Mozilla Popcorn Maker

» see popcorn.webmaker.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Mozilla shipped Popcorn Maker 1.0 on 11 November 2012, the closing day of MozFest in London. Brett Gaylor, who ran the project, gave it the description nobody improved on: a web page that makes other web pages. You opened a URL, dropped in a video from YouTube or from your own server, then laid things over it on a timeline. A caption at fourteen seconds, a Google Map at thirty that recentered when the speaker named a city. None of it was baked into the video file. What came out was a page with the video as one element inside it, and anyone who found that page could hit remix and take it apart.

The lineage ran back two and a half years. Popcorn.js opened as a repository on 21 May 2010, a JavaScript library with a one-sentence mission to make video behave like the web, built by Mozilla with Seneca College's Centre for Development of Open Technology in Toronto. It flattened the HTML5 media element into an API you could hang events off, and it wrapped the players that were not HTML5 at all, so YouTube and SoundCloud looked the same to your code as a local file did.

The authoring layer on top started as Butter, prototyped at Bocoup, where Rick Waldron and Boaz Sender wrote the first versions alongside Al MacDonald. Seneca took it further, a design team at Ocupop gave it a face, and by late 2012 the thing was a hosted editor at popcorn.webmaker.org that anybody could open without an install or a license.

In 2012 I was an engineer in Ankara writing code for a living, and the problem Popcorn Maker solved was not a problem I had. Video on the Turkish web at that point meant a YouTube embed, and the embed was the entire interaction: a play button and nothing on top of it. Whether a video could be a first-class citizen of a page, addressable by the second, with your own markup reacting to its clock, was being argued about in Toronto and in a handful of newsrooms. It was not being argued about near me.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was built out of ~

The component names tell you the era. Butter was the editor framework, written against require.js and loading its interface out of static HTML at runtime, while the server behind it was called Cornfield, Node with Express, keeping finished projects on S3. Popcorn.js sat under the pair of them and did the actual work of firing your events against a playhead.

The part that aged best was the media wrapper. In 2012 HTML5 video was real but most of the video people wanted to use was not HTML5, it was a YouTube iframe or a SoundCloud widget, each with its own JavaScript and its own idea of what a timestamp meant. Popcorn put a single interface over all of them, so an author could write one timeline and not care which player was underneath. That compatibility work got thrown away along with the editor that sat on top of it.

~ what people made with it ~

The showpieces came before the editor did. The National Film Board of Canada built One Millionth Tower on Popcorn.js in 2011, a documentary about a Toronto high-rise rendered in the browser with WebGL, where the film reached out to the live web as it played. PBS and NPR used the library for their 2012 US election coverage, which is the closest the project ever came to being load-bearing in a newsroom.

The quieter adoption was in classrooms, and it is the reason the shutdown note reads the way it does. When Mozilla sunsetted the tool it said in plain language that the decision was very difficult and that teachers had come to rely on it, which is a sentence companies normally cut. A free browser tool that let a fifteen-year-old annotate a news clip and publish the result at a URL had found a use nobody had planned for it, and the people switching it off knew that.

~ seven weeks ~

The announcement came on 11 August 2015, seven weeks ahead of the date. Appmaker and Popcorn Maker both stopped on 30 September so the staff could move to Webmaker for Android, an app whose last update landed on 25 April 2016 and which nobody ever wrote a shutdown notice for. Existing projects stayed readable for a while afterward. Every remix URL anybody had shared, in a tool whose entire output format was a shared URL, eventually stopped resolving.

~ the word on the repository ~

The code is still on GitHub. The popcorn.webmaker.org repository took its last push on 29 April 2016 and was archived in July 2022, and somewhere along the way whoever had commit rights replaced its description with a single word in capital letters: RETIRED. Popcorn.js itself sits archived too, with a note pointing at a fork by one person who kept going. Both are still readable, and both are pointed at a version of the web that stopped existing while they were still being maintained.

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