Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Mozilla Rising ... As A Platform

Posted by timothy on from the it-sure-works-for-me dept.

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."

3 of 397 comments (clear)

  1. I wonder if Tim is in on this by adamy · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  2. Tutorial here by Cap'n+enigma · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you want to get an idea of what is possible, check out this tutorial.
    http://www.xulplanet.com/tutorials/xult u/

    I played with it about a month back and was amazed at how easy it makes GUI development.

  3. Re:Mozilla vs. Netscape by aengblom · · Score: 5, Informative
    Add in pop up blocker to Netscape 7:

    (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