my dotjs talk

The Web: Evolution in Action

Brendan Eich, CTO, Mozilla

[email protected]

@BrendanEich

Wednesday, December 4, 13

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

What’s at Stake on the Web

5.6 BILLION


An estimate of the number of people going online in the next ten years.The Internet next wave looks very different.

Enablers of growth:* widely deployed mobile broadband * people skip the PC experience for smartphones and tablets* inexpensive smartphones – we can lead together* inexpensive cloud-hosted services, processing power and inexpensive storage

Online Life Is Pervasive


But over the next several years, smartphones are just one way people will connect:payments, location, messaging...wearable computing and the Internet of things. all generating information -- more information than we can currently imagine. Digital life is becoming an extension/interwoven of our real lives, not something separate. So everything we do doesn’t just affect what we used to call “online life” on some sort of parallel world. Online life and real life are one and the same.

Pervasive = Threats + Hopes


More data comes with benefit and risks. Managing identity and payments more importantOwnership - who gets to use the data, and how?SurveillanceEstimates are that Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook have stored at least 1,200 petabytes of data on the web

There are amazing benefits. And huge risks.

What about User Sovereignty?


So, some big questions for us as we map out our future:

* What is our role, as citizens, as an industry, and for Mozilla, when everything is connected? How can we enable amazing experiences in a user-centric way?* Where and how do we influence how other companies manage the rules around all the data that is being stored?

These are some of the questions we should all be thinking about.

8,154


The Web is young in days since TBL pressed a bu5on.Don’t worry, the future is bigger than the past.


The connected world is moving to ambient compu@ng -‐ the Open Web is even more importantYou don’t want your house, your car, your body not interopera@ng, not using open & transparent standards.


So we believe the web is the widest plaForm and it will be even more important.

Shape the Web platform by building great products.


This requires awesome user-first Web-based products.

CONTINUE TO IMPROVE WEB PERFORMACE


Bust silos open

… add transparency, control, privacy by design… enable choice and build trust… build the Internet that people want but that no one else will create… AND do it in a user-centric way

CONTINUE TO IMPROVE WEB PERFORMACE


Empower web users with the know-how they need to “own” their online lives, especially on mobile.

… ensure that we build and get the Internet we want, together.

People Deserve a truly open platform


Think about iTunes vs. Google Play, note how “you can’t take it with you”

Personalization inside a given silo leaves the user out and divides content providers’ efforts across silos.

Developers have to rewrite from one native stack to another to reach users with best effect, so long as silos play games to hold back the Web.

(Version-free!)


Hixie sez!

Standards always make “editions” or _a posteri_ versions. Developers JS object-detect, CSS selector-match, etc.

WEB PLATFORM -WHERE WE ARE

Vibration Motor

Hardware Keys

Proximity Sensor

Multitouch

NFC

Bluetooth

Accelerometer

Cameras

USB Access

Speaker

Microphone

Light Sensor

Gyro


Talk about the progress we’ve made thanks to Firefox OS driving standards for Web APIs into Gecko and other engines.

THE WEB PLATFORM -CLOSING THE GAP


We all, as a part of the mobile industry, can help to close the gap and make the web platform truly competitive - as a platform for innovation and development (compared to native)

We, as Mozilla, don’t want a competitive advantage for us -- rather we want a competitive advantage for the Web.


Talk about many layers affecting performance:* network layer* DOM* layout* graphics, with web developers programming the GPU* JS, which has become crazy fast

“IF YOU CAN DODGE A WRENCH...”


Let’s talk about games.

Games are the wrench, apps in general are the dodgeball.

Games are the acid test that drove iOS to add native apps after the iPhone 1 launched

We have moved the goal posts just this past year.

With more to come soon, but here are some demos...


Latest from Alon Zakai (~2 weeks ago)


Mozilla + Epic Games demo reel

TWO SOLVABLE OPEN PROBLEMS


Big but solvable...

1. Pause-Free Garbage Collection

• Today’s JS GCs optimize Throughput over Latency

• Some relevant work from Research Literature:

• Metronome (Bacon, et al.)

• HRTGC (Pizlo, Hosking, Vitek; see next slide)

• Trade utilization for predictability

• Isolation needed to avoid priority inversion


Filip Pizlo works on JavaScriptCore at Apple


Nice relevant slide from http://www.filpizlo.com/slides/pizlo-lctes2007-hrtgc-slides.pdf

Similarity to OCap membranes used for browser window/frame security is interesting

2. Hosting Languages Efficiently

• “Vtables”, connecting guest and host heaps

• Threads, but racy only for C/C++-to-JS code

• SIMD intrinsics

• Mozilla working with Google (Dart) and Intel for ES7

• GPU programming beyond WebGL

• WebCL, but safety is not optional

• Rust on the GPU (Holk, et al. at IU)



Kidding!

Happens rarely with standards too long in draft status, implemented and shipped and used by developers.

Such draft standards were finalized by reality, standards body should face it and not break compat.

Don’t break the Web.

CALL IT EVOLUTION IN ACTION


In the good way, not the Niven & Pournelle / Darwin Awards sad way!

The Big Picture

• On the Web, it’s easier to evolve than replace

• Competition => cooperation + transparency in standards

• Release early and often, in multiple browsers

• Add missing lower-level capabilities

• Extensible Web Manifesto, or github FTW

• http://extensiblewebmanifesto.org/


http://extensiblewebmanifesto.org

http://extensiblewebmanifesto.org

Thank you!#extendthewebforward


Coda• First they said that JS or the Web stack

couldn’t do “Rich Internet Applications”

• Then they said it couldn’t be fast enough

• Then they said it couldn’t be fixed

• Wrong every time!

• Always bet on {JS, HTML, WebGL, ...}

• Really, always bet on Web Developers


Ob. closing slide

my dotjs talk

Technology

web platform

competitive

developers

mozilla

standards

web

couldnt

user