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."
I wonder if this is Salon's attempt to /. Slashdot for all the times Slashdot has hammered Salon? ;)
"...you can steal my woman, but you ain't done nuthin' smart."
now only if salon would write an article about the comments posted on slashdot referring to the article on salon that referenced a slashdot comment. than, slashdot would have to post a story about the article on salon about the story on slashdot that arose from an article on salon that featured a slashdot comment...
sorry, its been a long day.
it seems that mozilla, as a whole, will evolve into a framework of reusable components that will transcend the browser application itself.
this will pose to be a problem for microsoft; why bother using microsoft components, which are bound to windows, when i can program across multiple platforms using mozilla components?
My vote is for SVG, even though the current support for it in Mozilla is pretty fragile [YMMV, I'm on 1.1 Linux].
With full support for SVG, Web applications could really take off in a big way (graphical and not just text interaction) that is unhindered by platform specific nonsense.
One big hitch though seems to be in rendering quality outline fonts. Everyone would love to have the precision of PostScript for determining exactly where text is located, how far it extends, etc, but there seems to be big players that are nervous about releasing outlines of their fonts and have punted about precise layout of fonts inside SVG, deferring to upper level CSS specifications and what not that permit layout decisions to change when we really need a web layout engine that doesn't change from platform to platform (and is free and open).
"Provided by the management for your protection."
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
Law of Software Envelopment jwz edition
``Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.''
Sure, there is initial appeal to having your application look the same on all platforms. Who really wants to write the same application N times? However, cross-platform consistency isn't necessarily a good thing.
Each platform has its own quirks with how it should behave. 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). In Windows, a menu action simply happens while on Macintosh, the selected menu item flashes several times.
I could go on and on with the differences between the Windows and Macintosh platforms (to say nothing of UNIX!). The point is that an application that acts differently from every other program is an application that is harder to learn. Users are forced to keep two sets of expectations, which completely defeats the purpose of using a cross-platform GUI!
Yes, you can tweak the UI so that it looks more like the host operating system. This is a thin veneer, however, as the emperor's proverbial clothes come into view when the OS theme is changed.
It makes sense that the UI should be abstracted from the rest of the application, but XUL is not the answer.
Nathan
If you want to get an idea of what is possible, check out this tutorial.t u/
http://www.xulplanet.com/tutorials/xul
I played with it about a month back and was amazed at how easy it makes GUI development.
This is where I do my little dance and feel special. Salon quotes me, *and* I get an article on the front page! Then I post this OT, worthless post and burn off my karma.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
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.
Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can
:) I think the ultimate stopping point of development on emacs is going to be when the emacs hackers sit down to make improvements in the program, and the program ends up responding, "I wouldn't do that if I were you, Dave"
Yep, that's one of those quasi-funny computer "laws" that actually has a very disheartening core of truth to it. Of course some programs such as emacs expanded until they could read mail and then kept going
Here's another one of those informal computer laws that's ha-ha funny...but serious:
Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming:
"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
(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
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.
Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming:
"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
"Including Common Lisp."
- Robert Morris
(I love this one -- I found it on Graham's webpage, you know, the one developing the 'arc' programming language.)
-Billy
Skyshadow:
Why use Netscape (Score:6, Linked)
by Skyshadow on Thursday August 29, @02:56PM
"Why should/would I use Netscape instead of Mozilla? Not getting enough pop-up windows in my life? Feel the need for a more closed solution?"
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
Here's the google cache for the Sky Shadow page... oh wait. heh.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number