Mozilla Makes a Plugin to Help IE Advance

Despite some positive steps in the right direction, Internet Explorer still lacks many important features. Its mediocrity has arguably hampered the evolution of the web and forced many site designers to depend on suboptimal proprietary solutions.

Mozilla plans to push IE into the next generation of open web technologies without Microsoft's help. One of the first steps towards achieving this goal is a new experimental plugin that adapts Mozilla's implementation of the HTML5 Canvas element so that it can be used in Internet Explorer.

The Canvas element allows web developers to programmatically render interactive bitmap images in HTML content. It was invented by Apple to bring richer graphical capabilities to the company's WebKit renderer. The Canvas functionality eventually became part of the HTML5 standard and has been implemented in both Gecko and Presto. Canvas is used extensively in several popular web applications, including Google Maps, but it hasn't gained widespread acceptance because it isn't available in Internet Explorer.

Using ActiveX 

In order to make Google Maps work in IE, Google had to develop ExCanvas—a complex library that implements many of the Canvas element's features with VML, Microsoft's proprietary alternative to SVG. Unfortunately, scripted manipulation of VML is too slow to be used for highly interactive web applications. Mozilla's solution is to make its own native Canvas implementation into an ActiveX plugin that can be integrated directly into Internet Explorer.

Mozilla's Vladimir Vukićević has developed a working prototype which is still a work in progress, and development is still at a somewhat early stage.

The plugin is designed to snap into IE as a binary rendering behavior, but the browser's defensive security mechanisms insist on prompting the user before every time it is used. This detracts from the seamlessness of the plugin and makes it difficult to use for conventional web applications.

Currently, the experience is pretty crappy: you have to click through an infobar to allow installation of this component, then you have to click 'Yes' to say that you really want to run the native content, and then you have to click 'Yes' again to allow the component to interact with content on the page.

This Canvas plugin is only the first step toward bringing standards-based web technologies to Internet Explorer. Mozilla is working on a much more ambitious initiative called Screaming Monkey that will make it possible to plug Mozilla's entire next-generation JavaScript engine directly into Microsoft's web browser. If these plugins gain widespread acceptance, it will empower web developers and give them the ability to target web standards and not have to compensate as much for Internet Explorer's broken behavior.

Getting Adobe on board 

Adobe is collaborating closely with Mozilla on next-generation web scripting technologies. This is purely speculation, but If Adobe decided to ship Screaming Monkey and the Canvas functionality as part of the next major iteration of the Flash plugin, it would rapidly accelerate adoption and get it onto lots of computers.