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Mozilla Summit 2013

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I was invited to the last two Mozilla Summits but I always missed it. This year, I finally be able to attend the Summit.

Mozilla Summit 2013

So what is Mozilla Summit? The apparent approximation of the Summit would be to think of it as a three-day festival, to celebrate what we want to achieve and also to reaffirm our Mission; however, Summit is way, way more than that. I am humbled and comforted by the fact I got to engage in many high-level, philosophical conversations about Mozilla and the Mission itself, in a lot of breakout sessions. Some of the questions being bought up were fundamental questions like what is a Mozillian, challenges of communicate the vision to the boarder audiences like the general users (kudos to @potch on many of his insight comments), to practical questions like how to work with closed mobile industry partners, and our challenges with our current position in the mobile market, and internal organization.

These are all important conversations that I have little chance to talk about in the office, given the fact we are all caught up in daily work. To my embarrassment, I feel I should ask forgiveness on being cynical in conversations. Nonetheless, to me, it’s more important to know how we are doing than why. The summit shouldn’t be a three-day religious or self-reinforcing event where only the good news were told; I am really glad it didn’t being hold like this for the majority of the time spent. To my relieve, I am also happy to find out most of people are much more energetic and optimistic about how we are doing, and much more hopeful on whether or not we will getting there, and devoting their thoughts on what we could do more to get there.

During the keynote, the main message of the Summit given was “We’re here to build an Internet the world needs.”. I totally agree that Mozilla should expand it’s mission from simply Open Web to Open Internet, although my question about Open Hardware being the foundation of Open Internet and another eventual goal of the project was not being picked up during the QA session. I’ve also heard little discussions (expect DRM) on some of our seemly conflicting means to reach the end, which, arguably, is a good thing (because that means most of us in the Summit agrees the Mozilla way — making concessions in order to gain future influences).

toronto

On topics unrelated to the Summit directly: I found that Toronto is a really lucky city, being gifted to have the off-shore Toronto islands that serves as a getaways and an “central park”. The city itself is a bit chaotic though as they were constructions around the Union station. However the 12 hours time difference stuck me hard; I missed a few night events because I was so tired that I had to crush to bed.

By the way, best wishes to Margaret and Gavin 😀 They were call up to the stage by Jay during closing in Toronto on their #MozLove: they first met on Summit 2010 and got engaged last week. I am pretty sure they weren’t the first ones and they won’t be the last ones.

That’s us, we are the hopelessly idealistic, happy, and innocent, Mozillians.

Firefox OS released

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Note: this is a recycled, unpublished post form July, 2013, when the first Firefox OS phone was released. Below are my personal reflections on the Firefox OS project upon the release.

Mozilla Taiwan Office

Within a relatively short time, Mozilla managed to open up an Taipei office with relative large operation, signed deals with various partners, and ship the first version of Firefox OS.

To me personally, this is a challenging yet exciting work. I would imagine the description to be true for Mozilla as whole as well. The office in Taipei grows tenfold; MoCo as whole grows as well to accommodated the new project (I’ve already lost counts on that, as always). I started as one junior developer working on the code base with merely a few checked-ins, to be a people manager leading the front-end team in Taipei and one of the tech leads that struggle to involve every aspect of a code base involves multiple teams within Mozilla and external teams from many of our partners (note that Taipei front-end devs have since spilt into two teams and we have another capable manager on another team). It’s a learning process to work with project of this size — for Mozilla, product-wise, to enter a new market, to coordinate with partners on their launch dates and feature sets — is new too.

Firefox OS

Nonetheless we made it. I don’t feel particularly proud for the release. There were many decisions made that should have been made differently, although I am certain that everyone have made the best decision with information at hand. I am also in no position to judge a past decision if all the information is still not available to me.

There are still many, many work to be done here.

Re: Why mobile web apps are slow

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Although the title broadly and vaguely referring to “mobile web apps”, Why mobile web apps are slow is actually a lengthy breakdown of JavaScript performance on mobile. tl;dr: too slow, and will stay relatively slow in feasible future.

Regretfully, because I was not formally trained as a computer scientist, I don’t have the necessary knowledge to judge whether or not the analysis of hardware architecture, garbage collection, or even interrupter development trends, are genuine or not. Nor I will try to be an web fanboy to pin the arthur as an Apple fanboy to repudiate what he just wrote. The question I would like to bring up is: Supposedly all of the analysis (and the conclusion) are true, what would the future holds for the Open Web, in post-PC world?

For the web to move away from JavaScript, there are currently two active proposals: Google Native Client (NaCl) and asm.js. NaCl comes with some trade-offs, like interpretability; asm.js on ARM is still in active development, and we will not know whether or not it would bring the same performance boost on x86.

Obviously, without JavaScript, the web as we (the front-end web developers) know it will cease to exist. It’s not necessary a bad thing though — while the web moving a way from a place I grew up, where everyone can find out the layout or logic of any website with view source, it had also involved to something much useful and powerful, embedded into everyone’s digital life more deeply. Yet, working on Mozilla payroll means there is no excuse to give up on the Open Web — even though I am not the person who make these decisions, thought experiments is always a fun thing to do.

So, maybe 10 years from now, website, or web apps would do this: Probe the CPU architecture of your hardware, drop the corresponding optimized asm.js or NaCl bytecode to your device, and render the entire screen with WebGL. There might even be Flash-like authoring tool for that, or even WebHAL — a library to abstract CPU/GPU differences. Think about what the Open Web gain or loose at that future.

As for JavaScript, in that future, people would have conversation like this comic (spooler alert below; thanks Kanru for the link):

— … Can’t remember its name. Today it’s mostly used just as a target language for compilers, but back in [the professor]’s days people actually used to write in it directly!

— Oh, that must be JavaScript!

Perhaps, just like Lisp at the time, a dynamic-typing language is still too advanced for hardware circa 2013.