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. Is this a Good Thing (TM)? by goldspider · · Score: 1, Troll
    Correct me if I'm wrong (as in not intended as a troll), but isn't this the sort of thing that Microsoft was criticized for with it's heavy incorporation of browser and kernal?

    How safe would this be? What kind of interaction between an application developed with Mozilla and the kernal would there be? Would this potentially create vulnerabilities?

    Just wanted to be sure all sides of this were explored.

    --
    "Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
  2. Mozilla as an app interface? by ACK!! · · Score: 1, Troll

    Fine, the three hours or so it takes to compile that damn monster known as mozilla will now be worth more than just giving me a big old browser. Personally, I have to see the apps that are produced. It seems like another invitation for GNU GUI redundancy.

    (i.e. Does the world need one more freaking ftp client this time based on the mozilla model?)

    I don't think so. There are a half dozen choices for GUI libraries for free operating systems as it stands right now. The world does not need one more. I understand that there will be differences in philosophy behind widget and app libraries but come on. Choose QT, GTK, GNUstep or now Mozilla libraries to base your calls on. Yuck.

    Considering the bloat of the mozilla app as it stands now and how it takes as I said before so long to compile just the browser I would shudder at the thought of a desktop based on this model.

    ________________________________________________ _

    --
    ACK /ak/ interj. 2. [from the comic strip "Bloom County"] An exclamation of surprised disgust, esp. i
  3. I hope not. by ugen · · Score: 0, Troll

    In my work i had an option to use Mozilla as a codebase for one of the projects. At a first glance and idea of XUL gui, which can be custom tailored to application needs and run on any platofrm while using some native objects - seemed very tempting. However the devil as always is in the details.

    The XUL described interfaces are severely limited and their implementation is often buggy, and extremely slow.

    Bidings to native objects using XPCOM and XPConnect are a horrible mess, adding layers upon layers of complexity.

    All this may in theory be remedied by a good group of developers, but currently Mozilla does not posess such a group. There is no consistent documentation on interfaces (which tend to change without warning), and no good documentation to speak of. With no docs and no commentaries in the 3 million lines of code, Mozilla is an unyeildy beast. I can only assume that lack of documentation and comments is created on purpose to discourage "outsiders" from intruding upon developers turf.

    Add to that general lack of responsivness from Mozilla developers, be that to other developers looking for solutions and API's or to users (and i am not alone in multiple requests to mailing lists or newsgroups that go unanswered).

    Add gazillion of bug reports that go un-fixed (a bug that prevents mozilla windows to be started from javascript in xpconnect is lingering for a year now with a patch attached).

    To summarize - a lot of time and/or money and a different group of people are needed to make it work before it will become a viable platform. As things stand, this is just a plug for AOL.