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

Is this a Good Thing (TM)?

[goldspider]

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.

Mozilla as an app interface?

[ACK!!]

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.

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