Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla Rising ... As A Platform
ceswiedler writes "Salon is running a story about Mozilla's potential dominance as a platform for application development. They discuss the community development centering around Mozilla, and point out that its cross-plaform GUI environment is 'exactly the kind of thing Microsoft was trying to prevent when it launched its war against Netscape. It didn't want Netscape around, because Netscape was becoming a platform.' In what might be a Salon first, they even include a reference to a Slashdot comment by SkyShadow."
> Is it possible to add the ICQ integration to Mozilla
No.
> alternatively, to add the pop-up killer to Netscape?
Complain to PDT.
I've been looking forawrd to the Mozilla Programiing book from O'Reilly coming out. According to their web site it is coming out this month. Conspiracy anyone?
I've played with Mozilla some. Java script with CSS is a powerful way to do UI development. The question is how are we going to build apps that
1) Havethe install flexibility of a website
2) Have access to the local hard drive.
One cool thing about Mozilla is that you can remote an XUL reference just like an html, and it will render. This means that you get a pretty huge toolbox of UI available for anyone browsing using mozilla. One development tactic might me to use a XUL interface for layout, and swap out the javascript file to have different behavoir if you want to process locally or remotely.
I'd love it if SVG got into the main branch. As I understand it, the reason it hasn't was due to Licensing Issue. The original is under LGPL and GPL, but Mozilla is also licensesd under the MPL. Not sure what the SVG authors view on the MPL is.
Open Source Identity Management: FreeIPA.org
If you want to get an idea of what is possible, check out this tutorial.t u/
http://www.xulplanet.com/tutorials/xul
I played with it about a month back and was amazed at how easy it makes GUI development.
mozilla with xul/js allow you to build some interesting tools. But try building a simple front end tool that reads a RDF as a remote datasource. I have yet to see an online working example displayed in a tree.
/xul python search page. Quickly I checked the xul source to see if mark used remote RDF only to see the code commented out with a remark along the lines of, 'almost got going'. Marks example works ,but like the code I was working on it had to use a different approach.
While the responses on the mozilla newsgroups are excellent (with the actual netscape engineers responsible responding), the lack of consistant *complete working examples* is a pain.
I had to laugh when I stumbled upon Mark Hammonds site and found a mozilla
I just want to to use remote RDF feeds.
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
Years after STL has been ratified as the C++ standard library, mozilla is still not using it, to its own detriment. mozilla needs to be rewritten using STL.
You can kill popups in netscape if you set the following lines in the "prefs.js" file.
" , true);e .status" , true);g e", true);
user_pref("dom.disable_cookie_get", true);
user_pref("dom.disable_cookie_set", true);
user_pref("dom.disable_image_src_set", true);
user_pref("dom.disable_open_during_load", true);
user_pref("dom.disable_window_flip", true);
user_pref("dom.disable_window_move_resize
user_pref("dom.disable_window_open_featur
user_pref("dom.disable_window_status_chan
or if the icq/aim integration is in the form of an xpi just find it and drag & drop into a mozilla window to install.
(it exists. I think this is it)
Download the adblocker.xpi file (Shift+click to download). When you download the adblocker.xpi file in Netscape 7, it will add .txt to the filename
(adblocker.xpi.txt). Before saving the file, remove .txt
from the filename and save the file to disk. Then in Netscape 7 click
File | Open to install.
In Netscape 7 click Edit | Preferences | Advanced - Scripts & Windows to unselect or select the Open unrequested windows
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
I can speak on that. WSS tags your browser with a cookie containing, among other things, the number of times you've visited a site and the last time you visited that site. The WSS server software can take that and determine whether you're a unique visitor to the site that day and/or forever. The browser figures are based not on total hits, but on unique browser instances as determined by the cookies. So it doesn't matter if you hit the site once or 1000 times, you're one unique visitor for purposes of counting browser types.
Note that identifying a particular browser instance isn't needed with cookies, the fact that WSS's servers got that particular cookie automatically does all the work that unique IDs would have been needed for. Of course, it also means that if you block third-party cookies WSS can't keep track of the timestamps and counts and so can't include you in the statistics.
Disclaimer: I write WSS's front-end software, the stuff the browser actually talks to. Take this as you will.
Actually it's not the same, it's more akin to JNI or the Java -> ActiveX bridge that Sun wrote a couple of years ago.
M$ wanted to change the language to make it incompatible, I just want Java objects exposed in XUL.
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
Microsoft's problem is that it tied IE to the underpinnings of Windows, which essentially means you have to keep IE around.
Really?
Then how was Microsoft able to release IE for Solaris and HP-UX?
I'm not sure if you're trolling or not... your argument is pretty bold yet lacking in supporting facts. But if you aren't trolling I would suggest you reverse the argument. I think it's more accurate to say that the more recent versions of Windows depend heavily on IE (consider it's integration into the shell).
Not only can Java apps use the "native" (mostly but not quite) Look-n-Feel of the platform on which they run, they can also give you the LnF of that platform on any other platform.
Sure, it's not perfect, but it's a better step in the right direction than anything else out there now.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Mozilla still doesn't seem to have the incremental layout capabilities of Netscape 0.9
.9 was nothing like it is now, probably at least an order of magnitude simpler. Compare the First early specs of HTML with HTML 4 and that doesn't even include CSS. HTML 2 (which your comparison browser couldn't even render because it was too complex) is a 77 page spec, HTML 4.0 (linked above) is close to 286 pages.
"incremental layout" depends a lot on the HTML complexity and the HTML author. you need to define the sizes of layout objects before you can lay out things past them. the IMG WIDTH and HEIGHT tags introduced by netscape helped this a lot, where you can say "hey, I'm blocked on getting this image, but I know what size it will be, so let me render the stuff after it and I'll worry about putting the image in later". Tables and CSS add to the complexity of determining sizes. You never really know the size of a table until after you read the trailing TABLE tag and you may even need to know the sizes of multiple elements inside the table until you load them, so you essentially have to grabthe whole table before you can show anything inside. The state of HTML at the time of Netscape
making as many connections as you wanted (later capped at 20)
It still does this, defaulted at 4. You can change this in user.js, it's just not a pref you can see in the UI anymore because folks abused it too much, and there definitely is a diminishing returns thing, and mostly - you just don't need to change it. HTTP 1.1 also lessens the need for this, drastically reducing the overhead for small objects, where socket start and teardown time is a much more significant part of the overall time.
These days the thing will freeze as it loads some plugin or other, maybe this is somehow harder than images
This is harder, and the memory requirements are huge. You're loadoing a bunch of new code, having to dynamically link stuff all over the palce, establish communication links, allocate memory, a nuch of stuff. The image library is already loaded, and showing an image takes a lot less memory than say, showing a 10 meg shockwave game.
It's hard to make comparisons now, since our browsers are required to do so much more. I tried to look at some old browsers just for the hell of it, and I couldn't even get NCSA Mosaic to run, just blew up on me.
- Does AOL even use their own Netscape product with their web subscriptions, or is that IE deal still in play? How retarded can you be?
It makes perfect sense unfortunately. But you need to know a little more about what really goes on and went on behind the scenes.When AOL first "integrated" Spry Browser into the AOL service, many many apps were written to build and serve the content they (AOL) use and show - like Rainman for one. If you dont know what it is, get a job for AOL or an AOL partner. What it means is (still) there is a lot of proprietary non-web ready content out there that needs to be changed over - including tons done by content providers who pay for the priviledge of serving their content via AOL - like WebMD used to and many other channels.
AOL cant switch over until that situation is dealt with - which means writing code for Mozilla/Netscape that allows Rainman generated content to be viewed, as well as many other proprietary formats AOL uses.
When MS decided they wanted a browser and failed miserably at the attempt of creating one, they "acquired" Spry and relabelled the browser IE... which is how AOL got stuck with it.
Hence, CompuServe (an AOL company) already has a Netscape version available while the AOL service does not.
-Rob
WebMaster:
BinFeeds
XXX Thumbnailed Image Newsgroups but
O'Reilly is publishing Creating Applications with Mozilla this month.
* XUL is an easy way to make a GUI for your program.
...?).
* It's cross platform so your GUI will work on other platforms as well, without (much) modification.
* It's designed from the start in a language and format that's supposed to be sent over the internet (use your PC visually from anywhere).
* It's also language independent! You don't need to program in a specific programming language to make your GUI. Ok ok, you need to learn how to write an HTML-like language, but almost any programmer can do that. You're NOT tied to using a specific C++ or Java library to make your GUI. Swing is a cross platform GUI but you need to program Swing in Java.
The big implication seems to be that all programs, written in all languages will be able to standardize their GUIs by using XUL. And I've read that it's easier than all other methods (Gnome, KDE,
In 100 years, people all over the world will probably be using 1 Open Source Graphical Interface (with different underlying Operating Systems). Mozilla's XUL is a first step in that direction.
Some extra functionality is needed, but should be added slowly and sensibly. Using SVG like MacOS X uses Display PDF would be nice. But in the meantime XUL seems to provide enough functionality for most programs. In the end, XUL should take over the GUIs not just for individual programs, but also for the whole OS.
The article stated that XUL doesn't have floating windows withing XUL and that's why it won't take over as OS desktop yet. How about making a floating window just another XUL window inside the main window?
And what about this screenshot?
ByzantineOS
Doesn't that show multiple XUL windows at the same time?
- -- Truth addict for life.
While that tutorial gets you quite a bit for XUL coding, the overall documentation for Mozilla is sparse. I've been working on a bug for a couple weeks now, and in the process I've learned a lot of how Mozilla works, but I've had to do it the hard way. I use a lot of find and grep to trace conceptual maps of data flow and how Moz keeps track of certain things.
That's the hard way. Try a source indexing program like Source Navigator, or my personal favorite, LXR. The latter requires that you figure out how to install and configure a CGI script to run under Apache (or whatever httpd), so it takes some effort to get it going, but being able to surf into localhost and browse all your source, hyperlinked, witht he browser of your choice, is a decadent luxury that just can't be beat. Get it here if you're interested. The source is on the site, and there is also an ambitious lxr2 project out there, using PostGres as the back end.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Linujournal had this information about Mozilla's application framework two years ago in a story about "the many faces of mozilla" "You can build all sorts of applications on top of the Mozilla applications programming framework." Here is the URL if you want to read it. http://linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5183
Mozilla however, is a genuine development effort that is not attempting to just rip off on other people's work. They have done some real development, they have done some real innovation of their own, and most importantly they are legally protected. There's no way (well there's always a way but the risk is much much smaller) for Microsof t to send their army of lawyers after Mozilla developers and claim they are infringing on MS IP. Mozilla guys are actually doing the work on their own. It is in a whole lot healthier position from the legal point of view.
Therefore I would rather see any OSS framework develop out of Mozilla than Mono. Just to make sure I can safely keep on using it.