The impacts of the purely JavaScript-based system are multiple: for end users, the ability to run native PC apps on any device with an internet connection and to purchase and protect content without digital-rights management (DRM); for content creators, cheaper, faster rendering and the ability to distribute anywhere viewers can type in a URL; and for open web or cloud-computing advocates, a push away from proprietary or legacy plug-ins and an embrace of HTML5. With the presence of William Morris Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel at the launch on Friday, the creators of the ORBX.js technology were also seeking to emphasize its piracy-fighting powers for the movie and TV industries: with video streams or apps watermarked in the cloud, DRM in the browser becomes unnecessary.

OTOY and Mozilla came together recently with the realization of a shared goal: trying to turn the web into the platform for all apps. Mozilla’s effort to implement H.264 in Firefox inspired OTOY to rewrite their own codec to run in JavaScript, said OTOY founder and CEO Jules Urbach at the launch event in San Francisco on Friday, and the partnership has now culminated in an optimized rendering experience that is approaching native app speeds in Firefox. Among the capabilities demonstrated at the launch were a virtualized Windows desktop running in Safari, lag-free gaming in a browser and streaming that can be adaptively encoded based on a user’s bandwidth.

“Web is the medium,” said Autodesk CTO Jeff Kowalski, who was very upbeat about the possibilities of the new tech for increasing work collaboration and creativity, and reducing delays through real-time rendering. Besides investing in OTOY, Autodesk’s interest is in providing 3D apps to their customers using cloud resources. The implications for agility — both for individuals and for enterprises — are freeing: a low-power home device can drive the centralized, high-power cloud machine, eliminating the need for a high-end workstation or provisioning of hardware assets to employees or contractors. Kowalski’s suggestion, in fact, was that such a move will allows users to downgrade their hardware, because it no longer has to match the needs of the software.

So what is needed for ORBX.js to work? Any HTML5 browser (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, IE10 or Opera) will do, but it needs to have WebGL technology to take advantage of the codec’s full decoding speed. Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich predicted that Apple will eventually come around to more fully accept WebGL. When asked if Apple, Google, or big streaming providers can do anything to stop the use of ORBX, Urbach said nothing short of getting rid of the browser would stop the tech from being used.

The central issues with streaming all of your computing are bandwidth and money. Video seemed to stream well on an iPhone over 4G, and with the adaptive streaming and superior compression of ORBX, Urbach projects a 25 percent bandwidth savings for, say, Netflix streaming. For that to happen, Netflix, Amazon and other providers have to adopt ORBX, something that the Mozilla-OTOY partnership is actively working on. They are hoping that their solution will be the one to put the format wars to rest, and allow consumers to collect the highest-definition content possible in a way that is format-agnostic. With respect to pricing, a ballpark figure suggested at the launch was $300 per year for OTOY’s cloud-rendering engine to take over one person’s computing needs. Pricing is still up in the air, but Urbach expects an AMI to launch later this year with the second generation of ORBX that will also include HDR encoding capabilities.

The videos below show streaming video and gaming through a browser using ORBX (via Mozilla).

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There weren’t a lot of details revealed by Mozilla’s press release, but the company plans to talk more about the Mozilla Marketplace next week at Mobile World Congress and will invite developers to submit Web apps. The idea is to give Web developers a prominent place to hawk their HTML5 Web applications. App discovery is a huge problem in the native world, and even though Web applications don’t really need a distribution channel other than a Web site, without a big signpost directing mobile users to Web apps it could be a lot harder for smaller developers to get noticed.

Mobile Web apps offer the promise of being able to target everyone with a single development effort, as opposed to building separate iOS and Android versions of an app (not to mention tablet versions). But right now native apps offer hooks into the phone’s hardware that Web apps can’t quite mimic and most consumers are quite familiar with the concept of stores like Apple’s App Store and Google’s Android Market.

While Mozilla avoided any discussion of the details, it suggested two ways in which it might try to change that equation: standard APIs (application programming interfaces) that could help developers reach down into the phone, and “a new identity system for the Web that puts users in control of their content, tying apps to the user and not the device or platform.” Stick around for our MWC coverage next week to learn more.

A report in the San Jose Mercury News suggested Mozilla might also be ready to unveil a prototype mobile Web phone based on the Boot To Gecko project announced last year. Google has also tried to plant seeds for mobile Web computing with its Chrome OS hardware, but it’s pretty clear that has yet to make an impact.

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That’s an impressive result for Google’s WebKit-based browser, which was only released in December 2008. One of the reasons Chrome originally gained so much traction, apart from its novelty, was its clean design, blisteringly fast V8 JavaScript engine and support for newer web standards, which, when Chrome was released, meant it ran complex web applications, like Gmail and Google Docs, much faster than the crop of browsers that existed at the time. Its release forced the other browsers vendors to catch up, even Microsoft, sparking a new round of browser wars. This resulted in an across-the-board improvement of browsers that’s not only good news for users, it’s good for Google, too, as the company wants to make using its web apps feel as close to a desktop experience as possible.

Note: Browser market share statistics should always be viewed with a healthy slice of skepticism, as they can be skewed depending on where the data is collected from. StatCounter Global Stats are based on aggregate data collected on a sample exceeding 15 billion page views per month (4 billion from the U.S.) from the StatCounter network of more than three million websites, but it should be pointed out that Net Applications, for example, reports Chrome’s marketshare at 12.5 percent in May.

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Does the world need yet another browser? Tim Howes and Eric Vishria think that it does, and that is one of the reasons why two years ago they started Mountain View, Calif.-based RockMelt, raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Andreessen Horowitz (and scores of technology luminaries such VMware co-founder Dianne Greene, Intuit’s Bill Campbell and Josh Kopelman) and hired away some of the best design and browser talent from other companies. Their socially aware browser will finally see the light of day today and will be made available as a beta version.

It’s a bold move by the two co-founders. They are entering a hotly contested market that is dominated by Microsoft (Internet Explorer), Google (Chrome), Mozilla (Firefox) and Apple (Safari). In addition, they’re launching a desktop browser — it works on Windows and Mac OS — at a time when the axis of computing is shifting to touch-driven mobile devices.

Vishria and Howes say the reason they started the company was that, while people’s usage of web and the services they use have changed, the browser itself hasn’t changed very much. “The modern web has evolved to a point where it needs a new kind of browsing experience,” said Vishria, CEO of RockMelt. “I can’t understand why the web browsing experience is so serial, especially when we have so much available processing speeds, memory and available bandwidth.”

He argues that today, everyone in the browser market is about minimal user experience, ease of navigation and speed. What RockMelt is focused on is around people’s web usage – which centers on consuming content, social sharing and social networking.

RockMelt’s quest reminds me of another grand attempt to take on the browser establishment, called Flock, which, despite great social aspirations, has had a tough go of it thus far. Vishria and Howes say that it is all about timing. Thanks to increased broadband penetration, the rise of cloud-based services and mainstream adoption of social services such as Facebook and Twitter, the browser itself needs to be social, said Howes, who worked at LoudCloud/Opsware along with Vishria.

“Most people communicate with a few friends and check only a few sites and we’ve made it easy for them to stay connected and get their information,” said Vishria. The browser integrates Facebook, Twitter and other social services right into the browser itself. At the same time, it makes it easy to add news feeds and other information sources. The browser, which is based on Chromium (the open-source project behind Google’s Chrome browser), requires you to sign-in with your Facebook credentials. Once logged in, you can add your favorite friends and news feeds on the left and right side of the browser. The browser makes it easy to update, tweet and share content via Facebook and Twitter. (See screenshots to get more details on the browser and its features.)

From the demos I saw, the 30-person company has done a fantastic job of integrating social features into the browsing experience. It has developed proprietary technologies (mostly HTML5-based) that make search a massively fast and more meaningful experience. The browser uses its built-in cache to pre-fetch, then pre-render a lot of content and make it available instantaneously.

However, it still has its work cut out for it; it’s entering a saturated market and will need to fight for attention. RockMelt wants to focus on mainstream consumers, but it has to contend with the harsh reality that people are slow to change and switch. Look at how long it took for Internet Explorer numbers to start sinking. Perhaps that’s why the company is focusing on getting the browser in the hands of many users before trying to build a business model. “Search is a good way for browsers to get paid, and we are thinking about other services beyond search, but that comes later,” said Howes. For now, the founders will be happy if a million people are using their browser in six months.

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