Blame cord cutters. Or cell phones. Or the rise of great original content. Whatever the reason, people now have an obvious and insatiable hunger for streaming online video and that demand is only increasing.

Whether it’s their favorite Netflix shows or must-see live sports, people want to watch more video. They want it now, on all their devices — computer, laptop, tablet and mobile — and they want it to be high quality. But what you might not know is that there’s been a battle going on behind the scenes over who is allowed to use the technology needed to bring video to the people.

For the past several years companies and creators have had to pay millions of dollars in licensing fees to use the technology that helps deliver videos to consumers. This makes it difficult or even impossible for creators to innovate on new platforms that deliver high-quality video.

We’ve been working hard to change all that, and today’s release of Firefox 65 marks another important milestone in that revolution. The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), a consortium featuring some of the biggest names in content creation, software, hardware, video conferencing and web technologies including Amazon, Apple, ARM, Cisco, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Netflix and NVIDIA, has developed and standardized a next-generation royalty-free video compression technology called AV1. In short, this will allow producers and consumers of content to access the best in video compression technology that was, until now, prohibitively expensive. Firefox 65 includes support for AV1 so any of that content can be freely enjoyed by all.

We think someone’s ability to participate in online video shouldn’t be dependent on the size of their checkbook.

It’s something we’re passionate about at Mozilla. Our engineers working on the Daala project spent years studying how we could create a better way to compress videos, and in the spirit of Mozilla that better way had to be open source so anyone could have access. To succeed however, we would also need all parties to ensure there would be no royalty fees. In 2015 we helped launch AOMedia to ensure that video compression technology becomes a public resource, open and accessible to all.

For this to work, it wasn’t good enough for the technology to be royalty-free. It also had to be superior to today’s royalty-encumbered alternatives and offer better quality for a large number of use cases. We worked with our partners to make sure that what we settled on creating could stand up against and surpass the existing alternatives.

AOM and AV1 were able to get to this point because this initiative isn’t just about software makers. We’ve also had hardware manufacturers on board, which means you’ll see the technology in cell phones, computers and TVs. The diversity of interests assures we have a wide enough market representation to push for this adoption and the follow through to actually implement it.

An open source and royalty free video codec is needed for video to thrive on the internet. If licensing fees become a relic of the past then the expensive barrier to entry for new content creators and streaming platforms will be eliminated. They’ll no longer have to fear the threat of patent lawsuits, and can move forward unleashed.

If this barrier to entry for online video services is removed, that’s a victory for consumers. Consumers get more choices as more start-ups will enter the marketplace with an ability to compete with the big companies who, until now, were the only ones with pockets deep enough to afford the fees to deliver high quality video online.

The AV1 format is already 30% percent better than competing formats such as HEVC and VP9, and we’re not done yet. We’ve only just scratched the surface of what is possible. The fact that this technology is free will push open the doors of innovation and supports our mission of building an Internet that is open and accessible to all.

So creators, grab your cameras and consumers, get ready to take your binge-watching to the next level, because streaming video on the Internet is about to get a whole lot better.

Mozilla Celebrates Release of Free, High-Quality Video Compression Technology AV1 in Firefox 65 was originally published in Mozilla Tech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We wanted Firefox to be faster. Much faster. But it’s not enough to just be fast — our goal was to make an overall better browser for the user. Why have all that speed if you’re not going to put it where the user wants it most?

I first shared our vision for “Project Quantum” last year. That’s the code name we used for our work to embrace a truly next generation architecture for Firefox, and for the web. Here we are one year later and today we celebrate the release of a new Firefox, the most powerful version of Firefox yet. Anyone who downloads this version, which is so advanced we call it “Firefox Quantum,” simply can’t help but notice the speed, performance improvements and the responsively slick new UI.

Firefox Quantum is the best browser for today’s modern consumers because we used only the best of the latest technology to build it. It’s fast because if you look under the hood, you’ll see each layer was crafted from the bottom up with performance goals at the center.

As Mark Mayo explained, Firefox Quantum is not only the fastest yet, it keeps you safe from unwanted targeting with the Private Browsing mode. This is quite the achievement from the only major browser on the market backed by a not-for-profit company. We’ve revitalized Firefox to be the perfect browser for the casual user or the developer who needs modern tools and maximum performance for their work.

And though today’s new Firefox represents an extraordinary advance in responsiveness, Firefox Quantum isn’t the end of our efforts. Rather, it’s just the start of a new era of Firefox.

We Called it Quantum

The central advancement for Project Quantum was parallelism, the benefits of which we’d seen with Servo, our high-performance browser engine project. The clear throughput and performance advantages of Servo convinced us we could create a new web rendering engine for Firefox with unprecedented security and responsiveness.

Servo unlocks your machine to give you the best web experience using modern techniques to take full advantage of today’s hardware. A large part of that is because we built it leveraging Rust, a safe and fast programming language pioneered at Mozilla to do a better job utilizing today’s multi-core processors. With Rust you get speed, memory safety and parallelism under its aptly true tagline of “Fearless Concurrency.”

A global team of engineers came together with one goal in mind — handcraft a rendering engine that can deliver all components of a web page in parallel on multiple CPU threads. As part of that we’ve had the added benefit of thousands of community members contributing to both Rust and Servo.

Projects like Servo and Rust are just some of the innovations we are working on inside Mozilla’s Emerging Technology group. As you may recall from our Project Quantum posts last year, we not only talked about building a transformatively better engine for Firefox but also our commitment to make those core technologies reusable inside other projects and applications, enabling an extraordinary range of user experiences and platforms well beyond today’s web.

We’re Not Done Yet

Firefox Quantum is an amazing step forward in part due to incorporation of breakthrough technologies from Servo, but it is only the beginning of the Project Quantum journey. Already you can find additional new components from Servo in Firefox Nightly such as WebRender — a recasting of the browser graphics rendering pipeline designed to take advantage of high-performance techniques perfected in state-of-the-art video games. Developers might be happy to know you can also see these latest updates to Quantum in Developer Edition.

We have our eye on other work in Servo and in Mozilla’s Emerging Technologies group as part of that future too. Ideas currently being explored further along the Project Quantum path include ways to apply insights on parallelization to other areas that will give users a delightful increase in responsiveness, such as prioritizing just those pages they’re interacting with, or the way the browser lays out a page.

We’re also coming back to embedding, a topic we highlighted last year, as we see opportunities to craft a diverse set of application experiences around our next-generation components. Those aren’t confined to rendering traditional 2D web content either, as we have for example demonstrated how Servo can enable a new class of 3D environments and power “mixed reality” head-mounted displays. And we’re curious how far we can extend the benefits of WebAssembly to bring both more developers and more assets to the web, leveraging a powerful new virtual machine at the heart of every browser.

At Mozilla we’re delighted at the progress we’ve made over the past year in bringing Firefox Quantum to fruition and we’re sure you’ll enjoy it too. We have much more magic up our sleeve, and hope you’ll continue to follow along with us as we strive to make the web work for good.

A Quantum Achievement: But it’s Just the Beginning was originally published in Mozilla Tech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Mozilla Developer Roadshow events are fun, informative sessions for people who build the Web. Over the past eight months we’ve held thirty-six events all over the world sharing the word about the latest in Mozilla and Firefox technologies. Now we’re heading to Asia with the goals of finding local experts and connecting the community. Some of our most successful moments have been when we were able to bring local event organizers together to forge lasting relationships. Our first Asia event is in Singapore at the PayPal headquarters on September 19. (Check here for a full list of the cities.)

I’m excited to be coming along and be part of some of those events and so wanted to know what to anticipate plus get a little perspective from someone immersed in the local developer community. To do that I chatted with Hui Jing Chen, a front-end engineer based in Singapore who speaks globally on CSS Grid.

Q: What would you like to have come out of the event in Singapore? Should we look forward to more opportunities for collaboration between Mozilla and developers in Singapore and Asia?

Hui Jing (HJ): I definitely want to have more collaboration between Mozilla and developers in this region (Southeast Asia). I am aware that a lot of the work on web technologies comes out from Europe or North America, and there are lots of factors at play here, including the fact that digital computing was kickstarted in those regions. But it is the WORLD wide web, and I think it is important that developers from other regions contribute to the development of the web as well. For example, WebRTC expert Dr. Alex. Gouaillard, runs CoSMo Software Consultancy out of Singapore, and they are the key contributors to WebRTC’s development. Understandably, it will take time for our region to catch up, but I hope events like this encourage developers in the region to not only be users of web technologies, but shapers of them as well.

David (DB): And independent of where the technology might come from, clearly the use of the web on a day-to-day basis is as much if not more so driven by what people are doing in Asia and the information (or experiences) they need. We know from our steady stream of developer relations efforts and our Tech Speakers activities that the more engaged we are with developers in this region the richer the web will be and the better sense we’ll have of where the web needs to go. So yes, more opportunities for collaboration would be marvelous!

Q: Meetups have been great regional allies for our Developer Roadshows — What are the unique cultural aspects of the Singapore/Malaysia MeetUp Communities?

HJ: My web development career has taken place completely in Singapore, so I can only speak about the Singapore meetup community, but I find that there is less “networking” at the meetups, in that, you’ll see pockets of people chatting with each other, but a large number of people show up to listen to the talk then leave immediately after. Maybe this happens universally, I can’t say for sure that this is unique though.

DB: That’s something we’ve heard and seen elsewhere too. In part that’s why we like the smaller, more frequent, more community-oriented approach we’ve taken for our Developer Roadshows as opposed to more traditional conference-style events. Our hope is that keeping it more intimate, hosting jointly with well-established local partners, and engaging with an existing local community will give people a more comfortable way of considering ongoing collaboration opportunities yet still have an informative core topic that brings them together in the first place.

Q: Tell me a little bit about some challenges working with and participating with the community.

HJ: I’m the co-organizer of Talk.CSS, which is Singapore’s CSS meetup, and in general, the challenge is in finding new speakers. The community in Singapore is really great, so finding venues is never the problem, it’s usually getting people to speak that is much trickier. I sometimes joke that I’m amazed I still have friends left because I’ve almost strong-armed all of them to speak at my meetup at some point in time, and they’re all too polite to say no. This could be an Asian thing, but people here are a bit more reserved, and if they’ve done something cool, they’re less compelled to stand up in front of everyone and share what they did.

DB: Hmmm, perhaps that’s something we can help you with. (And I mean the finding speakers part, not the still having friends part. :-)

Q: Every region has its particular special interests and strengths. What are some things that the Singapore and possibly Malaysian community does exceptionally well?

HJ: Singapore has an exceptionally strong tech community (at least from what I’ve heard from my friends outside of Singapore). This can be attributed to the efforts from key people, who we will hopefully meet in Singapore, who are super active when it comes to organizing events, helping out newbies, encouraging developers to start their own meetups, and generally just making the tech community in Singapore really vibrant.

For example, webuild.sg is the go-to resource for all the tech meetups in Singapore, which is especially helpful if you want to start your own. They also have their own podcast, where they interview developers on their respective areas of expertise. Engineers.sg was originally a one-man operation which records almost every tech meetup in Singapore, and has now expanded into an entirely volunteer run team.

DB: I wasn’t familiar with webuild.sg, but now that you’ve pointed it out to me I keep finding valuable and informative information on the site, for example on organizing events and contributing to open source. So it’s not only a vital resource for the community in Singapore but valuable elsewhere too.

Q: What expectations should we have as a team visiting from the US/Europe?

HJ: Locals are generally more reserved, in that, usually the people who ask questions or speak up more are foreigners from Western countries. There is a sizeable population of developers from all over the world here in Singapore, so meetup attendance is very diverse. It seems that most people are more comfortable approaching speakers individually after the talk rather than during an open Q&A session.

DB: Individual conversations afterward are something I know our presenters and Roadshow team like very much too. I think our format for the Developer Roadshow works well for that so am looking forward to meeting people and talking to them one-on-one.

Q: Diversity and inclusion are very much highlighted in our tech communities — is this an issue of discussion here in Singapore?

HJ: These issues are not as hotly discussed here as in America, I think, largely because Singapore has always been a multicultural society. I’m not saying racism and misogyny do not exist here, but I dare say very few people are overtly so. I think the gender ratio in tech is male-dominated all over the world, including here.

DB: Certainly this is an issue that varies by region, though we’re committed to expressing our support for diversity and inclusion across all developer communities. That means, for example, having a clear code of conduct for events to promote the largest number of participants with the most varied backgrounds. And we love having these Developer Roadshow events play a part in that, having heard attendees express their delight when they meet other folks from similar backgrounds or come to hear presenters with diverse backgrounds. I know from talking to other people about their company’s developer outreach efforts that we’re going to see even more progress in this space going forward.

Our Developer Roadshow events have been enjoyable and very popular, and I’m looking forward to the upcoming sessions in Asia. We’ll have more later on in the year in other locations around the world too, and by time 2017 is over will have held about fifty-five sessions — more than one a week. Hopefully one has been near enough to you for you to take part, and as we’re keen to keep the program will be again soon. Let us know if not, though, and we’ll see what we can do!

Mozilla Developer Roadshow: Asia Chapter was originally published in Mozilla Tech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

With today’s release of Firefox, we are the first browser to support WebAssembly. If you haven’t yet heard of WebAssembly, it’s an emerging standard inspired by our research to enable near-native performance for web applications.

WebAssembly is one of the biggest advances to the Web Platform over the past decade.

This new standard will enable amazing video games and high-performance web apps for things like computer-aided design, video and image editing, and scientific visualization. Over time, many existing productivity apps (e.g. email, social networks, word processing) and JavaScript frameworks will likely use WebAssembly to significantly reduce load times while simultaneously improving performance while running. Unlike other approaches that have required plug-ins to achieve near-native performance in the browser, WebAssembly runs entirely within the Web Platform. This means that developers can integrate WebAssembly libraries for CPU-intensive calculations (e.g. compression, face detection, physics) into existing web apps that use JavaScript for less intensive work.

To get a quick understanding of WebAssembly, and to get an idea of how some companies are looking at using it, check out this video. You’ll hear from engineers at Mozilla, and partners such as Autodesk, Epic, and Unity.

It’s been a long, winding, and exciting road getting here.

JavaScript was originally intended as a lightweight language for fairly simple scripts. It needed to be easy for novice developers to code in. You know — for relatively simple things like making sure that you fill out a form correctly when you submit it.

A lot has changed since then. Modern web apps are complex computer programs, with client and server code, much of it written in JavaScript.

But, for all the advances in the JavaScript programming language and the engines that run it (including Mozilla’s SpiderMonkey engine), JavaScript still has inherent limitations that make it a poor fit for some scenarios. Most notably, when a browser actually executes JavaScript it typically can’t run the program as fast as the operating system can run a comparable native program written in other programming languages.

We’ve always been well aware of this at Mozilla but that has never limited our ambitions for the web. So a few years ago we embarked on a research project — to build a true virtual machine in the browser that would be capable of safely running both JavaScript and high-speed languages at near-native speeds. In particular we set a goal to allow modern video games to run in Firefox without plug-ins, knowing the Web Platform would then be able to run nearly any kind of application. Our first major step, after a great deal of experimentation, was to demonstrate that games built upon popular game engines could run in Firefox using an exploratory low-level subset of JavaScript called asm.js.

The asm.js sub-language worked impressively well, and we knew the approach could work even better as a first-class web standard. So, using asm.js as a proof of concept, we set out to collaborate with other browser makers to establish such a standard that could run as part of browsers. Together with expert engineers across browser makers, we established consensus on WebAssembly. We expect support for it will soon start shipping in other browsers.

Web apps written with WebAssembly can run at near-native speeds because, unlike JavaScript, all the code a programmer writes is parsed and compiled ahead of time before reaching the browser. The browser then just sees low-level, machine-ready instructions it can quickly validate, optimize, and run.

In some ways, WebAssembly changes what it means to be a web developer, as well as the fundamental abilities of the web. With WebAssembly and an accompanying set of tools, programs written in languages like C/C++ can be ported to the web so they run with near-native performance. We expect that, as WebAssembly continues to evolve, you’ll also be able to use it with programming languages often used for mobile apps, like Java, Swift, and C#.

If you’re interested in hearing more about the backstory of WebAssembly, check out this behind-the-scenes look.

WebAssembly is shipping today in Firefox on Windows, MacOS, Linux, and Android. We’re particularly excited about the potential on mobile — do all those apps really need to be native?

If you’d like to try out some applications that use WebAssembly, upgrade to Firefox 52, and check out this demo of Zen Garden by Epic. For your convenience, we’ve embedded a video of the demo below.

If you’re a developer interested in working with WebAssembly, check out WebAssembly documentation on MDN. You might also want to see this series of blog posts by Lin Clark that explain WebAssembly through some cool cartoons.

Here at Mozilla we’re focused on moving the web forward and on making Firefox the best browser, hands down. With WebAssembly shipping today and Project Quantum well underway, we’re more bullish about the web — and about Firefox — than ever.

Special thanks to Ryan Pollock for contributing to this post.

Why WebAssembly is a game changer for the web — and a source of pride for Mozilla and Firefox was originally published in Mozilla Tech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

But, that doesn’t mean we’re all out of ideas in terms of how to improve performance and security. In fact, Electrolysis has just set us up to do something we think will be really big.

We’re calling it Project Quantum.

Quantum is our effort to develop Mozilla’s next-generation web engine and start delivering major improvements to users by the end of 2017. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of a web engine, it’s the core of the browser that runs all the content you receive as you browse the web. Quantum is all about making extensive use of parallelism and fully exploiting modern hardware. Quantum has a number of components, including several adopted from the Servo project.

The resulting engine will power a fast and smooth user experience on both mobile and desktop operating systems — creating a “quantum leap” in performance. What does that mean? We are striving for performance gains from Quantum that will be so noticeable that your entire web experience will feel different. Pages will load faster, and scrolling will be silky smooth. Animations and interactive apps will respond instantly, and be able to handle more intensive content while holding consistent frame rates. And the content most important to you will automatically get the highest priority, focusing processing power where you need it the most.

So how will we achieve all this?

Web browsers first appeared in the era of desktop PCs. Those early computers only had single-core CPUs that could only process commands in a single stream, so they truly could only do one thing at a time. Even today, in most browsers an individual web page runs primarily on a single thread on a single core.

But nowadays we browse the web on phones, tablets, and laptops that have much more sophisticated processors, often with two, four or even more cores. Additionally, it’s now commonplace for devices to incorporate one or more high-performance GPUs that can accelerate rendering and other kinds of computations.

One other big thing that has changed over the past fifteen years is that the web has evolved from a collection of hyperlinked static documents to a constellation of rich, interactive apps. Developers want to build, and consumers expect, experiences with zero latency, rich animations, and real-time interactivity. To make this possible we need a web platform that allows developers to tap into the full power of the underlying device, without having to agonize about the complexities that come with parallelism and specialized hardware.

And so, Project Quantum is about developing a next-generation engine that will meet the demands of tomorrow’s web by taking full advantage of all the processing power in your modern devices. Quantum starts from Gecko, and replaces major engine components that will benefit most from parallelization, or from offloading to the GPU. One key part of our strategy is to incorporate groundbreaking components of Servo, an independent, community-based web engine sponsored by Mozilla. Initially, Quantum will share a couple of components with Servo, but as the projects evolve we will experiment with adopting even more.

A number of the Quantum components are written in Rust. If you’re not familiar with Rust, it’s a systems programming language that runs blazing fast, while simplifying development of parallel programs by guaranteeing thread and memory safety. In most cases, Rust code won’t even compile unless it is safe.

We’re taking on a lot of separate but related initiatives as part of Quantum, and we’re revisiting many old assumptions and implementations. The high-level approach is to rethink many fundamental aspects of how a browser engine works. We’ll be re-engineering foundational building blocks, like how we apply CSS styles, how we execute DOM operations, and how we render graphics to your screen.

Quantum is an ambitious project, but users won’t have to wait long to start seeing improvements roll out. We’re going to ship major improvements next year, and we’ll iterate from there. A first version of our new engine will ship on Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux. Someday we hope to offer this new engine for iOS, too.

We’re confident Quantum will deliver significantly improved performance. If you’re a developer and you’d like to get involved, you can learn more about Quantum on the the Mozilla wiki, and explore ways that you can contribute. We hope you’ll take the Quantum leap with us.

Special thanks to Ryan Pollock for contributing to this post.

A Quantum Leap for the Web was originally published in Mozilla Tech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

(This piece was originally posted on March 14, 2016)

The Web is the platform for game development and we‘ve shown it in action at this year’s Game Developer Conference in San Francisco. Powerful new capabilities continue to emerge and gain mindshare with developers and gamers alike as the open Web games stack reaches ubiquity.

• Technologies pioneered by Mozilla, such as WebGL, WebVR and asm.js are all gaining momentum.
• Today, WebAssembly, the next evolution of asm.js, is available as an experiment for testing in Firefox Nightly.
• Launched at this past GDC, Open Web Games is a site for developers and browser makers to demonstrate modern Web game technologies, stress-test browser implementations and collaborate on maintaining the stability and evolution of the Web games stack over time using a variety of real-world games and demos.
• Next generation Web technologies such as WebGL 2, SIMD.js and Shared Array Buffer are also now available for anyone to explore in Firefox Nightly.
• To advance WebVR, Mozilla recently announced version 1.0 of the WebVR API proposal.
• Mozilla is investing in helping developers move titles based on plugins to Web technologies through the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) and direct engineering support.

Over the last year the industry has continued to demonstrate its support for the open Web stack:

• Unity, one of the largest and best-regarded game engines in the industry, showed that the Web stack is ready for prime time by removing the ‘Preview’ label from their amazing WebGL exporter which takes advantage of WebGL and asm.js.
• Autodesk, a leader in 3D design and animation tools, is showing a tech preview of Web export support with its Stingray game engine.
• Indy mobile developers like EVERYDAYiPLAY are expanding their revenue streams by building for the Web with games like Heroes of Paragon. They report Daily Average Revenue per User (DARPU) numbers that are much better for the Web version of their game than the Android Play store and are very competitive, relative to iOS.

• Major browsers have adopted more of the key APIs needed to enable the next generation of Web games. The industry’s top brands are coming out with growing support for the Web, making it easier than ever for developers to create for and succeed on the Web platform.

For more information:

• If you’re a member of the press and have a question, please email press@mozilla.com and we’ll help you out.
• To learn more about what Mozilla showed at GDC, read articles from developers or learn how to get involved, please visit games.mozilla.org

Open Web Games Pushed by Mozilla was originally published in Mozilla Tech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

These days it takes a diverse and complex collection of components to power a web browser. It’s fair to think of all those parts coming together as a single piece of machinery, and we often talk about our web platform as an “engine”. Mozilla’s web engine is known as “Gecko”, and is something we’ve been working on for over two decades.

Originally web engines existed purely to let you build a web browser — a stand-alone application you used on some computer whenever you wanted to access the web, just as you are doing now — and the web was all about documents. We’ve come a long way, though, from basic, static documents to the media-rich, highly interactive web you experience through your browser today. Developers have realized that web engines and their components have great value outside of browsers and have been embedding them in all sorts of clever ways.

For example, why confine all that compelling interactive web content inside a browser? Why not use it to build entire applications that can run on their own? And so we’ve taken web engines and embedded them into application frameworks. A good example of that is Electron, a framework for building cross-platform desktop applications using web technologies. If you’ve built a web page and thought about turning web content into an app you really ought to give Electron a try.

Web engine components can be embedded in other interesting ways too. JavaScript has become a powerful programming environment in general. Used in over ninety percent of web pages, it has started cropping up inside lots of other tools, from pure runtimes like Node.js to hardware development platforms like Tessel to text editors like Atom

Embedding web technologies is officially a thing. And it’s something we’ve taken a major interest in at Mozilla. One new effort all about embedding is Project Positron, wrapping the Electron API around Gecko. We have lots of core web technology work at Mozilla, including the Gecko platform, breakthrough new engine component development as part of Servo, independently exciting technologies like WebAssembly, and powerful new tools like the Rust programming language. As all those next-generation pieces converge, we want them to be embeddable so they can be generally useful to all developers — not just folks building web browsers.

A second new embedding effort is Project Spidernode, in which we’re exploring use of our SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine inside Node.js. We spend a lot of time enabling powerful new JavaScript features in SpiderMonkey as part of Firefox and want have them be available more broadly as well.

As a web engine builder, it’s exciting to realize that any piece of web technology these days might very well be great if embedded somewhere. In fact, that’s true of the entire web itself, and I think of today’s excitement about the Internet of Things as less about just connecting devices to a network and more about embedding the web — all of the web — into everything. Let’s see what we can come up with.