DougT’s Blog

Mitchell Baker spoke at Web2.0 yesterday.

Some of the highlights that I wrote down when I watched it (paraphrased):

“For most people the mobile web should be irrelevant…. there is only one web.”

Exactly. Wap is long dead, long live the web. (if you are still shipping wap content, the world is no longer flat, rejoice!) The point is that I as a user should be able to go to “wellsfargo.com” from any device/pc/whatever without having to think about adding “mobile.” or “m.” before the domain. It also means that as a web developer, I do not have to worry about a different protocol and a completely different way of building things.

“Firefox is the best and most effective platform for getting to that one web.”

Arguably, the application stack that Firefox is built on is the best platform for the web and the brand is second to none.

“We are building firefox for Mobile to spark innovation and excitement.”

Face it folks, innovation in mobile has not taken off as it did with the PC.. yet. There are many great ideas but going to market is really hard. Getting “on deck” or “in catalog” is many times a non-starter. Worse, operators basically have a chokehold on direct-to-consumer. Guessing here, but if these chokeholds were in place during 80s, the PC would not have taken off. (Sure there was “certification” programs that Microsoft had for boxed software, but developers did not have to participate to ship software).

“We need an open web based development platform to do this. We view Firefox as this platform.”

Mitchell, for the win!

My Stuff Search - Use Case

Mitchell also had a great use case of her usage of Firefox on the desktop. She routinely searches for “wheat free”, and the Awesome Bar searches her own history and bookmarks (as apposed to searching the web). Her need when she is mobile, is to access this exact content from her phone. Yeah, that feature must happen.

It was good to see Mitchell talking about Mobile. Our Mobile project is ramping up very quickly and we are making lots of progress. Now is a time to get involved! Please check out http://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile and see where you can help!