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."
This might work. I *love* Jabber just get a server that has a good ICQ gateway and you should be rocking.
d =9 71468490
http://www.jabbercentral.org/clients/view.php?i
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Microsoft's problem is that it tied IE to the underpinnings of Windows, which essentially means you have to keep IE around. Mozilla doesn't tie itself directly into the OS.
I'm not sure about the interaction, but I think it will be something like: [Kernel} ---> [Mozilla App Layer] ----> Application
Keep in mind that not every single application written for an OS will run through the Mozilla layer, only those apps written with the Mozilla framework would pass through the app layer.
"What kind of chip you got in there, a Dorito?" - Weird Al Yankovic
there already is a MozillaOS, it's called:
ByzantineOS it's bare bones Linux with Mozilla and sawfish. Boots and runs from a CDrom without touching the local harddrive. it's small...and I tried it on 2 machines, all I had to do was pick low or high res, get my connection "dhcpcd" , and start the GUI "startx" real slick once it loads you can remove the cd, and when you're done you don't 'shutdown' you just kill the power....and it's FAST.
ZillaVilla.com for Mozilla profile roaming.
A good example here is midrange ERP systems. Vendors are embracing Microsoft tools including .Net and IE. Of course, Microsoft acquired Great Plains and has already stated that it plans to "embrace" 90% of the functionality of the ERP products. Yet there the ISVs go, paying for the privilage of using the tools that will make them obsolete.
It makes Microsoft's statements in the antitrust trial that its competitors were just too stupid to keep up seem more believable.
sPh
When the absolute best things going for Mozilla for developers is its array of integrated development tools. Mozilla's DOM Inspector and JavaScript debugger are absolute heaven after coding for IE and MS's poor excuse for a browser development environment.
The DOM Inspector lets you interactively walk through the DOM of a page viewing each containers attributes and children. You can interactively change values and appearance. You can turn on the 'blink' feature to temporarily 'blink' whatever element you are selecting in the DOM. You can also view all CSS elements on the page and inspect how they are cascading. And lots more. Wow!
The JavaScript debugger is everything we have come to expect in a 'standard' development environment... but it is for JavaScript. Set breakpoints.. set watches.. step through code.. evaluate javascript in context.. change code on the fly..
And included in the JavaScript debugger app is JavaScript profiling! Turn it on and play with the page.. then save the results to a number of different formats. You get an excellent breakdown of what code was executed and for how long, how many calls were made, where the execution time was spent etc etc.. just like you would expect from a Profiler. Now I can definitively show how much overhead comes with using DynAPI!
And all of this built into the browser! I think from the development standpoint alone, it will boost productivity by an order of magnitude. Takes out so much of the guesswork that usually goes along with front-end development.
I think Microsoft should be afraid. Very afraid. Mozilla is what browsers should have been 5 years ago. I've now switched my development environment to developing under Mozilla and then testing IE later for any quirks. The dev time is radically decreased.
For example, menus in Windows are expected to be static (that is, they stay visible after the user releases the mouse button), while Macintosh menus tend to be rubber-band (menu disappears when user releases mouse button).
Actually since Mac OS 8, Mac menus behave the same way that Windows menus are supposed to. I say "supposed to" because Windows is a buggy pile of crap.
Want to see something amusing?
Open Notepad. Click-and-hold on a menu. Drag down, below the menu, off to the side. Release the mouse. The menu disappears. This is the correct behavior.
Open an Explorer window. Click-and-hold on the Favorites menu. Drag down, below the menu. Release the mouse. The menu disappears, just like in Notepad.
Click-and-hold on any other menu within Explorer. Drag down, below the menu. Release the mouse. The menu remains open.
Explain to me how this behavior can be inconsistent between different menus within the same application? Mozilla's behavior is Bug 32494.
In Windows, a menu action simply happens while on Macintosh, the selected menu item flashes several times.
This is Bug 66120.
Mozilla has multiple versions of the Classic skin, one for each platform. I don't use it. I use the Modern skin, which looks and behaves the same way on all four platforms I use.
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