1012: Who Decides What Ships on the Web?

Scott and Wes sit down with Jake Archibald from Mozilla to unpack how web standards actually get made at Firefox. From browser features and developer feedback to the drama around the Prompt API. They discuss Interop 2026, the future of web APIs, and what it’s really like shaping the web after a career spanning both Google and Mozilla. Show Notes 00:00 The Importance of Sunscreen 02:29 Welcome to Syntax! 04:35 Transitioning from Google to Mozilla 06:00 Brought to you by Sentry.io 06:43 Mozilla’s Current Position and Development Priority HTML Sanitizer API 08:35 Feature Implementation and Developer Feedback 13:12 JPEG XL and AVIF: The Future of Image Formats 18:06 Balancing User Features and Web Standards 20:56 Navigating the AI Translation Dilemma 23:03 Understanding the Prompt API Controversy 32:56 Rethinking the Future of Prompt APIs 39:00 Exploring Local Models and User Control 44:04 The State of Firefox DevTools 45:42 Browser Stability and Developer Editions 47:39 Introduction to the Heading Offset API 51:14 Interop APIs and Their Importance Headingoffset & Headingreset attributes 54:10 Developer Feedback and Browser Features Developer Signals 58:05 Animating Display None and Its Challenges 01:00:44 HTML and Canvas: Opportunities and Concerns 01:04:01 Sick Picks + Shameless Plugs Sick Picks Scott: Wes: Jake: Clues by Sam Shameless Plugs Scott: Wes: Jake: Bluesky Mastodon Threads LinkedIn YouTube X Insatgram Tiktok Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I'll tell you a story, and you want to put it in the podcast, and that is up to you. So we did an episode of, well, we did a series of HDB2 or 3, like, forever ago. And we filmed it out in California, because we were there for Google I/O at the same time. And one of the first episodes we filmed, because for some reason, we got a lot of budget and the crew that were, you know, filmmakers at heart. They filmed one of the episodes up at, like, a wine place, up a mountain thing, near San Francisco. And most of the shot was just us sitting there waiting for the light to be right, because it just, the cloud, you know, they hated it. But because we just sat outside, and my skin, even though it was overcast, I got horrendously sunburned.

• 0:43Speaker 00

  And didn't know, and I didn't notice until, until we, you know, got in the car for the, like, you know, on the drive back. And I felt the thing, I was like, oh, I know what this feeling is. Oh, no, I know what's happening here. And then within an hour, I was bright red. But this was the first day of a week of shooting. Oh, no. First day for a week. So I had an absolute panic. Like, I didn't sleep that night, because every hour, I set my alarm every hour to then go and dip my head in the sink of cold water. Because I thought, that's smart. That's something that's going to solve it. It gives the information. Did not solve it. So at like 4:00 in the morning, I panicked and just like went on to YouTube. And I was like, right, what do I do? What makeup solves this? Yeah.

• 1:21Speaker 00

  There was this, just really young girl, kind of like going, you know, I'm going to show you how to sort out sunburn. First thing you're going to do is you're going to moisturize. And I'm like, lady, I've been moisturizing all night. I don't know. And then, but then she was like, and first we're going to apply the green makeup. And I was like, tell me all of your secrets, little girl. Hell, yes, the green makeup, yes. Yeah. And it, and it sort, it sort of worked. You could tell from the end, I sort of look a little bit like Mr. Data in the next episode.

• 1:52Wes Bos?

  That's funny.

• 1:53Speaker 00

  Absolute nightmare.

• 1:54Wes Bos?

  Oh, that's, you know what the move is? Is put more sunscreen on. It has zinc in it, in it. It cools the skin. I've been sunburned many times.

• 2:04Speaker 00

  I have, I have been applying aftersun, and for this recording, I put some matte makeup. Because I am, I am a shiny boy. Like, I am a really shiny boy, just like at the best of times. If I put aftersun on, I look like... It looked like something's gone wrong with like a WebGL demo, right? The highlights are all sort of off. I look like a cue ball, you know?

• 2:24Wes Bos?

  There's our intro. Scott, take it from there. I think that's a beautiful way to open this up.

• 2:29Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. Welcome to Zintax. Today, we have Jake Archibald here. And we're going to be talking about web standards. We're going to be talking about Mozilla. We're going to be talking about Chrome, the Prompt API, and a whole lot more. I'm really stoked. Jake, I've been a fan of yours for a long time. I was a Sprite Cow user back in the day. So very familiar with your work forever and ever and ever. So if you don't know Jake, he has been around the industry, at the forefront of the industry for a very long time. And now, he's at Mozilla. So Jake, do you want to give the audience who isn't familiar with you a little bit of background?

• 3:13Scott Tolinski?

  And then now, what you're doing at Mozilla?

• 3:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure. I guess the short story, I started my career at the BBC. I was there for four years. And then I was, I worked at a web agency for a year, startup for a year. And then I went to Google where I was a Chrome DevRel for a solid decade. And then, then I left there and I've been, I was in, I was at Shopify for a couple of years. But then I, you know, I guess the short story is I missed web standard stuff a lot. So I'm now, I'm now at Firefox doing the DevRel thing again. I guess in terms of like, what are the big hitters? I suppose like I did a lot of the work around service worker stuff, fetch.

• 4:01Speaker 00

  And then sort of more recently, like view transitions and the, the linear easing

• 4:09Speaker 00

  thing in CSS where you can do like bounce easings and stuff. That was a kind of, and I knew I was kind of, I'm leaving Google soon, but I want one last thing. I want one last thing that I want in, and that was, that was that. So.

• 4:20Scott Tolinski?

  So many of the things that I love and use, man, that linear API rips. Big fan.

• 4:26Speaker 00

  Weird name, weird name, but it works.

• 4:28Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, weird name, but it works. So after a decade at Google.

• 4:36Scott Tolinski?

  What's it like to leave Google?

• 4:40Speaker 00

  That's great.

• 4:41Scott Tolinski?

  There was a time, the time before you were at Google and a time after. Yeah, so I've heard from other people who've worked at companies like that, that there's like almost trauma that you have to undo from working at these types of places. Does that, is that what it feels like to you?

• 4:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, the one thing I can't shake is I keep a meticulous work diary. So the way it would work at Google is you, you know, Perth would come up. And this is where you kind of like every half a year or whatever it was had to sort of essentially sort of justify your reason for having the job still. And I like, I could never remember anything. I like this thing would loom and I would be like, I'm going to get fired because I can, I can think of one thing for the last six months or whatever. So I would always keep a diary and then I, you know, end up going back through it and go, oh, no, okay, I think I might, I think I might just about get away with this. And I still keep that diary, even though like

• 5:38Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, wow.

• 5:39Speaker 00

  Other jobs where he's like, you don't need to be doing this is like, it's, it's in me now.

• 5:44Wes Bos?

  Oh, it's not a bad idea though. Like you hit the end of the year and go like, what did I do this year? And then you start kind of like going through and like, oh, I actually did quite a bit of stuff. I just forgot about all the stuff we shipped or all the projects we worked on.

• 5:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 5:59Wes Bos?

  That's great.

• 6:00Scott Tolinski?

  And if you want to see all of the errors in your application, you'll want to check out Sentryad, sentry.io/syntax. You don't want a production application out there that, well, you have no visibility into in case something is blowing up and you might not even know it. So head on over to sentry.io/syntax. Again, we've been using this tool for a long time and it totally rules. All right.

• 6:25Speaker 00

  But yeah, it's been, it's, it's like, so the role I have now is same, same, but different, I guess. Like it's, it's DevRel with, you know, bits of standards work, which is exactly what I was doing at Google, but yeah, things that are different is the number of people doing it and the budget that we have, you know? So that's

• 6:44Wes Bos?

  Yeah, let's talk about that. Like, like where is Mozilla? Where's Firefox at right now?

• 6:50Speaker 00

  Uh, yeah.

• 6:53Speaker 00

  I don't know. It's a big question. I like, I, I am.

• 6:58Speaker 00

  Still shocked by how quickly they move, we move, given the resources, right? Like that's, I actually, I'd say they, because I'm, it's not me implementing the features.

• 7:10Speaker 00

  And every time, like, you know, because I do these little videos about, you know, new features and it's like, it's not often that we're last to ship. And given the like relative budgets, um, you know, it's, it's, it's not a browser owned by a billionaire, which the others are, um, or the others which have their own engine are. And that's, that's, that's the other thing is like, you know, we, we're building our own engine here. The, you know, a lot of the other browsers are using an engine from a, from another. And yeah, so the, the amount that we're able to ship, given that sometimes we are last on features, but you know, a lot of time we're, we're, we're second or even first. And that's, it's, it's been wonderful to see that. I guess recently things like the, uh, the sanitizer API, we were first to ship that.

• 7:56Speaker 00

  Heading Offset just landed, which I would love to, to, to talk about. But then even sort of like the things like the temporal API, like we were, we were first to that as well. So, but then, you know, we, we shipped, um, style container queries recently and we were last there. That's going to happen. We, you know, we're, a, a big part of this role compared to Google is, is finding the priorities. Cause like that, that's, I'm supposed to be the connection between developers and the, the browser engineers. And so, yeah, like different to when I was at Google, I'm on the hook a lot for trying to, to find out what we should be working on. Like what's going to annoy people the least, like which order?

• 8:33Wes Bos?

  Yeah. That was my question is like, sometimes you see something just get shipped in like, oh, wow. That's, that's in Firefox now, or like a browser chooses to implement that early. And on, on the Safari side, you can often tell like, oh, that's, that's clearly something they needed internally, or they needed for like a web view or something like that. What, what does Firefox use to figure out what to focus on and what to implement next?

• 8:58Speaker 00

  It's, so it comes down to if, if we don't ship this, is it going to mean sites are broken in Firefox? And that's, that's a kind of number one thing, um, like, and it's, you know, are people, does it mean that? Google Meet is just not going to work or something like that because that's the thing that causes users to switch away. So that's really number one priority. And then from there, it's things like, yeah, what, what? What's the most bang for buck in terms of what we can, we can give developers to, to make the web better?

• 9:33Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. It seems like Firefox is taking this all a little bit more seriously in the past year. Is that accurate or is it, are they just doing a better job of?

• 9:45Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. I've been at Mozilla about a year. So if you're saying that, then I'm going to put that on my, on my little work diary.

• 9:52Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. I have not, you know what? It is funny because it, it felt like for, for so long as we've been doing this podcast that it's been a bit of a black hole. Like what are they working on? When are they going to ship? What? Yeah.

• 10:07Speaker 00

  It still is. It still is. And, and there are like, we're throwing around ideas internally to kind of make our backlog clearer. But one of the things I did last year is I got a bit involved in the Interop project and we shipped a little web form thing where, where it listed all of the things that were proposed for Interop and there was like, like 150 of them and let developers like pick as many as they want and rank them. And we used that to decide what we were going to push for, you know, in, in the meetings with the other browsers. And, and because, because that gave us like a, a ranking of all of the features, which

• 10:49Speaker 00

  was great, but we are still using that as a like, okay, there's a bunch of stuff that didn't make it Interop, but we've got this ranking that we can look at and, and, you know, developers have, have given us the information so, so we can use that. Unfortunately couldn't, couldn't get agreement in the Interop group to publish the results, but, but you know, I could, well, I can, I could probably leak a bit of it. What, what, what did you think came top? So this, so this went out like late last year and so it was just.

• 11:16Scott Tolinski?

  For 2026?

• 11:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, and we we got people to we use like an algorithm on the ranking and like we got, you know, we got the thing that sort of most consistently in the algorithm sort of came out top.

• 11:29Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, what what because we we covered Interop 2026. I don't know, I I

• 11:35Speaker 00

  Oh, I'll give you a clue. The number one thing did not make it into Interop.

• 11:39Scott Tolinski?

  Did not make it into Interop. Okay, that's a great question because I feel like I have such a different radar for what I want. I don't I don't our timeline, timeline animation, scroll, scroll animations.

• 11:54Speaker 00

  That did make it into Interop. That was number seven in our ranking.

• 11:59Wes Bos?

  Was it not haptics?

• 12:04Scott Tolinski?

  Haptics would be an interesting one.

• 12:06Speaker 00

  No, what in terms of the gamepad API or like?

• 12:09Wes Bos?

  No, that was more like a like a navigator dot. What's the the thing you can make the phone buzz?

• 12:15Speaker 00

  Oh, that's oh, yes, they're right. That is an API. Yeah. Do you know what? I don't think that was even on the on the list. But yeah, that is an API that is Chrome only, I think. No, okay, number one, temporal.

• 12:26Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah.

• 12:28Speaker 00

  By by a long stretch. Maybe there was some recency bias there. I don't know. But what the the an interesting way I cut the data was like, okay, like what if we reduce the the the analysis down to people who made only really because you could you could rank as many as you wanted. And it was like, if we make the the groups really small, if we only look at people who ranked very small groups like four or less, is there anything that seems to jump way up the list? Because I just wanted to be sure. Is anyone trying to meddle with the data here?

• 13:02Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, yeah.

• 13:03Wes Bos?

  Bottling web combat, yeah.

• 13:05Speaker 00

  One thing jumps up when you do that, when you analyze that, and it is JPEG XL.

• 13:11Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:13Speaker 00

  That's the thing that people came out to like, I'm going to put this top of my list and throw some other stuff in just a couple of right.

• 13:20Scott Tolinski?

  Can you tell us what JPEG XL is for the audience? Because I think it's kind of exciting thing.

• 13:25Speaker 00

  Um, yeah, it's a it's a new image codec that.

• 13:31Speaker 00

  Is haha, I think not as good as what we already have. Like it has, I think it's really good at low compression. Like I think it preserves detail if you're happy with high file sizes. In my opinion, it's, people should be pushing compression more. And in those cases, JPEG XL doesn't do so well. But we have, we have a, you know, an implementation almost ready to land. And Chrome's working on it as well. The implementation's a Rust implementation and that was kind of our requirement. Like we kind of pushed them to say like, all right, we'll support it as long as it's a memory safe implementation. And that was our requirement. JPEG XL has a really like it, it pushes.

• 14:18Speaker 00

  Okay, a lot of the image formats we have are kind of hand me downs from a video format. Right, that's, that's true for WebP. That's true for AVIF, like a WebP, it's, it's VP8, it's a VP8 keyframe. AVIF is an AV1 keyframe. Whereas JPEG XL is an image format, which is great. And one of the things we get through that is progressive rendering, because progressive rendering doesn't matter for a video format. Right? So you, it can sort of like give you a, a less detailed version of the image and it will sort of come in progressively.

• 14:53Wes Bos?

  As it's being downloaded from the server?

• 14:55Speaker 00

  As it's being downloaded from the server. But, and it, yeah, it's kind of like every few bytes you get, it will kind of give you like a new square of the, the image. And yeah, that kind of thing. But the AVIF folks have started to figure out progressive rendering as well. And they are doing it in a video way, which is like leaning on their video roots, which I think is really interesting. So you provide the progressive passes as frames. So that means you can decide what those frames are. So you can provide an initial frame for your image, which is a low resolution blurry version. Like it doesn't have to be the same image.

• 15:33Wes Bos?

  Oh, okay.

• 15:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it will use the whole sort of delta thing to then do the, the next image on top of that. So. Whereas like the the stuff in JPEG XL is much more granular, where with AVIF you can usually get a render much sooner and you're in control of what that render is.

• 15:52Scott Tolinski?

  Interesting.

• 15:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, I I it's it's kind of new. It's I've I've been playing with it. I've had to land like patches into into the encoder and I'm hoping that they're gonna release it like soon, uh, cause it works with existing decoders. But yeah, they like you can just generate a blurry version. Like if your image is like 150K, like it's a really high detailed image. You can get like a blurry version where you can tell exactly what the image is in less than 10K.

• 16:15Scott Tolinski?

  And so AVIF is supported in all major browsers currently?

• 16:21Speaker 00

  Yes. Whereas JPEG XL is only currently in Safari and they don't support the progressive rendering thing and they don't support animated JPEG XL, but animated JPEG XL is terrible. So no one ever should use it because it's it's kind of like GIF in its compression ratio.

• 16:37Wes Bos?

  It's just better to ship a video if you want animation. Is that is that the move?

• 16:41Speaker 00

  A hundred percent.

• 16:42Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 16:42Speaker 00

  A hundred percent. Yeah.

• 16:44Wes Bos?

  Man.

• 16:45Speaker 00

  But yes, we'll see. We'll see a JXL.

• 16:47Wes Bos?

  I didn't realize that video was also doing this. Like, does that mean that we would eventually maybe do away with having to like make a thousand versions of a video and then like stream in like the M3U8 where you have like a 420 and a 720 and a 1080 and it kind of adapts?

• 17:03Speaker 00

  I think the problem there is it's like you you you're still requesting a thing like and and so I guess you could maybe have a format that had them all in one, but the then the HTTP server is still gonna have to split that all out into one stream.

• 17:18Wes Bos?

  Oh, I see. Yeah.

• 17:19Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, M3U8 is like a playlist essentially. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Man, that's interesting. I had no idea AVIF was this well supported.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  Oh, it's I I'm a like they're improving their algorithms like it right now. I would say that the downfall of AVIF is like if you pick a if you decide, right, I'm gonna encode everything at quality 50, it will occasionally like make something look a bit over compressed. But they're about to ship a new algorithm for the quality setting. And it's actually based on some of the algorithms the JPEG XL people came up with. And it does improve stuff a lot there. It seems to come up with, it becomes much more consistent. I mean, it's great to see the competition there, right? Because that's, we're getting better stuff, thanks to competition.

• 18:02Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I want to ask about Firefox and like, just like end user features versus like, like web features. Because I often think about Firefox needing to get more people using it. And often you hear from web developers being like, well, they should be implementing this obscure thing. And I think like, yeah, yeah, of course, like it needs to be compatible. The web needs to work on this browser and whatnot. But like, another huge part of that is like, like regular people using this browser just want, want the features. They want an AI chat tab, or they want it to translate their Chinese into English if they visit.

• 18:42Wes Bos?

  Like all of those and like, when, is that the like, the same team working on Firefox of like, end user features and web? No, it's totally like, engine people are in a, in a different room.

• 18:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, and that's one of, so people have sort of said like, and there's been mixed feedback at best to some of the like AI stuff that's landed in Firefox. But the complaint that people have made is like, why aren't these people working on like, scroll driven animations instead or something? And it's like, well, it's not the same people anyway, right? It's not, that's not the way this is working.

• 19:16Speaker 00

  But yeah, and the end user features of Firefox, like if people want to send me like requests and stuff, they can. It's not, it's not the area I work in. I dipped into it, dipped into it very briefly because of the, the AI controls. AI Kill Switch, it was originally sort of being floated as, and because I really wanted that to land right. And there was, there was a lot of like, internally, we weren't sure what to do with translation. Because we were like, is translation AI? Because no one knows AI, right?

• 19:47Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 19:48Speaker 00

  It's just a term people throw around. And so we were like, if we, because if we put these controls in and it doesn't block translation, then people will say, you're cheating, right? You're sneaking AI in because it's, it's a machine learning local model, you know? In Firefox, it's a local model that does the translation because it's like, which is better for privacy, right?

• 20:09Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 20:09Speaker 00

  But it's not sending the text off to a, to a server. And so, yeah, I ended up doing like a poll saying, right, we've we've got this translation feature. What do you think? Is this? Should this be blocked? You know, by it? And people said, yes, it should be blocked by it, but I want to be able to re-enable it. And that was that was useful for me because the initial mocks internally didn't have that second ability. They didn't have that ability to to block everything but turn one thing back on. So, yeah.

• 20:36Scott Tolinski?

  That's good.

• 20:38Speaker 00

  Especially on like the Fediverse, if you if you mention AI, people get really angry. So that I kind of retired from that pretty quickly.

• 20:46Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, you just mentioned it. Yeah, and people people go nuts. I I guess that that's a good lead in to this whole prompt API business. So Chrome has been, I I'll let you kind of really get into the details here. But Chrome has been pushing through what is this prompt API? And there's been some disagreement, so to say, in the in the GitHub issues and the comments. And basically, their their entire process for for what is this prompt API? Can can you give our audience a high level overview of what the heck is going on with this thing?

• 21:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, so like, you know, Chrome has been looking at this API or developing this API since 2024.

• 21:36Speaker 00

  And I did a bit on a podcast, one of my own podcasts at the time, about this API. And I was I wasn't at Google at the time. I was at Shopify. And we took a look at this this API and we were kind of like, oh, this doesn't this doesn't feel great. You know, some I guess I wanted to say that because like all of the points that I've been pushing on recently are concerns I had in 2024, like pre pre Mozilla. So the prompt API is a it's an API where you create a language model. You can give it a system prompt and then you prompt it and you get a response. And it's like down to the implementation, whether it how it does that. Like whether it gets the stuff from a cloud service or whether it gets it from a local model.

• 22:20Speaker 00

  Chrome uses a local model. And so when you first request it, it will download this this four gigabyte model. And the user doesn't get like a permission request for that. That's something that a lot of people get angry about. I'm less, I can, I can see their view on it, but there is nothing. If you visit a website, there's nothing stopping it downloading four gigabytes, right? That's a capability that we just give every website. A browser could step in, I guess.

• 22:48Wes Bos?

  Yeah, you transform us JS, you can download a four gig model and run it right in your user's browser without any, any permissions.

• 22:57Speaker 00

  And you can store it locally, you can put it in the default system API or, you know, index DB if it will, if it will cope. But yeah, there are ways of doing that. And Chrome will only take the disk space if there's plenty of disk space available and it will, as far as I understand, purge it if it's not. But yeah, it gives you this, this LLM in the browser. The bit that we are worried about is like, it is a, just a non deterministic API.

• 23:26Speaker 00

  In the browser and we've had, we've had these before, we've got math dot random, right? We've, we've had non determinism before. There's, there's also the, the translation API, which we don't like the current API, the, the way the translation API is currently designed. But the idea of a translation API, we're, we're kind of warm to, even though there's, it's sort of non deterministic, but it's non deterministic within a lane. You know, there's like, there's a kind of, whereas this is just like a black box you throw text at and get text back. And I, and I'm sure, I mean, folks listening and, and you folks will know this, like, when you work with an LLM, you design the system prompt around that particular model.

• 24:09Speaker 00

  Like you will, you'll write a system prompt, which is what you want, like the behavior and the kind of things you want it to do. And then you'll test it and it will get some stuff wrong. And then you will change the, the system prompt accordingly. That's how you'll iterate. It's like, no, don't be like that or be more like this, be less like this. But you're designing it around one model. And that's where we think this doesn't work for the web because it means like, well, right now there's only one browser shipping this. But even if other browsers were shipping it, people will be designing around the most popular browser.

• 24:42Speaker 00

  And like, so I guess to give you an example, I've got this. Me and my other half, we've got a pool table. We play pool quite a lot and I created like a little thing, a little home assistant thing where when one of us wins, I have a language model which I keep, the system keeps the score and it speaks out of a speaker and it congratulates the winner and roasts the loser. Like that, that kind of thing.

• 25:07Scott Tolinski?

  That right, yeah.

• 25:07Speaker 00

  When I first did this, like I was, I would use OpenAI and firstly, it was, it used a lot of Americanisms. And so I was like, and because the speakers in my house are speaking with, it's the Google speakers, so they're speaking with a British accent. And I was like, well, that sounds wrong. So I started like, all right, remember that this is a British voice that will be spoken out of. And then like, it was, the voice coming out was like, blimey mateys, Jake's only gone and won a game. And I'm like, oh, what? Bloody hell, governor.

• 25:37Wes Bos?

  That's how you sound to us, yeah.

• 25:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:39Scott Tolinski?

  That is a little bit how you sound to us, I'm sorry, yes.

• 25:42Speaker 00

  So it was like more and more iteration, but I got it right. And then I switched to Gemini, kind of just because I was playing with it and also because it was cheaper. And it, like, it started doing things like,

• 25:56Speaker 00

  it would say, oh, you know, Jake potted the black and won the game. And it's like, wait, and that's not necessarily true. And it wasn't true when I first heard it. It's like, no, my, my partner pointed the black and a foul, which means I won. So, and I only sort of noticed that because I switched the model. So then I, I went, had to go then and, and update the system prompt for this new model. Now that's, that's because I was picking the model as the developer. Now that's not what's going to happen with the prompt API. The prompt API developer is, is writing the system prompt, but they do not know what is going to run it. And they like, and so the worry is like, even if a browser comes out with a better model, like it's, it's a different model, but it's, and it's maybe wins on certain benchmarks versus the, the Google model.

• 26:41Speaker 00

  All of the system prompts out there will be designed for Googles. So users will perceive it as worse. Even though it's better. And that's, that's kind of, and you can ask these models what they are. And I think this is what like a smart developer would do. You would say to the prompt, who are, what are you? What model are you? And then branch your system prompt based on that. It's just user agent sniffing again.

• 27:04Wes Bos?

  Yeah, we're back to that now. And then now Firefox is implementing hacks to make their, their, their model feel like WebKit model.

• 27:13Speaker 00

  Well, that's the thing is we would either have to like ship Google's model, which is, you know, everything just merging around a single engine.

• 27:22Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 27:24Speaker 00

  Or we would have to try and find a model that is, yeah, has built in prompt, system prompts that makes it quirk's compatible with Google's. It's, it's a problem we already faced just with web APIs in general, but it's multiplied like exponentially. So, yeah. Yeah. But the, the other part that we're worried about, and actually this is the one that kind of gets to me the most, is if you look at the, the Google's docs for this prompt API, it says like, if you're going to use this API, you must first acknowledge our terms and conditions. And this is no, this is an open web API, right?

• 27:57Wes Bos?

  Right.

• 27:57Speaker 00

  But it comes with terms and conditions that go beyond the law of the, the country you're in. These are just extra Google laws. And one of them is like, you know, you can't facilitate misleading claims related to a government or democratic process. Like, and it's, it's sort of vague. So I guess to give you an example, like if you use the prompt API to summarize an article that says the 2020 US election was rigged against Donald Trump through like the manipulation of voting machines and ballots, that sort of thing. And if you also use the prompt API to summarize an article saying the 2020 US election was not rigged against Donald Trump. Now, in one of those cases, you are breaking the Google terms and conditions,

• 28:42Speaker 00

  depending on which side Google believe.

• 28:45Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 28:46Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. So it, yeah, it becomes a Google API at this point.

• 28:50Wes Bos?

  Yeah. I, I feel that way as well with a lot of these, like I've been, I'm doing a talk on like MCP UIs and MCP apps coming up. And there's a lot of people in this camp that are simply saying, The browser is no more. We will simply be widgets that live inside of a chat. And then they have these these slides come up where there's OpenAI, Anthropic and Google on one end, and the other end, there's like Spotify, Airbnb and whatever. And I'm just sitting there looking at that, being like, I, I don't want to live in that world. I don't want to have to pay to use the web. I don't want to, I don't want to live in a world like we, we saw it already with the like the Apple iPhone where like they, the apps are sort of locked down to what you can do.

• 29:33Wes Bos?

  There's lots of cases and I don't, I don't know that I want this like governing body choosing what is able to do. And I know that they're not going to do crazy stuff, but they might.

• 29:47Speaker 00

  Well, so I use, I use AI in my coding and like, I gave a conference talk recently and I, I held, I was, I designed my slides in HTML and I, I was using a bit of Claude, a bit of Copilot. And as I was working around, like I was, I did something like, you know, say width equals blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I hit enter and I realized like, oh, I'm, I'm now waiting for the, for Copilot to do the height equals. Cause I've just become accustomed to that and it didn't. And I was like, oh, what's going on here? And it was like, Copilot, are you okay? And it's like, okay, it's, you know, everything's seen, you know, go to the GitHub status page. Apparently everything fine.

• 30:30Speaker 00

  And then I realized that in my, cause my notes are also in there and I had used the word in my notes and it turns out Copilot just gets all pearl clutchy and just.

• 30:45Wes Bos?

  Really?

• 30:46Scott Tolinski?

  Copilot more than any of them, Wes. Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

• 30:50Wes Bos?

  Oh, wow.

• 30:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. So that's the kind of, and it's like, well, you know, prettier doesn't do that. You know, like TypeScript autocomplete doesn't get all pearl clutchy on me. And so I do worry about that, that sort of stuff, that kind of like the neutrality kind of disappearing in, in this kind of stuff.

• 31:07Scott Tolinski?

  So what would a better prompt API look like in the eyes of Mozilla?

• 31:12Speaker 00

  I, I think it has to be more of these things that are, that are like. Having these APIs which are powered by AI seems okay as long as the scope of non-determitism is limited. So I go back to the translation API. The current Google proposal, or the one they shipped for translation, is just text in, text out. And we had a developer, I was saying, well, we think this needs to work on DOM, not just text. And we had some developer come to us saying, no, no, text is fine. I was like, okay, how are you using it? And they were just throwing HTML at it and getting HTML back and

• 31:56Speaker 00

  inner HTMLing that. And I was like, oh, boy. That's, that's, that's a security. And I came up with some cases where you could give it stuff which didn't look like HTML, but when you translated it from Chinese to English, it created script tags, you know?

• 32:11Wes Bos?

  Oh, man.

• 32:14Speaker 00

  So there's stuff like that. But I think, I think a translation API could work because people are like, it's something that browsers already have. And, you know, if an implementation wants to use AI to make it hopefully better, then I think that's, that's okay. I think it's the free for all prompt API is, I mean, maybe, maybe if things settle a bit between the models in a couple of years, then maybe we were like, okay, so this, this issue where the models are going to be wildly different, it would be less of an issue. But we're definitely not there right now.

• 32:50Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I honestly think that I, I love this idea of like a browser shipping a model because like, I would love to just use the user's local model on their iPhone or whatever for many of these cases. I think that there's, if it's free and fast, I think there's, there's lots of great use cases for that. Obviously, you bring up, up good points as well. But like, I don't know that we know what this API should even look like just yet as well. Like, that's another thing is like, let's not, I don't know if we should be pushing forward with some standard, which nobody's going to use in two years because it's, it's crappy and limited and doesn't do what we want to do. And then everybody just NPM installs something that's way better.

• 33:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's possible. I would say that the API design of it is, is actually pretty good. It's, so you can just do text in, text out. You can like, give it example conversations and define the roles of those conversations. And it's sort of stuff that you can imagine sort of being. Still helpful if a completely different paradigm to like came came about like a completely different system. It doesn't say it's a large language model. I think it just calls itself a language model. And so you can imagine in the future, like, you know, maybe that same API could be powered by something completely different under the hood. That that part I'm Yeah, it but when I complained, made noises about this in a couple of years ago, 2024,

• 34:12Speaker 00

  I was told that this was just going to exist as an API in Chrome Extensions. And I was kind of like, yeah, fair play. That seems okay. It's it would be a good place for this stuff to be experimented with. The API is in a decent shape. But that's another thing that we like really objected to Mozilla is like the the reason. So, you know, we objected, Mozilla objected, Microsoft objected. Yeah, so Mozilla WebKit, Microsoft. And then but the reason they gave for sort of plowing on is like the developer sentiment was strongly positive. But like, they had a link to the evidence, and it was like a couple of social media posts, a GitHub thing where they were asking for feedback and two people replied. And but they also had a

• 34:56Speaker 00

  survey, and they didn't they weren't clear about who they surveyed or like what the numbers were. But like developers gave the prompt API an 8.0 presumably out of 10. But that was for the API existing in browser extensions, not as an open web API. So we were very like this, that seems misrepresentative and misleading and that sort of stuff. So yeah, we were pretty unhappy about that.

• 35:22Wes Bos?

  On like a flip side, though, do you not see the this is just a thought I have. But do you not think that there is a a potential danger to the web right now if we don't have these APIs? Because if if like you can't do this stuff in a web browser, then people get pushed into like using it right inside of ChatGPT and using in an app. And we saw that with with native apps as well. It's just like, not a lot of people built progressive web apps because there was all these limitations for so many years. And I'm worried that will happen to the web as well.

• 35:58Speaker 00

  So I don't I don't have numbers. So this is a this is a made up fact, but people can can judge. Like, I would say the usage of AI is predominantly through a browser.

• 36:09Speaker 00

  Like when people are chatting to chat GPT when they're using Google search and using it like they're doing this through through the browser.

• 36:17Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 36:18Speaker 00

  Or even like in a native app, it's going, it's a web view, right? Like it's web, it's web tech.

• 36:23Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 36:25Speaker 00

  And and more to the point, it's not using the local model. It's using a model the developer can depend on. And when they want to upgrade the model, there will be a round of testing and tweaking the system prompt before they make that switch.

• 36:38Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 36:39Speaker 00

  On the public side. I just, I don't see a lot of native apps using the, you know, because on Android and iOS like they give access to these

• 36:50Speaker 00

  local models and they don't tend to get used very much. Certainly not by anything that's making big waves in the native app space.

• 36:59Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I'm just curious like what it looks like. Like I see a lot of people pushing the web into the chat, right? A lot of our stuff is being pushed into AI versus adding AI to our apps. You know, that's always the sort of catch 22. And I wonder like, like what else would be possible if this was now in the browsers? If you could do free, private, hopefully fast

• 37:27Wes Bos?

  prompting in via web APIs, I wonder what new features would then would then come up.

• 37:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, I guess what I would like to see then is like, could we have, you know, local models, but the developer selected?

• 37:41Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 37:41Speaker 00

  The user, there's some negotiation between the user and the developer on what models are available, what models the user is prepared to download and exist on disk. That would require, there's a sort of fingerprinting danger, right? Because knowing what models are available might tell you where the user has been before. And we don't like using four gigabytes per origin on this stuff is is bad, right? Like so, but I think there might be a way through those those issues. And that would sort of give us this. Yeah, this standard, or maybe even just in a couple of years, like I said, if the if the kind of difference between models settles down, then maybe that's a maybe that's a path forward as well.

• 38:21Wes Bos?

  Yeah, yeah, I could see that as well, especially like, I don't know, if Apple finally gets on their horse with this stuff and like ships like a sick one in the next OS update, you know, that covers a good chunk of it, you know, and then Microsoft will probably ship something. That would be great, but.

• 38:39Speaker 00

  Well, it's very telling that that Google, like if you're using Chrome on macOS, like Google will still like the Chrome will still download that four gigabyte model rather than go to the model that is right there already. So, you know, I think even the folks at Chrome want some consistency, like for themselves, maybe not for everyone else.

• 38:59Wes Bos?

  For their own sake, that's a good point.

• 39:00Scott Tolinski?

  Can you speak on like how Google is kind of pushing this through? And and how they tend to do that with some things that are not fully baked standards? What that what does that process look like? Is it just that they want this in there the way they want it? So they ship it and then everybody else has to deal with that after the fact?

• 39:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's really that. I mean, there was, I'm pretty sure there's no coincidence that this thing shipped sort of fast and loose slightly before Google I/O. Right, you know, the slides will have been submitted for the conference. That says they shipped it and so they had to go ahead and do it. Well, they didn't have to, you know what I mean? That that would have been that would have been the push, especially as, you know, Google's stock price depends on what they're what they are and aren't, are not saying about AI. So, yeah, I mean, the way they did it was just by going, you know, git push, like release and not really caring about what everyone else was saying and and sort of making spurious claims about developer sentiment.

• 40:05Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 40:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the best thing, well, you know, the thing we can do about that is. Is make a noise like sort of, you know, cha- challenge them about it like tell developers, look what is being done in your name, right? You you they they are saying you want this. And that's why they've done it. How do you feel about that? So so that, you know, even though they are just sort of doing what they want for the the company interest, at least make sure that people know that's what's happening.

• 40:35Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I wonder about like other APIs like I know Wes, we talk about things like web Bluetooth or web MIDI and those are two APIs that are both only in Chrome.

• 40:48Speaker 00

  Yes, but we just shipped cereal.

• 40:51Wes Bos?

  Firefox did that. Oh, I didn't even see that.

• 40:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. We just did. And I I think there's a strong chance that like we shipped web MIDI a while ago. And I I think there's a good chance that web Bluetooth and web USB will follow. We were against that for security reasons. But we feel like we we heard a lot from from our developer users. We have a strong community of tinkerers. And, you know, so we listened to their feedback on it and we felt like we found a way that expressed to the user exactly what they were letting themselves in for. And so, you know, we hope they're sort

• 41:38Speaker 00

  of like, you know, reading those dialogues and yeah, only accepting access to devices when they really want it. But a point that I've heard the Chrome folks come up with, which I think is actually valid, is is that having the stuff in the browser is ultimately safer than having to install a native app for it. So like the few devices that I have, which will do like firmware updates in the browser, I'm like, yeah, do you know what? I would rather that than have to download some some app.

• 42:11Wes Bos?

  I use these like, here, I got one right here, at least little ESP32s. And I flash them all the time with just different little firmwares and whatever for Home Assistant. Like, I used to have to download these like sketchy Java applets from Chinese websites to like, do stuff, or it would only be Windows. And now you like, you visit a website, you plug it in, you hold a button sometimes, and it just flashes a microcontroller from the browser. Unbelievably good experience.

• 42:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think, I think that's good. And yeah, the, you know, the web serial API can, can do that with the ESP32s. So that, that bit is now in Firefox.

• 42:51Wes Bos?

  That's sick. I didn't realize that. Do you think like Safari will ever, I know you don't work for Safari or whatever, but you maybe have a scoop into the standards process in Safari. Do you think that they'll ever ship this type of stuff? Or like, what's their hang up on the, these things?

• 43:06Speaker 00

  Uh, they, they, I mean, they still surprise me every now and then. I was, I was surprised when they shipped JPEG Excel, for example. But I, I've, I don't see, I don't see this one landing in Safari. I think it is just, it's, I don't think they have the same community of tinkerers that Firefox does. And I think they're kind of like, as a company, generally happy with native apps. So I, I, again,

• 43:38Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 43:38Speaker 00

  You know, I'd love for them to surprise me on this, but I don't see it.

• 43:42Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, that's the bummer. I, I mean, Web Mini for me is, because I'm like a music guy. So Web Mini for me is one of those ones where I'm just like, please Safari, come on. But I know their stance on it. And yeah, it's frustrating to just kind of know that, like you said, they're happy with their native apps. Yeah, that's a bummer.

• 44:01Wes Bos?

  Firefox DevTools, fantastic. Just visually, they're the best. And also, like, for many, many years, I was using Firefox DevTools because they were simply the best.

• 44:14Wes Bos?

  I don't even know what my question is here, but like, like, is that a different team as well? Like, what's the thoughts on dev tools inside of Firefox?

• 44:24Speaker 00

  So that team is much closer integrated with the, I mean, it's a different team. Like, like it isn't in, well, certainly in Chrome as well. Can't speak for Safari, but like, it's, it's very closely integrated with the, the development of, of web features.

• 44:40Speaker 00

  Again, it's a small team, you know, it's a very small team. So like, it's just sort of constrained on resources more, more than Chrome's, I guess. But yeah, on that, like, if any, if there's any sort of dev tools things that, that, you know, people see that they think is less useful than it could be. Or if there's something missing, then yeah, just throw, throw them over. I mean, you can either file it on Bugzilla, which is a bad user experience, or you can like, send it to me on social media and I'll go through the bad user experience on your behalf. But yeah, I, I'm, I'm a, I'm a big fan of it. I like, I use, like, my sort of daily driver is Firefox Nightly. Cause you're playing around with sort of new features and, and the dev tools there.

• 45:25Speaker 00

  And I would say like, if anyone listening sort of believes that it's kind of wants to help the Firefox mission, I guess, is, uh, one thing you can do is, is run nightly. And then sort of file any bugs you see. Firefox Nightly is so much more stable than Chrome Canary and WebKit Technical Preview, Safari Technical Preview. And I, and that's not a brag, that's just a kind of fact. Cause I, I mean, I used to run Canary as, as my sort of daily and you would go through like periods where it was just, it would just crash every tab, which I think is fine. It's a, it's a Canary, right?

• 46:01Wes Bos?

  I had to stop using it after all the web GPU stuff was in testing, so it kept crashing.

• 46:06Speaker 00

  Exactly, I think that's a perfectly valid way for a nightly browser to behave. But I just like Firefox nightly does not do that. So like it's this is kind of much more kind of like focus on stability. So so that, yeah, that's it's a if you want to sort of be playing around with new features or sort of help by filing bugs. Then that's that's something you can do and you can largely largely run it as your daily driver.

• 46:29Wes Bos?

  That's better than like Firefox Developer Edition. I guess nightly is updated more frequently.

• 46:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, so this this we're still sort of figuring out what we want to do with Developer Edition. Developer Edition is beta.

• 46:41Wes Bos?

  OK.

• 46:41Speaker 00

  Now, originally wasn't. It originally was was closer to nightly. They used to have another channel called Aurora, which is which is what Developer Edition was on. But it's now it's now running.

• 46:52Wes Bos?

  OK.

• 46:55Speaker 00

  Which is fine, but like I I I'm not. I don't think we're getting anything useful out of Developer Edition right now, apart from it having a really cool icon.

• 47:02Wes Bos?

  It is cool.

• 47:03Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, it does have a good great icon.

• 47:05Speaker 00

  I think I think it's there's a problem I have with it is like.

• 47:10Speaker 00

  I think developers, particularly web developers, are notable by not using an addition of a browser like. You know, I've I've got like five or more browsers open right now, and that's because I'm a developer. So they like, yeah, I think sometimes like a browser saying, well, the addition for developers is like, no, you're not like all of them are.

• 47:28Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 47:29Speaker 00

  That's because.

• 47:31Scott Tolinski?

  All of them are right, yeah. That's, yeah, I I'm I'm curious about an interop. You had mentioned we'd gone over some of the things, but you had mentioned one heading offset as an API. I wanted to make sure we hit on that because I'd never heard of this. And then, two, I wanted to talk about some of the things in interop that you're most excited about. So can you explain what this heading offset API is first? And then maybe tell us about what your favorite new.

• 47:57Speaker 00

  Yes, sorry, heading offset, we just landed in in Firefox nightly in the last few days. And it's it's something I have wanted for.

• 48:07Speaker 00

  God, when when did HTML five come out like because HTML five sort of promised this feature but didn't deliver it.

• 48:14Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, 2010, 2011.

• 48:16Speaker 00

  So a long time ago. So heading offset lets you offset the level of all headings within the element. So it's it's an attribute. Heading offset one. And that means all H ones in there become H twos. And like all H2s become H3s, whatever. And the reason I've always wanted this is, is like, if you were dealing with, well, sort of way, way back when, when this use case first hit me, I was dealing with SSI includes in like Apache or, or whatever. And so it's like, well, what heading level do I use in my include? And it's like, well, I don't know. And, and then, you know, maybe the, you know, the include would be moved around the page.

• 49:01Speaker 00

  And suddenly now the headings within that include are now all wrong compared to what they were. A more modern version of that problem is Markdown, right? You'll, you'll have your Markdown converter, like, take the H1 headings in the Markdown and turn them into what? Like, you, you'll have something maybe that offsets them in your build process. Whereas with this, what you can do is just say, well, just offset them by, like, you're, when, when an H1, when there's an H1 in the Markdown, just output an H1 in the HTML. Doesn't matter, because then when you put it in the page, you can have like a, a parent div or whatever. And you could say, offset, because you'll know, like, you know, just before that, there's an H2.

• 49:44Speaker 00

  And you can say, right, offset all the headings in here by 2.

• 49:49Speaker 00

  And it will normalize it. And that's, it just makes that sort of, I mean, I guess, as well as Markdown, it's, it's components, right? A React component, what heading does a, does a React component use?

• 50:00Wes Bos?

  Right.

• 50:00Speaker 00

  And it's like, now it doesn't matter, because now the, the caller of it can wrap it in the thing. And like, you, you just, just make sure, whenever you use a heading, you, you, you put a div around all of the child content and offset the headings. And then you can just, you know, in your component, use, start with H1. And everything will just work, because the, the offsets are all there.

• 50:19Wes Bos?

  We need that in our own show notes as well. We had our, our show notes, we were using an H1 for like the title of the show. And then we parsed the Markdown into our website and the H1 is syntax. It's the title of the website. So we had to like offset them all and

• 50:35Scott Tolinski?

  In H1, yeah, yeah, right, yeah. Or even, yeah.

• 50:38Speaker 00

  So that's, that's it. And, and so if you, if you're just in that habit of, of offsetting everything, then it will just work. And if, if someone Then goes and moves that include somewhere else where you're not having to then go into your markdown build system and correct the offset because it will be like as part of your HTML. Yeah, and with it, you get like a CSS selector for heading level. So rather than selecting the H1s, you can say, I want to select the level one headings or the level two headings. So it doesn't matter what tag they have. It will be what, you know, in terms of what is exposed to it, like accessibility layers, that particular level, which is really nice. So yeah, I'm looking forward to that. Yeah, so interop and now I'm just looking at the interop site to remind myself.

• 51:23Speaker 00

  What am I gonna say? I mean, I know cross document view transitions are in there, so that's, that's, that's an easy one.

• 51:32Speaker 00

  But what I'm, what I'm going to say.

• 51:38Speaker 00

  Now, you see, what the thing I am really excited about, which didn't make it into interop, is custom select, but we are working on it. But the things that were in interop was anchor positioning and popovers, which are the building blocks for custom select. And so this is, this is being part of the process of like deciding what features should have priority in Firefox. And, you know, when someone comes to me and says like, I really want text box trim, and someone else comes to me and says, I really want cross document view transitions. One of the things I need to sort of like think about is, well, hang on. If we don't ship, or if we're a bit later with cross document view transitions, people can still ship a site.

• 52:21Speaker 00

  It just means those animations don't happen in Firefox. The experience isn't broken. Whereas if we don't ship text box.

• 52:28Scott Tolinski?

  Right, yeah, yeah.

• 52:30Speaker 00

  Either the layout is going to look a bit bad in Firefox, or the developer is going to be angry that, you know, they can't use this lovely feature because Firefox is letting them down. So that's, that's, so that's kind of where I'm, where I'm thinking there. Like, my, my heart is with view transitions. Total bias there, but I, I look at pop over and anchor positioning and think like that's.

• 52:52Speaker 00

  Those are the key ones. And we have, we've already shipped both of those. Which is nice.

• 52:57Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, that's, I mean, I think that was one of the things I liked most about the transition to the view transitions API is that simply by including it, you weren't breaking the experience for any site that didn't use it. And that that that's such a great way to be able to implement things and obviously like progressively enhance them as something that, you know, we've been doing our whole career.

• 53:18Speaker 00

  It took me five years to persuade Chrome that that was an important feature that should be shipped. And I was quite I was quite moody about it afterwards. When, when we, when we sort of like started shipping it in Canary and all the developers were really excited about it. Well, a lot of developers were really excited about it. And an email went around and it was a very well meaning email, but by that stage in my Google career, I was quite grumpy. Like the, the one said, it's like, well, it's, we are so surprised by the developer reaction to this. And I was like, and I did reply. I was like, are you? Because I am not. Because I have been telling you for five years that this is what, you know, anyway, that's.

• 54:00Wes Bos?

  Does that mean?

• 54:01Speaker 00

  It did ship.

• 54:01Wes Bos?

  Everybody whining online about stuff like that, that does make it back to the browser vendors. Like I often think like, anytime you, anytime I post anything about like a new API, you get all these replies of people being like, this API sucks. I was like, where were you during like the standards process, you know, but like, I guess like that stuff does eventually make it back to them.

• 54:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's difficult, isn't it? Because there's always some recency bias, like someone will post like a cool demo or something. And then, and then see, you hear a lot of like, you know, you know, we want that now. And it, and we have to sort of filter that through like, yeah, how much recency bias is there here? What's the, what would be the downside of us like dropping everything and working on that versus like shipping the other stuff we have, we have planned for. But yeah, we, I mean, the whole part of sort of my role at Firefox is to be listening to that stuff. We're very careful with like avoiding.

• 55:02Speaker 00

  Um, mobs, I guess, because that can happen. So we have this GitHub repo called "Developer Sentiment" or something like that, he says, trying to find a doc where he might have written it.

• 55:16Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 55:17Speaker 00

  What was it called? Um, yeah, it's sort of like, we've got a repo for like developer feedback. Let me, let me look it up. Developer something. Oh, I'll, I'll get a link for it. Oh, Developer Signals. There we go. Right. So, and that's somewhere, it's got all, it's got an issue for all of the web features which aren't across all browsers. And developers can go in and like, you know, say what they think. And one of the, like, before I started um, at Mozilla, they were just counting thumbs up on the issues. Um, and that was something I didn't agree with because it's very easy for, well, Wes, someone like yourself, like to post on

• 55:55Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 55:56Speaker 00

  like, uh, social media.

• 55:56Wes Bos?

  Happens all the time.

• 55:57Speaker 00

  Like, why isn't this feature supported? And then a bunch of people will go on and click that.

• 56:00Wes Bos?

  I use that to my advantage all the time. Yes.

• 56:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Well, so do I, right? So I know, right? Um, so one of the things I fought for is that, like, you, you can still do that. You can still do the thumbs up, but it's a lower signal. And whereas the, we, we're encouraging developers there to, uh, you know, we've given a little bit they can copy and paste, um, a little template, which is like two headings, like, what I want to do with this feature and what I'm having to do in the meantime. And, and because, you know, that, that seems like a nice balance because it's, you know, for, for cross-document view transitions, say, it's like, what do I want to do for this feature? Nice transitions between pages. I don't need to make an SPA to, to have them, blah, blah, blah, blah. What am I having to do in the meantime? It's just like, well, just not have those animations in Firefox.

• 56:45Speaker 00

  And we might go, yeah, okay. Well, compared to some of the other ones where people are saying, I'm having to include like a 300 kilobyte library to da, da, da, or like, all right, okay, that's more interesting. And we get a bit more information than just a thumbs up.

• 56:59Scott Tolinski?

  I've got an API I would like to, uh, give a thumbs up here in this chat, which is, I'm sure you're aware. I actually saw you respond four months ago on a Mozilla bug thing, but just transition display with a loud discreet.

• 57:11Speaker 00

  Well, so, so here's, like, I put, I put a poll out today, actually, um, where, because it, there's I had some discussion with the teams internally, uh, about like, some recent priorities, because I was, I felt like maybe they were sort of not quite right. And so This used to make me laugh. We used to have project managers at Google who would say like, "The feature I'm championing is the most important." Because I went onto Twitter and asked people, "Are you interested in this feature?" And everyone replied, "Yes." And it's like, "Right."

• 57:43Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 57:43Speaker 00

  I, as a developer, if you ask me if I want something, I'll say yes.

• 57:46Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, you made the mom.

• 57:48Speaker 00

  Of course. So one of the things here, I did a poll of like, you know, "Which of these would you like first? Is it line clamp, margin trim, or animating display none?" And so, Scott, I'm taking you as a vote for display none out of those? Or what do you think?

• 58:05Scott Tolinski?

  Okay. I would vote for display none out of those, yes, because I have so many use cases for that, personally, whether that is drawers or modals or animations.

• 58:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's reasonable. Like, so line clamp, like, we already support WebKit line clamp, and it's just, but it's just, it's quirky, right? It's trying to copy the WebKit behavior, which is quirky. So my view on that is like, well, but people are coping pretty well with that in most cases. And then you've got the animating display none, which is like, yeah, it solves a real problem, but then the downside is like, if Firefox doesn't support it, then maybe in Firefox, the modal just disappears. Okay, okay. And then margin trim, it's like, right, like, working around the lack of margin trim is much harder, but then not a lot of people need it. So that's, that's the kind of difficult bit, is it's getting that balance. But I think I

• 59:01Speaker 00

  agree with you that it's animating display none is the one I'm most excited about. And that seems to be what people are saying.

• 59:06Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, well, to me, that like, that's a barrier for people who they reach for React when they could be reaching for, you know, CSS.

• 59:16Speaker 00

  So what I fought for, a part of that feature, that animating display non thing, and the people working on it got pretty annoyed because I think I came in pretty late. So what I wanted is that when the feature is animating, when the element is animating from block to none, or whatever, to none, during the animation, it is inert. And the reason for that is I wanted to avoid the problem a lot of people create when they hand draw this. And the problem they create when they hand draw it is that period of time where both things are on screen, or like you've... You've hit OK on the modal and it closes, but it hasn't really closed because it's got to

• 1:00:00Speaker 00

  transition away. And then maybe what the user double clicks and the code beneath it is not expecting the ability to double click because you've clicked the button and then the thing's gone. But if you don't correctly make it inert, then that becomes a possibility and someone can just go and add one of those transitions and then all of a sudden you've broken a lot of accessibility. You've broken these like edge cases in UX. So that was one of the changes I had sort of made to that feature. But it is also one of the reasons it's a little trickier to implement. Sorry.

• 1:00:31Scott Tolinski?

  See, for me, it's really easy to just say, oh, I want this. Can I have this, please? And then not have to think about any of all that stuff. So thank you.

• 1:00:39Speaker 00

  I don't implement them, so I get to do this. It's fine.

• 1:00:41Wes Bos?

  Have you? I know we're running out of time, but I'm curious to ask about HTML and Canvas. Have you been following any of that?

• 1:00:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, so this is one where I'm exactly like Scott on this where I'm like, I like this. Can we ship this right now, please? And I think so we're a bit more split about it internally at Mozilla. Like, there's a sort of worry that a lot of people are going to do bad things with this or things that are going to like certainly give trouble on lower end devices.

• 1:01:17Wes Bos?

  I've done some unspeakable things already. I agree.

• 1:01:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the developer years that goes into deciding how and when to upload an element or part of an element as a GPU texture, like years of developer hours have gone into that. And these people, a lot of these people come from game dev, like with that experience to implement this in browsers. And with HTML and Canvas, we just give you the key to the castle on that and hope you get it right. And like, yeah, a couple of people, because I like the API, I play around. So the videos I do, the little feature videos I do, I build those in the browser and it's HTML and Canvas that lets me. Like capture the frames and pipe it to the video encoder API.

• 1:02:03Wes Bos?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:02:04Speaker 00

  So like, I, I do like the, the, that API for that. But yeah, people were saying like, oh, so does this mean like, I can render a page faster? Because I can do it with web, web GPU or WebGL. And like, no, it's gonna be slower. It's gonna be slower because you're probably not as smart as the years of developer hours that have been spent in, in optimizing this stuff. And I'd like, you know, no insult to them because I, that's true of me as well. Like, I'll just like throw textures at it and hope it works, you know? But I do, I do like, I, I like, again, it's another thing that I pushed for when I was at Chrome, but was like unsuccessful there. So it's, it's nice to see it. Yeah, it's nice to see it being developed. I don't expect it to be something that lands quickly in Firefox, but it's one of those ones.

• 1:02:49Speaker 00

  I'm, I'm happy that Chrome is pushing on it.

• 1:02:52Wes Bos?

  Cool.

• 1:02:53Speaker 00

  And we've been like, even though we're slightly unsure about it as an API, like we've been like helping with the API design around it. So I did some research around like text selection, like is there a need for a, a new API around that? But it like, it, it turns out you can just kind of transform the real element around. And even if you've got like an element on a sphere, mapped on the sphere, you can just keep transforming the, the underlying element. And text selection will work on a, on a, you know, on a sphere, which is, which is really nice. We've, one of the changes we got into the API was that we ensured that the element goes through the normal rendering pipeline in the browser. So that the one of it, you could just go like paint this element to this canvas in its current state.

• 1:03:38Speaker 00

  But that would be like a bit of a flip of the coin, whether things like resize observers or intersection observers have run. So that was one of the things we fought for is like, is a, a proper render loop for the API, which they, which, which they've done. It's good. Yeah, I'm, I'm pretty happy with it.

• 1:03:54Wes Bos?

  Awesome. Um, all right, we're running up on, on an hour here. Let's move into the last section, uh, which is sick picks and shameless plugs. Uh, I don't know if you came prepared to sick pick or not, did you?

• 1:04:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've got, I've got some ideas.

• 1:04:08Wes Bos?

  All right, laying on us.

• 1:04:09Speaker 00

  Frantically wrote some down. Also, like, it's, it's a heatwave in the UK, uh, right now. So I, I, the first thing I wrote is Japanese sun cream, cause as a, as a, as a, the whitest man in any room.

• 1:04:20Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:04:20Speaker 00

  Uh, it's the, it's, it's the best. Um, anything that has sort of Aqua in the title.

• 1:04:26Wes Bos?

  Yeah. What, what's your, uh, go-to there?

• 1:04:28Speaker 00

  Uh, so there's a couple of ones. There's a Nivea one, uh, which I quite like. Uh, it tends to be a little cheaper. Um, but then, yeah, there's a, there's another one called, what is it? Like, Boyer? Is it pronounced UV Aqua Rich something, something?

• 1:04:41Wes Bos?

  Yes, yes. Sun cream is such a nice. I do have some of this, yes. You Brits have such nice words for everything. Sun cream. What do you call the windshield? Wind, windscreen?

• 1:04:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, windscreen. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:53Wes Bos?

  Yeah. The bonnet.

• 1:04:57Wes Bos?

  It is.

• 1:04:58Speaker 00

  The bonnet. Yeah.

• 1:04:59Wes Bos?

  The bonnet. Yes, the bonnet.

• 1:05:00Speaker 00

  The, the other one, the other things I panicked wrote down was like, I was just sort of looking around and, uh, um, uh, I, I really like the, the game TrackMania and it's, it's, it's really, have you ever played it?

• 1:05:12Wes Bos?

  Hmm.

• 1:05:13Speaker 00

  I, I like go-karting and I have never played a game that gives me as close to the feeling of, of go-karting as TrackMania does. Cause it, it has that sort of, um, you, you, you know, the tracks are really short and as soon as you mess up, you'll just press the reset button and go back to the start and, and try again. And so it has that kind of like Celeste or Super Meat Boy sort of feel to it, but, but in the car game. Um, but what I decided to go with is Clues by Sam, um, which is just, it's, yeah, daily game. I, I still, I play it every day. It's, it's been fun to see that the guy develop it, uh, as well. Like and add new ideas, but it's, it's, of all of those daily games, it's the one I. Play most, uh, most religiously, I guess.

• 1:05:55Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, man. Uh, folks, if you're, if you're not on Clues by Sam, it's, it's just, it's also, I also do this one daily. That's the one I, the only one of these I do daily. Man, it really teaches you a thing or two about logic. You think you understand it and then you, when you're first learning especially, you're like, I clearly know this person is a criminal or this, I clearly know this person is innocent. And then you click it and you're like, what the hell? Like, what, what, what did I, what did I miss here? Um, man, it's, it's, it's a really great game.

• 1:06:26Speaker 00

  If you play it after a few drinks, it really shows you how incapable you are. Like, me, me and, um, uh, Remy Sharp, uh, if you know Remy, uh, inventor of the term polyfill. There you go.

• 1:06:38Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:39Speaker 00

  Uh, but we tried to, we, we had a few drinks and then we tried to solve one of them together and just like, it was like, no, no, we should probably go home. This is, we are way more under the influence than we know.

• 1:06:49Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, it's crazy how much of those that you, that is like really where you notice those types of things, right? Where your brain just clearly isn't working as, as expected. Man, yeah, Clues by Sam, great game. I would love to talk about that more, but I don't think Wes.

• 1:07:03Wes Bos?

  Games guy, yeah, not into Pokemon, all that stuff.

• 1:07:06Scott Tolinski?

  Clues by Sam, yes.

• 1:07:08Wes Bos?

  That's cool. All right, uh, last thing, shameless plugs, what would you like to plug to our audience? Where can we find you online, et cetera, et cetera?

• 1:07:15Speaker 00

  I am like, the Firefox web devs accounts, which I set up, which I do like, well, like, like these polls and stuff and asking for feedback. And, and also post like videos about interesting standard stuff and things that have become recently baseline. So, um, give, give, give those a follow. I'll, I'll include a link. I try and be unavoidable, so I am everywhere. There's like, you know, it, I'm like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram for the video stuff. Um, but then I post the video stuff elsewhere as well, like Blue Sky, Mastodon, Next. Threads. I'm on Threads and there's no one.

• 1:07:53Wes Bos?

  Oh, I find the opposite. Whenever I go on to Threads, I'm like, wow, there's a lot of people here.

• 1:07:59Scott Tolinski?

  Really?

• 1:08:00Wes Bos?

  And.

• 1:08:01Speaker 00

  Oh, there's a lot of people there. They're just not reading my stuff.

• 1:08:06Wes Bos?

  No, every now and then I have something that goes, that like pops on Threads, which is very bizarre. Same with like Facebook as well. I've been posting my reels on Facebook recently. Cause I didn't think there was anybody on Facebook, but there's lots of people on there. Like I posted one of my old reels and it got like, like almost a million views on it so far. So, there's people there.

• 1:08:29Speaker 00

  I am, I am not in that ballpark. I am nowhere near a million views.

• 1:08:34Wes Bos?

  Well, neither am I. That's why I was surprised. Yeah. And you get, you get paid for it too. Like some of them made a couple hundred bucks. Yeah, Facebook is huge now.

• 1:08:41Scott Tolinski?

  I gotta be posting on Facebook, Wes.

• 1:08:43Wes Bos?

  All right. Thank you so much for coming on. Appreciate all your time and insights. This is really fun and we'll catch you later. Peace.