Prominent Mozilla developers strengthen Palm's open web credentials

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Prominent Mozilla developers strengthen Palm's open web credentials

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 28 September, 2009

READ MORE: People/Management | Palm | Applications | WebOS

Palm may be floundering in its attempts to hit the iPhone with its Pre launch, but it is still attracting talent to its cause behind the scenes, raising hopes that future models - with a more evolved webOS platform and apps - could make more commercial impact (broader distribution would help too). Most recently, two leading web-based programming advocates have left open source browser group Mozilla for Palm, arguing the phonemaker's systems will be a strong platform for their broader ambitions - to weaken closed mobile environments like Apple's and promote the open browser-based model.

This makes Palm a somewhat uneasy bedfellow with Google - the leading flagwaver in the battle between browsers versus downloadable apps platforms. Of course, Google has its own Linux-based mobile OS, Android, which competes head-on with Palm's open source, but single-vendor, webOS.

The move by Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith to Palm, where they will be directors of the developer relations team, raises hopes that the open mobile web push is becoming less dependent on Google, which bodes well for continuing innovation and competition. The two friends and developers have gained prominence for their work running the Ajaxian site for complex web interfaces, and working on Mozilla's web-based Bespin tool for collaborative programming. WebOS is one of the most browser-based of mobile software environments, prefiguring many of the concepts that Google hopes to introduce to the PC and mobile worlds in future, not with Android but with Chrome OS.

The foundation for Palm Pre Apps is a WebKit-based browser, so its apps are basically web services. Almaer wants to accelerate and highlight this process and wrote on his blog: "We will have the responsibility of the developer experience with Palm. We will be trying to create a rich connective tissue between the company and the web developer community that we love." In particular, people like this need to work to make web programs as fast, richly functional and efficient as native programs - so far, they fall down on all three counts, especially on smartphones, but they are making rapid progress, as witnessed by the rise of techniques like Ajax and the opening up of important players like Adobe.

Galbraith also sees the work of Palm and others as an antidote to the way that some vendors use the mobile web explosion to seize power and control. "My enthusiasm for this amazing new world is tempered by some unfortunate decisions made by some of the players in this space," he wrote. "It seems that some view this revolution as a chance to seize power in downright Orwellian ways by constraining what we, as developers, can say, dictating what kinds of apps we can create, controlling how we distribute our apps, and placing all kinds of limits on what we can do to our computing devices." No prizes for guessing which phone/store giant he was referring to.