future of the web (app)

Chris Messina vlogged some thoughts on Mozilla yesterday, and I thought I'd respond in turn.

Chris briefly mentions his view of the browser as, perhaps, the best place to innovate for the future of the web, but, alas, I think that this is no longer true.

It's not that the browser /wouldn't/ be a great place, it would be, but as Raymond Chen and Chris Wilson point out, backwards compatibility is king, and at this point, JS libraries such as JQuery have partly tamed the cross-browser AJAX beast.

(My out-there hypothesis: GOOG is already working on a platform to address the issues that Chris and I have raised, and will announce it at the end of May in San Jose. If they don't, you'll disappoint me GOOG!)

I wrote earlier about how I feel that Mozilla as an app platform for end-user programming is at least a year behind Adobe and MSFT, but now that JavaFX is out there in the conceptual world, perhaps Mozilla has an easier target to beat :).

As for IE, I personally regard IE7 as superior to FF2, alas, and see Adobe Flex/Apollo as the leader, with MSFT coming up strong with Silverlight 1.1 and the DLR/CLR.

Safari? In the form of WebKit, it sort of already runs on Wintel, in some Adobe transfigured thing called Apollo.

Mozilla for Mobile? Let's not go there now.

Overall, it's too bad that Chris ain't wrong. On the details, he might be off. For example, browsers aren't dead, they have just won and stopped innovating. They're more stone than buried in the ground.

My suggestion for Chris, and the larger world, come up with a better story, a more detailed narrative scenario of the kind of person Moz needs to cater to, and almost as important, Moz-the-platform seems to need a new, distinctive name.

(Perhaps that's just it, simple enough. Moz. No more, no less!)