Firefox 4's bold, browser-specific move with HTML 5 audio API

Defending the 'Moz-method'

It's amid this chaos that Mozilla finds itself clamoring to
reassert itself.  With a much stronger PR campaign for Firefox
4 than for version 3.5 or any earlier edition, Mozilla hopes to
forestall Microsoft's message of speed, "beauty," and
standards-compliance.

But in so doing, it will probably have to answer for this: 
The new Firefox 4 experimental audio API will use the
browser-specific prefix Moz-, as in
MozAudioAvailable.  This is a method that
some Web developers have argued against, equating it with the kind
of "hacks" that make IE6 support such a pain for those still forced
to implement it by their superiors.

So Mozilla has an answer for the naysayers:  Firefox always
has been an incubator for standards, and incubators by definition
are kept tight and warm until their chicks are ready to be
released.

"As part of the W3C's experimental audio incubator, we are
working with other browser makers and Web developers to define a
standard for all browsers to implement," responds Firefox principal
engineer Vladimir Vukicevic, to our question on the prominent
prefix.  "During the experimental phase we use a 'vendor
prefix,' as the W3C encourages.  Developers who do
experimental work with the Moz- prefixed APIs will
provide us with valuable data about use cases that we can
incorporated into a final standard.  Once a final standard is
agreed upon, the Moz- prefixes will be
dropped. "Indeed, long-time Mozilla contributors are familiar with this
method of incubation.  It's currently in use in conjunction
with ideas such as events for responding to sideways tips of the
screen, as with devices like the iPhone.  And the history of
CSS is replete with instances where -moz- was
tacked onto trial attributes that were left unprocessed by IE.

But in today's more politically charged, if historically
apathetic, Web atmosphere, the taint of specificity can be confused
with outright exclusivity.  
Some commenters already greeted Mozilla's announcements last
week as "gimmicks."  Over on Slashdot, Firefox is being trashed by commenters who argue that Mozilla
is becoming a kind of clique, listening only to its most cherished
and preferred contributors while leaving suggestions on Bugzilla to
rust.

Firing up the incubator

Another case in point: Mozilla's increased promotion for
Direct3D hardware accelerated graphics in Firefox 4 for
Windows.  Direct3D is a Microsoft platform which, of course,
is unavailable in Linux or Mac OS.  For those OS platforms,
Firefox 4 will support OpenGL.  This actually isn't
news, and hasn't been for several months; still, last
Tuesday's Direct3D and Direct2D demonstrations were met with
skepticism on Slashdot.  Commenter Darkness404 wrote, "What good is having GPU acceleration that only works on one platform?  The
entire point of the trend of doing things in-browser is to
make cross-platform compatibility a reality.  If I wanted a
game to work just on Windows, why wouldn't I just make an
application that did that?"

Thus Vukicevic's public stance, which is to show Firefox as the
leader of a cross-platform effort that merely has yet to cross
platforms.

"Mozilla's goal is to deliver high-quality and performant
rendering of HTML content, including technologies like
<CANVAS> and WebGL," he tells us. 
"Under the hood, we leverage the best possible technology on a
given platform to deliver that experience.  For Windows,
Direct2D fit our needs and is comparable to Quartz on Mac and X
Render on Linux, which we already have been using in previous
versions of Firefox.

"For new functionality that requires 3D acceleration, we turned
to OpenGL and Direct3D," he continues.  "Direct3D is the
default method on Windows, as it currently provides the best
experience for the majority of our Windows users.  On all
other platforms, we'll use OpenGL to provide an identical level of
acceleration.  Our goal is ultimately to make sure that
developers don't have to think about the platform their application
is running on, and know that they can take advantage of the latest
HTML features to deliver a visually rich experience in their Web
applications."

Vukicevic pointed us to the blog of Web applications developer
Douglas Alan Schepers, whose current experiment with Mozilla's
trial audio API is an SVG-based
virtual synthesizer keyboard.  Last May, Schepers saw the
conference session where Humphrey and others first demonstrated
their experimental alteration to Firefox, exposing audio data
through API calls and events.  "I immediately knew I wanted to
see this as a part of the native functionality of the Web platform,
across browsers," Schepers wrote.  "In some ways, it's the
last major missing piece from the open Web: the ability to view
source and hack sound, the last commonly digitizable sensorium. I also knew that I wanted the use cases and requirements to
come from the larger community, the musicians and UI designers and
developers who will ultimately be the ones using this functionality
to sound out the depths of what's possible on the Web."

Mozilla's Vukicevic contends that, had that demo not happened
and had Firefox not enabled it to happen, we wouldn't even be
talking about opening the audio API to developers at all. 
"The current work to standardize audio in the browser at the W3C,"
he tells us, "is the direct result of Mozilla's willingness to
incorporate the experimental API."

This article originally appeared in Net1News.

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