My closing keynote for dotJS in Paris, 2 December 2013

1. The Web: Evolution in Action
Brendan Eich, CTO, Mozilla
brendan@mozilla.org
@BrendanEich
Wednesday, December 4, 13

2. What’s at Stake on the Web
5.6 BILLION
Wednesday, December 4, 13
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

3. Online Life Is Pervasive
Wednesday, December 4, 13
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.

4. Pervasive = Threats + Hopes
Wednesday, December 4, 13
More data comes with benefit and risks.
Managing identity and payments more important
Ownership - who gets to use the data, and how?
Surveillance
Estimates 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.

5. What about User Sovereignty?
Wednesday, December 4, 13
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.

6. 8,154
Wednesday, December 4, 13
The
Web
is
young
in
days
since
TBL
pressed
a
bu5on.
Don’t
worry,
the
future
is
bigger
than
the
past.

7. Wednesday, December 4, 13
The
connected
world
is
moving
to
ambient
compu@ng
-­‐
the
Open
Web
is
even
more
important
You
don’t
want
your
house,
your
car,
your
body
not
interopera@ng,
not
using
open
&
transparent
standards.

8. Wednesday, December 4, 13
So
we
believe
the
web
is
the
widest
plaForm
and
it
will
be
even
more
important.

9. Shape the Web platform by
building great products.
Wednesday, December 4, 13
This requires awesome user-first Web-based products.

10. CONTINUE TO IMPROVE
WEB PERFORMACE
Wednesday, December 4, 13
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

11. CONTINUE TO IMPROVE
WEB PERFORMACE
Wednesday, December 4, 13
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.

12. People Deserve a truly open
platform
Wednesday, December 4, 13
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.

13. Wednesday, December 4, 13

14. (Version-free!)
Wednesday, December 4, 13
Hixie sez!
Standards always make “editions” or _a posteri_ versions. Developers JS object-detect, CSS selector-match, etc.

15. Wednesday, December 4, 13

16. WEB PLATFORM WHERE WE ARE
Cameras
Speaker
NFC
Microphone
Vibration Motor
Multitouch
USB Access
Accelerometer
Gyro
Bluetooth
Proximity Sensor
Hardware Keys
Light Sensor
Wednesday, December 4, 13
Talk about the progress we’ve made thanks to Firefox OS driving standards for Web APIs into Gecko and other engines.

17. THE WEB PLATFORM CLOSING THE GAP
Wednesday, December 4, 13
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.

18. Wednesday, December 4, 13
Talk about many layers affecting performance:
* network layer
* DOM
* layout
* graphics, with web developers programming the GPU
* JS, which has become crazy fast

19. “IF YOU CAN DODGE A WRENCH...”
Wednesday, December 4, 13
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...

20. Wednesday, December 4, 13
Latest from Alon Zakai (~2 weeks ago)

21. Wednesday, December 4, 13
Mozilla + Epic Games demo reel

22. TWO SOLVABLE OPEN PROBLEMS
Wednesday, December 4, 13
Big but solvable...

23. 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
Wednesday, December 4, 13
Filip Pizlo works on JavaScriptCore at Apple

24. Wednesday, December 4, 13
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

25. 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
•
•
Wednesday, December 4, 13
WebCL, but safety is not optional
Rust on the GPU (Holk, et al. at IU)

26. Wednesday, December 4, 13

27. Wednesday, December 4, 13
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.

28. CALL IT EVOLUTION IN ACTION
Wednesday, December 4, 13
In the good way, not the Niven & Pournelle / Darwin Awards sad way!

29. 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
•
Wednesday, December 4, 13
http://extensiblewebmanifesto.org/

30. Thank you!
#extendthewebforward
Wednesday, December 4, 13

31. 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
Wednesday, December 4, 13
Ob. closing slide