Adobe Gives Browsers a Boost

Browser incompatibility — a long-running problem for developers that has led to a slowing down of the web’s advancement — may soon become a thing of the past.

Earlier this week, Adobe Systems announced a partnership with the Mozilla Foundation that both parties hope will lead to a better web.

Adobe has agreed to release the script engine behind the company’s popular Flash Player under an open-source license. Mozilla will host the new project, named Tamarin, which makes the code for Adobe’s ActionScript Virtual Machine, or AVM, freely available.

“We believe that, in the long term, this will help spur even more innovation in Web 2.0 applications and benefit the entire developer community by providing a more uniform language for applications,” says Pam Deziel, director of product marketing at Adobe.

ActionScript, the code that powers interactive Flash applications, has long been based on a standard known as ECMAScript. ECMAScript is also the basis of JavaScript, the primary tool of Ajax developers. Web 2.0 companies such as Flickr, YouTube and Google rely on scripted technologies like Ajax and Flash to provide their services.

With Tamarin, both Adobe and Mozilla hope to accelerate the development of a standards-based platform for creating web software that’s not only more engaging, but also much faster. Adobe claims that its script engine can render code up to 10 times faster than the engine currently used by Mozilla’s Firefox web browser.

Although the Tamarin project will be hosted by the Mozilla Foundation, the code is available under the same open-source license as the Firefox browser code, meaning that other browsers like Opera, Apple Computer’s Safari and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer can incorporate the scripting engine into their projects.

Prior to Adobe’s announcement, each browser manufacturer was forced to rely on its own script-rendering engine. The differences between the various engines make creating an application that behaves the same way in every browser a daunting task.

“This being open source, we’re hoping that developers will be able to give users exactly the same experience in all the browsers,” Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen said while speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

Tamarin represents the largest code contribution to the Mozilla Foundation since the nonprofit organization was born in 2003.

The Mozilla Foundation says it plans to release a version of the Firefox browser with the new AVM code built in sometime in 2008. Adobe’s popular Flash Player, which is used extensively by video sites like YouTube and MySpace, will remain a proprietary Adobe product.

Even though this code release could signal a sea change in the way browsers render web-based software, developers working on Web 2.0 applications aren’t holding their breath.

Unless Tamarin is adopted by all of the browser manufacturers in the market, and not just Mozilla, the long-term benefits for developers will be minimal, points out Mark Belanger, founder and chief technology officer of Fluid, a development shop that works with Flash.

“There are still going to be at least three major JavaScript interpreters we’re going to have to develop against: Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari,” Belanger says.

Apple and Microsoft declined to comment directly on Tamarin.

“Microsoft welcomes competition because it drives innovation, which benefits customers,” a Microsoft representative said.

By Scott Gilbertson
Nov, 10, 2006