birds et al.) there are probably a thousand apps that languish with few users and/or no hope of making money. Between iOS, Android, Windows Phone and BlackBerry, there are approximately 1,580,000 (or so) apps - and 80% of them make next to nothing. Only the top 10% considered successful. The Web is a similar landscape. For every Google, there are companies like Microsoft that lose millions every quarter on their online properties. The concept is not that HTML5 cannot be monetized, but rather that it is very difficult to make big money in mobile in general.

Performance & Capabilities

Heilmann contends that HTML5 can perform just as well as native apps, except that closed mobile operating systems do not allow hardware acceleration and integration through the browser to outside apps. This is true - and one reason that Facebook decided to turn away from HTML5.

Fundamentally, the concept of “write once, run everywhere” is easy to achieve in HTML5. It is more difficult to achieve, “write once, perform well everywhere.” HTML5 apps for Web and mobile are often targeted towards a specific platform, such as a certain browser. When those apps are not running on that browser, the performance suffers.

The problem is not a matter of whether or not the HTML5 app can perform, but rather that of user experience. Facebook's HTML5-first vision for mobile meant that the core of its app was built around its mobile m.facebook.com site and then “wrapped” for native stores such as iOS and Android. Many users complained that the Facebook mobile application was nearly unusable on some smartphones, especially for Android users on older devices. 

Mozilla shows off WebAPIs earlier this year

But the onus for HTML5 performance and capabilities really has little to do with the HTML5 development community (presuming a developer’s code is well done, of course) but rather the individual mobile operating systems. It's the operating system and platform providers who need to open up hardware integration and acceleration so that HTML5 developers can tune to them. This lack of cooperation between the OS providers and HTML5 is a key reason that Mozilla is creating its own operating system, the Firefox OS (formerly “Boot2Gecko”) which will be completely Web-based and deployed internationally in 2013. 

As for capabilities, Mozilla is recreating many of the custom features of native apps - such as camera, contacts, calendar etc. - with its WebAPI initiatives, which tie a smartphone browser to hardware features. 

Mozilla Has An Agenda

It is understandable that Heilmann is intense in his support of HTML5. The capabilities of the technology stack mixed with the obstacles it faces create all the ingredients for an impassioned plea.

But Heilmann has an agenda here. Mozilla started in the late 1990s to counteract the Microsoft Internet Explorer monopoly. That battle has now switched to mobile, with HTML5 the primary weapon in Mozilla’s arsenal. So Mozilla has to rally the troops against the closed platforms. The continued existence of Mozilla depends upon an open Web. As the Web goes mobile, the closed nature of operating systems like Apple’s iOS and its App Store threaten Mozilla to its core. 

The fact is that HTML5 is not for everybody. Some developers will gladly take the advantage of the native approach and its closed ecosystem… and laugh all the way to the bank. Then again, native is not for everybody, especially for media brands or large enterprises that cannot or will not invest in the developer resources to create a native app for every platform. 

Will Mobile OS Makers Play Along?

Heilmann makes a significant point in noting how closely the future of HTML5 is tied to the goodwill of the native operating systems. 

“The main reason why HTML5 is not the obvious choice for developers now is the above mentioned lockout when it comes to hardware. An iOS device does not allow different browser engines and does not allow HTML5 to access the camera, the address book, vibration, the phone or text messaging. In other words, everything that makes a mobile device interesting for developers and very necessary functionality for Apps,” Heilmann wrote. 

There is no certainty that the native platforms will move an inch to support pure HTML5 apps (unwrapped for native performance) outside of their own purposes. For Apple specifically, there is little incentive to do so. That's why it makes sense for companies like Mozilla to take its future into its own hands with projects like Firefox OS. Yet there is no guarantee that Firefox smartphones will sell well - and it is impossible to monetize without attracting eyeballs.

When it comes to mobile users, the goal is for none of this to matter. If I want use Firefox OS or HTML5 apps, I need to trust that those apps will work as well as the native versions I am already used to from the closed app store models. Consumers should not even have to know if an app is native or HTML5 Web-based at all. The goal is to trust that any app, no matter how it is made, will work well on your device. With the complex relationship between the mobile operating systems, native app creation and the Web, there is no guarantee of that right now. 

That has to change. Outside of the specific Mobile Web App vs. Native App argument and the uncertainties it creates, there is a growing place in app development for HTML5 in the near and long term. The biggest problem – user experience – is conquerable. It will just take more cooperation among the various players to achieve.

Top image from HexGL racer by Thibaut Despoulain.