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Cloud busting

Similarly, he sounds a note of caution about the buzzword du jour, cloud computing: "This headline rush to the cloud is beautiful for some things and misguided for other things". This is where Google and Mozilla have what Lilly calls a key difference in browser design philosophy, referring to Google’s approach as treating the browser as a pane of glass. "Google, when they launched Chrome, the name Chrome was an ironic title. It implied they wanted to build a browser that didn't have any chrome, that didn’t have any user interface - they just want to be a pane of glass to the Internet. Setting aside for a minute whether that is even possible, we think the technical term for a browser is a user agent. We think the browser can do much on behalf of users - it can help you find stuff, it can help you figure out what you want - but it can also mediate between what's on your desk and what on the Web. It can meld those two together, mash them up so to speak. I think the browser sits at the interesting interface of client and cloud and there will always be that interface. "

While the Web will be a platform, client apps will never disappear he says, pointing to the flood of clients for notionally Web-based services like Twitter and Facebook. The cloud isn’t just a place to run applications or store information, so the browser has more to do than rendering pages and running scripts to realise the potential of the cloud; in his vision, the user agent needs to extend beyond a single machine or a single platform, with tools like Weave "We have got to make some strides figuring how to connect this stuff up with some cloud-based connective tissue. So how do we help people sync their bookmarks, how do we make it so you close your laptop and then you open up on Fennec and your tabs are all there for you?"

Jetpack, extending the browser "in a way that's more web native" There’s still plenty of work left to do in the desktop version of Mozilla too, including the extensions that make Firefox so flexible. "I have some ambivalence, in the positive sense of the word, here," confides Lilly. XUL is efficient, but if the browser is the platform, shouldn’t extensions be more about Web technologies? "We’re proud of our XUL heritage and the ability to have an add-on be really part of the browser that’s running but there are some issues we’re trying to address with Ubiquity and with Jetpack around how you extend that in a way that’s more Web native. XUL, I think, is more Webby than most any other extension system but it's not quite of the Web. You look at Greasemonkey scripts or Jetpack or Chrome extensions and they start to look more of the Web. I think we’re moving towards that. I think the question is can you get all the expressive stuff done, that you want to get done, with that type of scheme. We believe you can get a lot of it done but we don't have the total answer to that yet."

Another long-term work in progress is identity on the Internet; protocols like OAuth and OpenID are just the beginning (and Lilly notes that OpenID has "certain flaws"). "I think identity must emerge in a new way; probably less photorealistic than you are in Second Life but a little more than just your Twitter handle." Tools like Twitter could be increasingly important for supplying the 'social clues' that we're used to in the real world, where you don't have to supply a name and password to walk into a shop or find out how much it would cost to rent a car. "Social cues like the clothes you're wearing and the fact you're an adult and you probably drove up in a car; those things tell your brain 'this person is probably worth interacting with now and we’ll figure out the specific bits later'. But all these soft cues we don't have right now online. Twitter is interesting because it provides soft cues about people; it provides sensor streams, it provides other information about what’s happening, it gives you soft information about how to make decisions. I think Twitter and sensors hold some keys but this is going to take a long, long time. It’s like we’re all trying to rewire our brains how to do this."

Lilly's slightly downbeat view of the state of browsers isn't pessimism about Firefox (which he calls "a great product") or about Fennec ("Which will sooner or later just be called Firefox"). It's a recognition of the way the Mozilla Foundation and community works, which he calls "network-based design; we try to give tools to the most people and then you try to notice what's good and innovative and you try to grow it." With such a large number of developers involved in creating the next step for the browser in so many and varied ways, recognising that there are still plenty of bumps in the road ahead is a much more realistic approach.

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