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."

Comments

Mozilla OS=ByzantineOS

[ZillaVilla]

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.

Re:mozilla as a common library for linux?

[sphealey]

IE's already in place, and it works very, very well, and the components are well documented. I'm seeing *many* shrinkwrap programs coming out now that DO use IE as a framework. Quickbooks Pro 2002, for example, is built on IE.

What was that quote attributed to Lenin? "The capitalists will sell us the rope we use to hang them"? It amazes me when I see independent software developers build their products on Microsoft tools when Microsoft has already announced their intention to attack that market in the future!

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

Re:I think a cross-platform GUI is a red herring.

[Phroggy]

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.