The Real Difference Is The Platform

I just read this blog post on extensibility of Safari, Chrome, and Firefox - and it hits a very important point.

Chrome is winning an interesting share of users, Safari wants to do the same, Firefox recently goes out of its way for improvements that make it more alike to the "cool child in the block" that Chrome currently represents. Now, many of the improvements the teams are making are worth to be made by themselves, with our without having competition in that field - I'm not sure all of them are, but that's a topic for other discussions.

What's important is that we look into what makes a difference between Chrome, Safari and Firefox. Now, as I recently posted, the mission is the main philosophical difference. On the side of the product, there is a real difference as well though - even if we'd match Firefox to look, feel and function almost or completely like Chrome (which I'm sure the team are not really targetting, even if they're going a lot of the way in that direction), that would persist - and if it wouldn't, I'd not feel like it would still be right to be called a Mozilla product.

And that difference, the one thing that sets our technology apart from any competition, is the Mozilla platform.

The core of that platform goes back to a decision of a few probably visionary Netscape engineers back in 1998 who found out that the new web renderer they designed for "Netscape 5" in the newly founded Mozilla project was so fast in rendering basic web pages and even form elements that they decided it would make sense to use it even for rendering the browser UI with that renderer - using the same code and definitions on all supported platforms. As HTML didn't have support for all a UI needs and the HTML box model was made for scientific documents and not on-screen design, they created XUL as the markup language the web renderer (Gecko) would use for that UI - but the key was that it was extensible in many ways with very web-like technologies that were - and are - quite easy to learn and use (and IMHO, much of it is even easier than HTML itself, as e.g. <input> has strange syntax there).

The extensibility of that platform and making UI work with web-like technologies made it a no-brainer to support additional modules that could be installed, later called "extensions", nowdays a part of the refined "add-ons" system. As the UI itself is built with the same technologies, that also means those extensions or add-ons can do anything the UI can do or that the application can do - I just recently converted what I previously ran as a full-blown application into a Firefox (and SeaMonkey) add-on (KaiRo.at Mandelbrot), for example.

With the tremendous success of Firefox over the last years, a rather large add-ons ecosystem has formed around exactly that platform that allows any extension the same flexibility as the application itself - and even though generic packaging and installing isn't very well-supported, whole applications are powered by the Mozilla platform or based on Mozilla technologies.

And that is the real strength of Mozilla technology-wise. We have a very powerful platform that allows building extensions to our applications or whole products by themselves (using XULRunner), and all those use "web" or very "web-like" (but IMHO to some part even cleaner) technologies and work on all platform that platform can be compiled on, recently that even can include mobile devices.

The real technology difference of Firefox, Thunderbird, and SeaMonkey to any competition is that extensible and powerful platform. If we want to "win" over any competitor, this is one thing we really need to focus on, this is the ace we need to play. Other might try to match us there, but we have put 10 years of the work of great minds into developing that strength, others won't match that easily.

So, let's put this difference to work. Our mission for a better and open Internet and this great platform technology ought to be a game-changer. We need to build on those to succeed. But we can do it. So let's get to work, and let's tell people about it.