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Ah good, someone got in before me :) It is definatly a good idea to separate out the GUI part when dealing with cross-platform applications, since a lot of portability problems reside there.

In all honesty, I don't recommand Qt or wxWindows - they are great toolkits, but you lose out heavily on productivity compared to visual development environments with GUI builders. While both of these have associated builder tools, I don't consider them very mature of capable compared to VB or Delphi/C Builder. There is also a write-once-debug-and-tweak-everywhere concern (just getting wxWindows looking good on Windows and Solaris takes some effort).

Java is a great choice as it is supported on many platforms, has powerful GUI classes, a couple of builder products, and has several means for client/server support, including CORBA. But for UI applications it isn't hugely productive (strangely enough).

Some of your other options include ParaGUI and SDL, gTk, GraphApp, V, Mozilla's XPToolkit and XUL, and WideStudio.

I have grappled with exactly this question (legacy C/C++ needing to go cross platform with GUIs), and the best answer I've come up with so far is to keep your main code in C/C++ (since you have the legacy code AND the skills), define a clear UI abstraction layer, and create the UI in a scripting language such as Tcl or Python. Use SWIG to tie the script to native C functions.

I have more experience with Tcl/Tk, and believe it is more widely portable (especially the GUI consistency), but it is slower and arguably more difficult to program than Python. Still, this depends on what skills you can acquire, and what your UI requirements are.

Prechelt has an empirical comparison of some languages, including C/C++, Python, Tcl and Perl, and most importantly he has productivity figures! Keith Waclena has a Language Crisis page of comparisons, and Doug Bagley hosts the Great Computer Language Shootout. There are all invaluable resources for determining a balance between portability, functionality and productivity.

It doesn't have anything to do with what browser we use; it has to do with having deleted Flash in order to restore sanity to our web experience. I also disable window.open() calls during load and unload events, limit animated GIFs to one cycle through (i.e., no looping forever), disable scripts from messing with my status bar, restrict websites from removing my toolbars and resizing my windows, and if I don't like the colour scheme on a website I turn that off too. (I love the preferences toolbar. It rocks.) I tried Flash out briefly, and I have no reservations about skipping any site that relies on it.

The only bad thing is that if you install a new Mozilla and install PrefBar again, it overwrites your PrefBar settings. You need to find the prefbar.rdf file (that contains your customized settings) in your Mozilla profile folder and make a backup somewhere so you can copy it back after new installations.

Well if there's an enable/disable for prefetching it's sure to be accessable via the best Mozilla plug-in ever!

I installed XUL Planet's Preferences Toolbar on Mozilla, but the next time I installed a new version, it was gone and I had to reinstall it. I know that you can install plugins into your ~/.mozilla directory so that upgrading the browser doesn't require reinstalling the plugins, but is it possible to do this for chrome-like things (like the aforementioned Preferences Toolbar)? I've highly customized the toolbar, as well, and I don't even know where that configuration gets saved. Thanks.

Here's the list of available XUL applications. There is only one (1) XUL app. It's called "Preferences Toolbar 2". Big deal.

Give it up, people. Nobody is going to write applications for Mozilla.

This is because the Mozilla project is _more_ than just a browser. It is an application framework. (see http://www.mozilla.org/projects/). The scope of what they have taken on is amazing.

I personally think the XUL think was a very far-thinking investment in developer mind-share. Yes, it hasn't paid off yet, but have you actually taken a look at what XUL can do? (point Mozilla at http://www.xulplanet.com/tutorials/xultu/). This is a dream for web-based apps. I am so sick of the standard DHTML/Javascript cruft that I have to use to get a decent GUI. If Mozilla/XPToolkit/XUL (http://www.mozilla.org/xpfe/) become a standard, then I will be the happiest developer on earth. It really is kind of the answer to client-side .NET even before .NET was invented.

Yes, at first it was kind of slow, but that is because thay worked on features first, performance last. Honestly, with the hardware that is available nowadays, is performance really a problem? The average user can have a machine that only 5 years ago would have been considered a supercomputer, capable of rendering fullscreen realtime 3D at 30 fps, or better, so what's the problem compiling a little Javascript? On my "older" PIII 600, or my AMD 550, or even my Celeron 500, Mozilla seems to perform well, in both Windows and Linux. I personally don't see where the problem is. 1.5 Ghz machines now don't even cost $600.

There is always a trade-off between performance and features, but I think the Mozilla project took the long view, and I hope we will eventually see an XUL-type interface available for any GUI, on any platform. Goodbye .NET!!

First, I dont know what all this hubub about tabbed browsing and mouse gestures has been. W/o a quick way to cycle through my tabs,

Mouse gesture Up-Left or Up-Right IIRC.
Or CTRL-PgUp / CTRL-Pg Down.
Or try the Radial context pie menus - a little easier to learn than the mouse gestures.

Personally I find the Tabbrowser Extentions add a bit more functionality to tabs aswell. (I particularly like the addition of a close button to each tab, and the ability to drag'n'drop to re-order the tabs.

w/o being to have a tab be automagically reloaded,

See the Tabbrowser Extention above.

w/o a keyboard shortcut to close the tab,

CTRL-W

There are mose gestures too, but you didnt ask that :)

I dont see why opening multiple windows and using the WinXP group programs feature isn't any better.

Memory, and (personally) speed. I'm already focussed on that window, so having a 'taskbar' on that window seems faster than going to the real taskbar, hunting down the correct application group, and then choosing the new window.

Second, the auto-scroll Moz bug has been around forever. Every time Ive been on another computer and browsed in IE, I realiz how often I use that feature. It drives me crazy not having it in Moz.

We're different I guess. I prefer the scroll wheel.

Third, maybe I can w/ a theme, but I can not quickly move and re-arrange my bars like I can in IE.

On it's way. Pheonix includes something like this atleast.

On top of that its very anoying when I go to some sites to be told I have to have such and such browser.

You might try something to mung your UA string. How about the PrefsBar2.

Numero cinco. Mime types. It is really anoying to click on links like .rar, .wmv, etc. and just have the file not downloaded, but opened in a new window or tab. I see where I can add such mime types, but this should be done already.

Misconfigured server problem. But look on the bright side, at least Moz doesnt automagically run .exe s with a mime type of audio/x-wav ;)

7. Mouse gestures were a joke. Every time I wanted to highlight something, and then copy it, the gestures decided I wanted to close Moz. I could have saved this with a modified key, but then what is the point of the gesture if I have to hit my keyboard?

Preferences>Advanced>Mouse Gestures. Change the 'Make Mouse Gestures with' option to something more sensible like "Right Mouse button". I agree, 'Left Mouse button' is a bit of a silly default.

8. Until I hunted it down, Moz would not let me use anything other then composer for mailto: links. This I was able to fix, but it was not cool.

As you know know, theres a line you can set in your prefs.js file (I cant for the life of me remember what it is though - I use composer :) )

9) I'm on a 56k modem, so couldnt comment. Seems weird though

10) IE and Moz seem roughly equal on my WinXP machine. I just prefer browsing in Moz though.

Ill finish out my two weeks, but I can't wait to get back to IE. I am just as anxious to try Moz again after the next big release.

The first time I tried Mozilla seriously (back in the 0.9.2 days), I went running back to IE pretty quickly. I think it's quite a big culture shock initially.

I went back to it at about the 0.9.5 stage, dug around the preferences for a bit, and it's been my default browser ever since.

• "MSIE" in the User-agent (necessary to prevent some sites from claiming "We deny Mozilla users access to this page. Spoofing your user agent is a violation of the DMCA.")

Uh-oh.

All I care about is that there is a new Mozilla Preferences Toolbar! Download this sweet mother fucker RIGHT NOW!

Sounds like you need the Preferences Toolbar. Turn popups on/off quickly.

Try PrefBar over at XULplanet. It has exactly what you're looking for.

Try PrefBar over at XULplanet. It has exactly what you're looking for.

Check out the radial context menus or the mouse gestures. Look at edit->preferences->navigator->internet search, and edit->preferences->advanced->Scripts&Plugin s. And finally take a look at the preferences bar to quickly enable or disable certain options. These are always the first things I install with any new Mozilla, release or nightly.

I've got this toolbar installed in Mozilla, which doesn't do the same thing, but it lets you turn on and off custom fonts, colors, images, and some other things with just a click. (or two if you keep the toolbar hidden)

Mozilla can do this too, with an add-in. Just download and install the Preferences Toolbar.

I too usually surf with Javascript turned off (tip: add the Preferences toolbar to mozilla to be able to toggle js/java/cookies/etc. on and off quickly) but Javascript is gaining ground as a more general purpose language. See a recent article in Javaworld on using Netscape's free Rhino library to add javascriptability to your applications. Also, Javascript is how many XUL mini-apps are implemented.

for the opera-like feature in mozilla, get this

Funny how CNet mentions XULPlanet.com as a place to get new themes. Mozilla 1.0 links to a page which lists MozDev and DeskMod, but not XULPlanet.

Have you tried tabbed browsing? You will like it.

Have you tried the preferences toolbar? http://www.xulplanet.com/downloads/view.cgi?catego ry=applications&view=prefbar

With the preferences toolbar you can disable image loading, javascript, java, popups, on-load pop-pups, proxies and cookies with a single click. I use it every day because some sites are just annoying with their pop-ups, but I need it for other sites. If I am on a slow modem connection, I often disable image loading and that speeds things up significantly (assuming the images don't contain content).

With pinball theme it looks much nicer than with too big classic theme. Also finally I can switch javascript support and pop-ups on and off by one mouse click with this preference toolbar tool. Tabbed browsing is also great feature. New rc3 starts up and loads pages as fast as explorer. With all these additional features and equal performance with windows native browser I can finally honestly recommend using mozilla.

hopey

And although the option for disabling popups has disappeared from Netscape's preferences, so as not to harm AOL's revenues too much, adding this line to your user.js...

Well then take off some shit that nobody uses (like almost all of the remaining options)

Do it yourself!!! ;) This XUL app makes it easy.

For gestures, check out Optimoz. I tried it in an early stage and it seemed to work well, though I never got used to it.

For quick access to preferences, look at Preferences Toolbar. I seem to remember that MultiZilla also has quick access to common prefs.

Hope that helps!

http://www.xulplanet.com/downloads/view.cgi?catego ry=applications&view=all
The second option down provides an awesome preferences bar that makes using Mozilla the best thing since sliced bread for me.
Hope you like it.

I'm a big mozilla fan, but to be forking for 1.0 and still have no splash screen or icons? And this stuff isn't even themeable, so the usual suspects can't help us.

This is the kind of stuff closed-source people are laughing at. Why can't the Moz team get this together??

For an easy way to change the useragent in Mozilla, install a copy of uabar. It fits in with the other toolbars, provides a dropdown list of useragent strings and the ability to type in a new one. There are also plenty of other useful Mozilla related projects at mozdev and XulPlanet.

I use the Lo-Fi Classic theme for its nice small buttons. Note: I haven't tried the theme with Mozilla 0.9.9 yet.

For mozilla news, I generally read Mozillazine, the major mozilla news site, as well as Mozillanews, a somewhat more community-driven site. For downloads, try XULPlanet, which has a good collection of themes and a good tutorial, and Mozdev (I usually follow projects like Optimoz- gestures- and Googlebar, a mozilla Google Toolbar. Most community development projects wind up here.) Mozillaquest is reserved for cheap laughs, though they have a few article templates to choose from....

Yes, this is a key area where I think de Icaza has a problem. He's clearly planning on implementing Winforms (I checked on the Mono site) and those are not part of the ECMA C#/CLI/CLR spec. Microsoft will not permit those classes to be cloned - its already dropped strong hints about it.

Hmm... If I was Miguel I would take a different route to avoid this problem - I would create a UIML based tool that would generate code for both Winforms (on Windows based platforms) and Mozilla XUL for everywhere else (and your little Windows too, deary!) Plus UIML is a handy intermediate form for other forms-based UI platforms, such as Java Swing and HTML. Just standardize on Javascript for the local scripting needs...

Personally I think UIML is a damn good stab at creating a standardized common syntax for cross-platform UI design. Given a couple of revisions to add scripting capability and a decent event model it would rule (if enough tools supported it). And I like this kind of general approach a lot more than I like the idea of emulating MS Winforms.

Jack William Bell

Themes.org is gay. Go here for a real themes site. http://xulplanet.com/downloads/view.cgi?category=s kins&view=all

I'd still like to have site-by-site preferences wihtout having to edit the prefs.js file, but, what can you do?

How about using the cool Preferences Toolbar from XulPlanet ? Now this is cool stuff, enabling/disabling images, fonts, colors, javascript, with one click ! michel v [cafelog.com]

The Preferences Toolbar allows you to do this, and more - allows/disallow custom fonts, custom colours, auto-load images, Javascript, Java, popups, onLoad popups, proxies, cookies, & XUL cache. I'm not at home to try it, but I'm pretty sure all these can be set on a window by window basis.

try XUL...

Are you serious? XUL is the answer to your question and it is a big part of the reason Mozilla is so large.

Try this for number 1:

http://www.xulplanet.com/downloads/view.cgi?catego ry=applications&view=prefbar

Lets you kill fonts, coloring, javascript, AND popups from the toolbar. In Mozilla of course...

The thing that I love about XUL is that many of the interface-related things that people brag about in other browsers can be (and have been) implemented and installed with the click of a button.

An example is the Komodo IDE by ActiveState, which uses XUL.

XUL is the next generation browser application platform. Simply speaking, the Mozilla team chose an approach very similiar to JAVA to come closer to a platform independent graphical user interface:

• implement a set of base compenents on the most popular platforms (Win32, Mac, UNIX, ..), that render your JAVA specific widgets in terms of the native GUI.
• implement your applications in your JAVA language
• compile application
• distribute JAVA binaries

XUL goes one step farther, as there is no compilation step.

The XUL application implementation language is a XML language that together with cascading style sheets and JavaScript glue will yield an application one starts in the browser by opening the .xul document.

A possible advantage of XUL might become the relative ease of application development, change and distribution.

Possible problems will be similiar to the ones known from JAVA. The qualitiy of XUL applications will stand and fall with the quality of the XUL implementation for a specific platform, which right now means the quality of its Mozilla or Netscape implementation.

Of course, compared to JAVA, which has underwent several larger development cycles and now features mighty libraries, XUL is a bleeding edge technology at its beginnings.

However it is still possible to make direct use of the various Mozilla widgets as well from C++.

I don't object to the Opera people trying to make a living. I'm just saying that I don't choose to use their product because there are free alternatives that work better for me.

I haven't downloaded it yet (I wasn't even aware that it existed until you mentioned it), but I found a download for a prefs toolbar at xulplanet. While I was looking for it, I also stumbled across David Illsley's useragent toolbar, which is pretty neat-o (and useful if you're tired of getting redirected by sites because you're using Moz or simply *not* using MSIE). Thanks for the hint about the prefs toolbar. Otherwise I'd have never found it.

I'd argue to never, ever do this. Why change your good browser to report that it's a bad browser?

I agree with this statement, but that's not what the author was suggesting. He was suggesting that you report it as the same browser, just on a different operating system. Mozilla on Linux is definitely not a "bad browser" and it's functionally equivalent to its Windows counterpart, so changing your Mozilla on Windows to say that it is Mozilla on Linux shouldn't be as big of a deal as masquerading as something like Netscape 4.x.

In practice, this may still cause problems with other braindead sites which will see your browser as Mozilla on Linux and not let you in. A great way to get around this would be to add a way to easily switch user-agent strings to this awesome little prefs toolbar. Then you could surf with the correct user-agent most of the time and when you run into an annoying site like MSN that only works with certain browsers, you could easily switch to a different user-agent string just while you're looking at that site. The toolbar already lets you very easily turn on/off Javascript, Java, Pop-Ups, Onload Popups (with a slight modification that I wrote recently), and other things that usually require a browser restart or a lengthy trip through the preferences menu. User-agent masquerading would be a great addition to the toolbar (I'd do it myself if I actually wanted to look at MSN).

Dumdeedum... downloaded Mozilla 0.9.4.... Added "user_pref("dom.disable_open_during_load", true);" to prefs.js.... restart...

Better yet, check out this prefs toolbar. It rocks! It lets you disable/enable pop-ups and many other things from a nice little toolbar rather than hand editing a file and (more importantly, in my opinion) without having to restart Mozilla any time you want to temporarily enable pop-ups. It does disable all calls window.open() which blocks pop-ups good and bad alike, but this is because it was written before the disable_open_during_load feature that you mentioned was added to Mozilla and it's pretty easy to change it to use the newer disable_open_during_load feature anyway (I actually submitted a patch to do this a few minutes ago). It's nice to be able to temporarily enable pop-ups when you come across a site where they are used for more than just ads.