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."
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."
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.
IE! Ooo... it's sooo cross-platform...
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
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
(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