I did my best to reassure him of course, providing arguments that support their choice and pointing him to a blog post by a GNOME developer that gives a fair and balanced assessment of the merits and drawbacks of the two platforms. The truth, however, is that the second wave of the browser wars — the platform wars — is now in full swing, and so far WebKit is winning.

WebKit has decisively chalked up a few early battles. Apple choose WebKit as the engine for Safari back in 2002. Mozilla would have been a logical choice, but those were early days, and even Mozilla insiders say they probably weren’t ready to serve as the foundation for another major browser. Google’s decision to use WebKit in its Chrome browser is more telling. The reality is that, although Mozilla now has a stellar platform, they have made it clear that their primary focus is on Firefox. WebKit, on the other hand, is first and foremost a platform, and as such has an inherent appeal to software developers looking to build their own browser or embed browser functionality.

Well, so what if a bunch of products adopt WebKit over Mozilla? (Flock is the latest to plan a switch, if you believe the rumors.) Firefox is a hugely successful brand, with steadily growing market share that recently topped 20%. And competition in the browser market is a good thing, as Mozillians are quick to point out, and will only serve to accelerate innovation to the benefit of end users.

Mozilla has established principles that imply a custodial role for the internet at large. It is becoming increasingly clear that software that provides some browser functionality (but may not be a browser in the traditional sense) is going to play a bigger role in the future of the web. From media browsers like iTunes and Songbird to single-site browsers like Fluid and Prism, people will be accessing the web via a variety of products in the future. If Mozilla fails to compete effectively in the platform space, it will see its market share decline even if Firefox holds steady among traditional browsers.

This means that Mozilla will be less able to pursue its stated mission. It will be handing control to large corporations like Apple and Google.

Mozilla knows this of course, and they’ve done many things recently to respond to the WebKit threat. The Fennec mobile browser is clearly a huge strategic priority, an attempt to counter the current dominance of WebKit in that space. Firefox’s memory consumption, long a sore spot, has been dramatically improved. And a few individuals have made heroic efforts to make Mozilla more appealing as a platform, rationalizing the code base and rearchitecting Firefox so that it runs on top of XULRunner.

I think more is needed. In particular, I would love to see a reversal of Mozilla’s decision not to “invest in a pre-packaged or stand-alone XULRunner at this time.” This is as much about public relations as anything else. They already offer nightly builds of the platform SDK. (Can we have debug mode though, pretty please?) The platform documentation is so improved it brings tears to my eyes. But hardly anyone outside of the Mozilla community knows about these things. A big loud honking public statement that the platform is being actively developed and marketed, as a product, would in itself be a huge help in getting people to choose Mozilla for their software projects.

The other area screaming for improvement is platform evangelism and developer relations. A funny quote in the TechCrunch story about Flock dumping Mozilla (true or not) cites a “source” complaining that they feel like the “red headed stepchild of the Mozilla development community.” This might seem a bit overboard, but the last open forum I witnessed between Mozilla and users of the platform rapidly descended into a heated shouting match that I thought, for a while, might come to blows.

I don’t want to be seen as airing dirty laundry here. There are tensions inside any developer community, and not all of the complaints (expressed loudly by a few individuals) were fair or reasonable. When I was new to the community, I found Mozilla employees to be exceptionally welcoming and helpful. But I still believe there is a lot of room for improvement. It would be fantastic if Mozilla would appoint at least one individual whose specific role it is to act as a liaison with developers using the platform. A clear go-to person who can help developers to get their patches landed (or explain to them in clear, diplomatic terms why they won’t be) would be invaluable. This person could also help to evangelize use of Mozilla as a platform.

I’m not too worried about Mozilla’s technology. WebKit may be the shiny new toy, but on balance Mozilla stacks up well in terms of performance, stability, standards compliance and features. More to the point, a lot of folks smarter than me are aware of the technology’s shortcomings and are continuing to improve it on many fronts. What is missing so far is clear, public recognition of the strategic value of having a competitive platform.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Alright, Apple’s action is dastardly and underhanded, but then corporations have done much worse in the service of their strategic goals. A much more interesting question is why Apple considers it strategic to drive adoption of its browser so aggressively among Windows users. Larry Dignan presents what is frankly a rather artless take: it’s all about the money. Ironically, Larry undermines his whole arguments when he observes (correctly) that “Google’s fees to Apple aren’t likely to be material.” Understatement of the year, when you consider that Mozilla’s Firefox revenues (with four times the market share of Safari) for the entire year of 2007 are probably not much more than what Apple books every day.

Matt Asay’s explanation makes a lot more sense:

[Safari is] a great browser but…who cares? It doesn’t provide any differentiation that Internet Explorer or Firefox don’t already provide.

Except for its tie to the iPhone, of course. Safari is the application platform Apple uses for its iPhone. Why should Apple care about which browser you use? Because it cares about which phone you use. Apple won’t sell a single license to Safari, but it’s definitely hoping to sell you a boatload of iPhones.

But even this is an oversimplification. The real reason for Apple’s move is that it sees Safari as a strategic application platform on the whole range of computing devices, not just the iPhone. Despite continued gains in PC market share, its management realizes that they aren’t going to dislodge Windows from its entrenched position any time soon. So they are fighting to get more widespread deployment on Windows of their two application stacks, Cocoa and WebKit. It is a no-brainer that Apple is eventually going to launch some sort of Rich Internet Application platform, and overall market penetration of Safari will be a huge success vector. The hardest part of driving adoption of any new platform, after all, is getting your runtime onto the end user’s machine. Just ask Microsoft (.Net) and Sun (Java).

I like Matt Asay’s analysis because the iPhone is a significant part of this picture.  Mobile devices, game consoles and television sets will arguably be bigger targets for application deployment than traditional computers in as few years time. But the key message is not iPhone uber alles, but the need for Apple to get its runtime onto as many environments as possible to maximize economies of scale for application developers and cement its nascent but fast-growing control of the software development market.

Something similar is shaping up in the browser space with WebKit’s vertiginous rise. Since WebKit swept onto the scene as the engine powering Safari, AIR and the iPhone browser, the heat has been on Mozilla, and they’ve responded with major improvements to their rendering engine’s memory consumption and performance. I was speaking to some developers at a major Ajax shop yesterday, and they were blown away by the performance boost they’ve experienced since upgrading to Firefox 3.

Now the WebKit camp has struck back with the release of Safari 3.1:

Safari loads web pages 1.9 times faster than IE 7 and 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2. Safari also runs JavaScript up to six times faster than other browsers, and is the first browser to support the latest innovative web standards needed to deliver the next generation of highly interactive Web 2.0 experiences.

Apple pointedly fails to provide figures for performance relative to the latest Firefox 3 beta, but according to the same Ajax shop, WebKit is back in the lead by about 10-15%. It’s only a matter of time until Mozilla responds in kind; innovations like Tamarin Tracing (just-in-time compilation using the virtual machine donated to the Mozilla Foundation by Adobe) will eventually take their JavaScript performance to the next level.

And what about IE? My Ajax contacts tell me it isn’t even on the map. They even claim that, for their app at least, the new IE8 beta is even slower than IE7. With two outstanding, standards compliant, open source browser implementations vying for supremacy, Microsoft had better get its act in gear or risk going the way of the dodo.

Hopefully one message that will stick in people’s minds after they have digested this is that Mozilla is concentrating on the right things in finalizing Firefox 3. Memory consumption and performance have long been major criticisms of Firefox. The detailed analysis of Firefox 3′s runtime performance undertaken by Vlad demonstrates a renewed commitment to addressing these criticisms, as does Stuart Parmenter’s work on reducing memory fragmentation. Stories like this should help to win over geek hearts and minds, although end users will withhold judgment until they’ve actually tried the upcoming Firefox release.

A deeper question is what this implies for the web browser marketplace (and the software industry in general). Privileged access to low-level operating system features is just another advantage bestowed upon OS vendors, to add to their tremendous engineering muscle and unparalleled marketing clout, including access to the cherished OEM channel through bundling. With increased adherence to standards and widespread adoption of previously differentiating features like tabbed browsing, it is tempting to conclude that the web browser is rapidly turning into a commodity.

And this would doubtless be the blog post I was writing if it weren’t for one thing: Mozilla Firefox. Other attempts to introduce competition into the browser world have buckled in the face of the aforementioned challenges (Opera being a notable example). Meanwhile Firefox has gone from strength to strength. The explanation is for this counterintuitive state of affairs is complex. For one thing, Microsoft dropped the ball on Internet Explorer development once Netscape had faded into oblivion, leaving the door open for a determined competitor. Poor security, first and foremost, prevented IE from locking up the market when it had the chance. Firefox also introduced some features (liked tabbed browsing) that helped it gain a foothold before other vendors could catch up. Its extensibility has led to an amazing ecosystem of third-party add-ons that no other browser has come close to duplicating. And the Mozilla crowd also did some excellent marketing, the lack of which has hampered the adoption of other open source products.

Nonetheless, Firefox is increasingly looking like an outlier. It’s hard to think of another popular general-purpose software application developed by an independent third party. Practically all of the apps likely to be needed by most users are already bundled by both Microsoft and Apple. The real independent software market is now the web. Personally I find it hard to imagine ten years from now that any user (beyond a tiny percentage of hard-core geeks) will ever install a web browser on their computer. They’ll use whatever is already there when they buy it. Naturally there is still a huge opportunity for both Mozilla and Opera to be that pre-installed browser, on computers and on other devices like mobile phones, game consoles and televisions.

When the dust settles, the lesson here is not how nefarious Apple was in hiding top-secret programming interfaces from its competitors. In the short term, it is how committed Mozilla is to addressing the frequent criticisms of Firefox’s speed and footprint (and the positive implications for the success of Firefox 3). In the long term, it is that the advantages of operating system incumbents in the desktop software market are getting harder and harder to overcome.

Ryan Stewart speculates that these new features prove that Apple is “very serious about an RIA strategy that seems browser based.” They still have a long way to go to compete with the likes of AIR and Prism. In particular, there is no mention of a mechanism for creating desktop shortcuts for web applications so they can run in their own process, independent of the browser (perhaps that’s what Ryan means when he describes Apple’s approach as “browser based”). What’s more, the SQL storage (which was integrated months ago into the WebKit engine that powers Safari) is only for application-specific data, not for code, so presumably this still won’t allow web apps to run without internet connectivity.

Nonetheless, I’m sure Ryan is right to speculate that Apple is brewing up a complete RIA platform. It will be interesting to see whether they create their own markup language for creating rich user interfaces (powered by QuickTime?), analogous to Flex and XUL, or whether they stick to the HTML5 spec. I’d also like to know when these new features will make their way into Mobile Safari for use on the iPhone. It’s worth noting that the latest 1.1.3 firmware lets you create desktop (well, Springboard) shortcuts, so the addition of offline storage (for code as well as data) will finally make their vaunted web platform viable as a proper iPhone SDK.

Update: A commenter points out that CSS transforms and animations are not part of HTML5. The same appears to be true of downloadable fonts. Needless to say, I put in these errors intentionally from time to time to check if people are paying attention.

This is one of those cases of an enthusiastic developer answering a question theoretically. There are no current release plans for Opera Mini or any version of Opera for iPhone.

Translation:

I’m constantly telling company management to keep the developers tied up and gagged in the basement. Letting them out to interact with other people is only asking for trouble.

Regardless of the true status of these rumored plans, Michael then cuts to heart of the matter:

Safari is a great browser and all, but many are itching to see other browsers like Opera, Firefox and Internet Explorer (don’t scoff, there are plenty of reasons) running on their Apple gadgets.

[Michael, I'm scoffing. What are these reasons of which you speak?]

Are we headed to another round of the browser wars on the iPhone, or is it a broader war to be waged on multiple devices?

If so, who wins? On the iPhone in particular, Apple already has a head start. Who’s to follow next?

I discussed this informally with some Mozilla folks yesterday. Apparently they did consider porting Firefox to the iPhone but couldn’t see the point. Apple is clearly hoping that devices like the iPhone and Apple TV will expand their potential user base, the market for personal computers being inherently limited by their complexity. Seen in this light, the last thing you’d want is for grandma to be swapping out something as fundamental as her phone’s default browser. Naturally some technology fanatics won’t sleep until they get Emacs/W3 running on the iPhone, but then some people can’t wait to take a blowtorch to their brand new Porsche. This isn’t going to hit the mainstream. Ever.

At the same time, it’s an observable fact that the browser wars are going mobile. Competition between Microsoft, Opera, WebKit and Mozilla for inclusion on new devices is fierce. But the battle is for OEM deals, not for the hearts and minds of consumers. As with its Macintosh line, Apple is betting that its tightly integrated hardware/software combo will carry the day. WebKit is rocking and rolling, most recently as the browser of choice for Google’s Android platform. Microsoft is Microsoft. And Mozilla is finally taking the mobile space more seriously (with its engine already shipping on the Nokia N800). As on the desktop, the spoils will go to the vendor best able to make its browser a great platform for deploying applications, not just a vehicle for surfing the web.

UPDATE: Michael responds.

As web apps have continued to encroach on what was previously the sole realm of the desktop, the “airplane problem” has become increasingly evident. Although Ajax applications actually download their code onto the client before running it, they are still impossible to use if you’re not connected to the internet. In part this is because browsers don’t yet have the smarts to hold on to code that might be needed later. Leave your Gmail inbox and you won’t to be able to get it back without a live net connection. Moreover, you wouldn’t be able to do anything interesting anyway since all of your data is stored on some remote server and thus inaccessible when you’re offline.

The iPhone is a poignant illustration of this problem. When Apple announced that Safari would be the SDK for its new phone, industry observers were skeptical. Although the central theme of this blog is that the distinction between web apps and their desktop-based counterparts is eroding, Safari is simply not yet up to the task. One of the main lacks is the need to be online to use third-party web apps. There are many instances when this is impossible or inconvenient: on airplanes, as mentioned, but also when roaming, when you don’t have an unlimited data plan (you dirty hacker you) or any time you’re away from a wifi connection and have to rely on the glacial EDGE network.

Mozilla began tackling the problem at the beginning of 2007. Browsers already store JavaScript downloaded from web sites in their cache to speed subsequent loading of these sites, but not in a way that makes it usable when offline. What is needed is a persistent cache specifically designed for this purpose. The new functionality, which is based on a specification being fleshed out inside the WHATWG, is slated to be included in Firefox 3. Complex applications like Zimbra have already been adapted to take advantage of it. According to Ars Technica, Apple is “jamming on adding offline storage capabilities to Safari” for use on the iPhone. Since Apple is an active participant in the WHATWG, it’s reasonable to expect that their implementation will be compatible with Mozilla’s from the perspective of web developers.

The other contender is Google Gears, which also provides capabilities for storing code and data locally for use without internet access. Google has a couple of advantages over the WHATWG. For one thing, it controls some of the most popular Ajax applications on earth. Also, Gears is distributed as a browser plugin and supports Internet Explorer as well as Firefox (with Safari support on the way). This gives Google end-to-end control analogous to that enjoyed by Apple with iTunes (both the music store and the client) and the iPod. The WHATWG crowd has to convince web application developers to support its specification, and it has to deal with the fact that IE users are currently out in the cold.

So where is Microsoft in this story anyway? I couldn’t find any indication that they have offline capabilities at all, existing or planned. I suspect we may be in for a big surprise announcement when IE 8 is released this year. Perhaps they are even planning to support the WHATWG spec. That would be a real shocker but might make sense if they perceive their real rival in this game to be Google rather than Mozilla or Apple.

No discussion of offline capabilities for browsers would be complete without mentioning SQLite. Every solution in this space has one thing in common: they all use this small, fast, reliable embedded SQL database. Adobe has also adopted it for use in AIR, its platform for standalone web apps. It’s safe to say that SQLite has accelerated the rollout of offline-capable browsers by at least a year or two. It also has some of the most liberal licensing terms out there. D. Richard Hipp, its creator, is a genuine tech hero.

Next time in browser trends we’ll explore the rise of site-specific browsers and rich internet applications.