Mozilla unveils vision for web evolution

Preaching the mantra that “the web is for everyone,” Mozilla has published a vision for the evolution of the web that stresses openness and safety, with the company aiming to address shortfalls in areas including privacy and complexity.

The vision document covers what Mozilla would like to see happen and outlines the work necessary to achieve these goals. While saying the web has become the world’s most important communication platform, Mozilla’s FireFox CTO Eric Rescoria and Distinguished Engineer Bobby Holley wrote that the web has real problems, with people spied upon, disempowered, and burdened by sluggish and overly complex experiences.

Also, much of the web remains out of reach for non-native English speakers and persons with disabilities, the Mozilla officials wrote in a March 23 blog post. The company also published an executive summary of its vision for the evolution of the web. Mozilla said it wants a web without gatekeepers and lambasted the current web monetization strategy that relies on advertising, arguing that better models were needed.

Three basic values were identified in the vision post:

• Openness, allowing everyone to access the web and use it to reach others.
• Agency, empowering individuals to accomplish goals.
• Safety, ensuring that people can use the web without being put in danger.

In pursuit of these values, Mozilla cited a number of things that could be done to make the web better:

• Protection of user privacy. Mozilla wants a shift from the current paradigm of tracking and surveillance and to eliminate surveillance mechanisms such as cross-site tracking.
• Protection from malicious code. Mozilla emphasized that every web browser routinely has had major security vulnerabilities.
• Ubiquitous encryption of communications. Mozilla wrote that the long process of securing all HTTP traffic is nearing its end, and encryption needs to be retrofitted into legacy protocols such as DNS and built into new protocols.
• Extend the web, but do so safely.
• Make the web fast enough for any use. Browsers and infrastructure need to be faster.
• Make publishing to the web easy enough for anyone to do it.
• Empower users to experience the web on their own terms.
• Provide a first-class web experience to non-English speakers.
• Improve web accessibility for disabled persons.