View source for Labs/Web Content Experiments

In the spirit of the motto "The Web is The Platform", Mozilla Labs seeks to aggressively explore new capabilities in the Web Platform, as well as innovative use cases previously not considered for it.

== New Capabilities/APIs ==

These involve adding some sort of new capability to the web, e.g. by extending the <tt>window</tt> object.  It's okay for these solutions to only work in Firefox, though it'd be even better if they could work on any browser via a cross-browser mechanism such as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPAPI NPAPI].  

Writing up a W3C specification for anything here is encouraged, as is working with the W3C and Mozilla to get the capability standardized and added to the Web Platform.

* New Selectors API
* [http://blog.vlad1.com/2009/03/24/3d-on-the-web-its-go-time/ Canvas3D/WebGL]
* [http://www.mail-archive.com/public-webapps@w3.org/msg04187.html B-Tree API].  This is a simple low-level API that would enable multiple high-level storage solutions to be efficiently implemented in content space, e.g. CouchDB.
* History access
* Identity/social-network access
* Camera access
* USB device access
* New security model (tainting-based, web-of-trust based, etc.)
* Code sandboxing (e.g., hermetic <tt>eval()</tt>)

== New Applications/Libraries ==

These involve creating new applications or libraries using only web content. All of these solutions should work in any browser, not just Firefox.

* [[Education/Projects/ProcessingForTheWeb|Processing For The Web]]
* [http://www.toolness.com/wp/?p=580 BrowserCouch]
* [http://labs.mozilla.com/bespin/ Bespin]

== Competition/Inspiration ==

* [http://code.google.com/apis/gears/ Google Gears API]
* [http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/9.0/ActionScriptLangRefV3/ Adobe Flash API]
* [http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AIR/1.5/jslr/ Adobe AIR Language Reference for HTML Developers]
* [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb404700%28VS.95%29.aspx Microsoft Silverlight Overview]
* [http://browserplus.yahoo.com/ Yahoo! BrowserPlus]
* [http://phonegap.com/ PhoneGap]
* [http://developer.palm.com/ Palm WebOS]