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Future Directions Proposed For Mozilla
Ars-Fartsica writes "MozillaZine is now featuring a set of slides regarding future directions for Mozilla that were detailed at the recent Mozilla developers meeting. SVG and integration with programming languages are among the directions discussed."
they fix their integration with friggin' Javascript. I swear, every new version of Mozilla has new and more obscure bugs. Designing form-based web pages now requires beta testing against IE6, Netscape 7, and every version of Mozilla that ever existed.
-a
The Mozilla logo may be so so, but the Mozilla Firefox logo is probably the nicest logo I have ever seen.
Buckethead
Can SVG be expected to take off now if all the developers use flash instead?
What if any SVG based graphic tools are there?
What other benefit besides native browser support will SVG have to use against Flash?
Totally agree with the "platform" thing. Forget about it. Just as long as it works with standard stuff, it's good.
Though I've got to say that I'm quite happy with Mozilla. I use Firebird all of the time, and it's a joy. I have a few issues (not being able to tell Moz what helper apps to use easily), but I've never had a crash that wasn't the fault of Acrobat reader with it.
Firebird especially needs a new icon. Eck.
It'd be nice to be able to bypass the cache when doing a reload with a menu item. Now it's a poorly documented option that makes you hold shift down.
-I am an elective eunuch.
I have to agree with the folks who have said the developers should concentrate on the individual apps rather than an Uberzilla Internet suite.
FireFox r0x0rz -- it's the best cross-platform browser out there and its standards compliance is quite good.
I haven't tried Thunderbird, but I've heard a lot of good things about it. (Sorry, but an e-mail client is going to have to be at least as good at searching archives as Eudora for me to switch. There's a suggestion for 'em...)
Concentrate on making those two apps the best in their respective market niches. Cut out the dead wood like Composter. Even the new version is still generating ugly code. If someone wants a pseudo-WYSIWYG HTML editor, there are FAR better options out there.
I must say, though, I like what the developers have done in the past year. They seem to be moving more in the direction of smaller, lighter, faster, more-focused apps, and that's A Good Thing(tm). Keep up the good work, guys.
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
I find it ironic that the page does not work with Safari.
What with all the gripping about cross platform browser standards and how web developers only make things for IE,
and how MSN breaks other browsers CSS parsers or just plain ol' don't work. You'd think the Mozilla crew would have the courtesy of writing a little cross platform javascript...
But, perhaps they were worried Bill Gates would sneak a peak at their plans, I hear he uses a G5 at home.
First of all, I think this software is great. After 5 years of reluctantly using IE (one reason - speed), I have finally been able to make a comfortable switch.
I have but one small beef: In Mozilla 1.6.x, hitting CTRL+Enter in the address bar caused the typed URL to open in a new tab. In the Phoenix/Fire* series of browsers, this feature has been inexplicably removed. I'm probably just missing some switch in the Preferences that I've been too lazy to toggle, but let's be serious - it's a good, simple feature and 90% of end users probably never open their Preferences except to clear cache after browsing for porn.
(Also, it would be nice if they could settle on a name.)
...Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
Churchill
Does anyone recall Netscape 2.0 that was on the Macintosh III LC's that were like 16mhz or so...
Netscape (which mozilla is built off) loaded within about 10 seconds on those machines....
Man, I wish I could get the PC version of that, I'm sure it'd load and run quicker than even firefox could hope to do.
(What took 10 seconds on 16mhz would take how long on 1.4ghz again?)
could -one- of you browser whippersnappers please add a 'save browser state/restore browser state' function to whatever the browser de jour happens to be?
...
...)
i want a browser that will remember its state between sessions. if i close the 15 windows i've got open, i want them all back again, same site, same position, when i re-open it again!
sheesh. 15 years of web-browsing, and we're still begging for the most rudimentary, fundamental, web-browsing-workflow features to be implemented, while the rest of the 'web scientists' go off into RFC and NIH land
(apologies if there is actually a 'browser' thats capable of maintaining state information between sessions. please inform me if it'll run on OSX
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
"They" has been one person up to now, basically. He recently landed a major rewrite of most of svg that should make it possible to move towards actually enabling it by default (especially if the libart licensing issues, which are what's prevented it from being turned on as far as I know, have gotten resolved).
Too bad the [Firefox] logo is non-free and will never be checked into public CVS.
Hey, guess what? My signature, my slashdot username and password, and my likeness (i.e., picture),are also non-free and will never be checked into CVS. You can use the ideas in my Slashdot comments, but you can't sign them "orthogonal".
I may grant you a license to use my code -- or other ideas --, but I'm never going to grant you any license yo go around and sign my name to your work. And that's the whole issue here: the Firefox logo is not crucial to the compilation of Firefox code; nothing in the code reads any secret checksums steganographed into the logo.
But the logo is an essential imprimatur that declares a particular build to be an official build, with all that connotes -- such as a well founded belief that it represents the actual work of the official development team and is not likely to be a trojan exploit.
All that not having the logo in CVS deprives you of is bragging rights that aren't yours to claim.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
... will be the (sad) end of the battle for alternative web browsers.
[heh. try that again, this time without the angle brackets!]
Well it's a damn shame they broke it for other browsers.
They didn't use the <link rel="next"> meta-tag. Which means, for instance, Opera can't use its default "fast-forward" shortcuts to automagically go to the next page when I hit left-down+right-click.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
What kind of computer are you running that Mozilla is too slow? Really I would like to know because until I left my last company it was my daily browser there and my PC's were a P2-300 with 256MB or ram and a P2-233 laptop with 192MB's. Mozilla didn't feel slow on either of those machines, in fact it felt faster then IE for most things and I didn't have to deal with IE's problems. Btw the answer to your question is that it makes the browsers UI extensible and cross platform.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
gone away?
If not, there is (still) a market for mozilla.
Sometimes I feel like I'm bailing out an ocean, but I'm converting users one at a time. To non-geeks, it's starting to hit home, as to just how bad the crapware is getting. I do a little show and tell. "see this program (points to IE) - BAD!!!", "see this program (points to mozilla) - GOOD!!!". I of course give them a run down (in laymens terms) on how the sneaky stuff gets on their system, and how 99% comes from IE and Outlook Express. After that, all are more then willing to try something different. So on goes Moz!
One thing to remember is that it's very important that you setup Mozilla for them. Make sure the pop-up blocker is enabled. Also set it so that these things are disabled(unchecked):
-move or resize existing windows
-raise or lower windows
-hide status bar
-change status bar text
-change images
Finally. _warn_ _them_ , that Mozilla won't work on every single site. Tell them to fall back to IE on the few sites that don't work(with moz)... But that Mozilla should be first line of defense.
"Give up trying to be a "platform". Not gonna happen."
You nust be use to being ignored.
Oeone and Komodo
Here would be a fair trade: Cooperation of Web Standards and Mozilla implements Objective-C/Cocoa as one of those first class programming languages it espouses about, besides Mono.
I'm seeing a lot of comments in reply to this article advocating that the mozilla foundation stick to making web browsers, a task that it now admittedly does very well. Follow the Unix philosophy, small programs that do one thing and do it well.
I agree with the philosophy, and agree with what the foundation has done in starting the firefox/thunderbird fork.
But I feel the issue isn't as simple as some fellow /.ers are saying it is, and the longterm prospects are definitely interesting. The key topics mentioned in this slideshow (SVG, XUL, XBL, Eclipse plugin, scripting language integration) are all focussed around the central issue of what the words 'web application' are going to mean in the future.
Think back to several years ago in the dark ages of IE4.0 sheer dominance, when you were hard pressed to find an online banking service that would permit your alternate browser inside without you having to spoof a UA string. Microsoft had defined the standards that the web developers had been using, and we suffered for having a just standards compliant browser set.
We are now at a lull in the web application development market, at least from the client side. Sure on the server side the battle wages ever on, but the front end is pretty sown up. But it won't remain that way. Nothing like that does in this industry.
This is a proposal to start heading the mozilla project in the direction of a web development framework. Extending the front end possibilities, and giving developers the tools to close the gaps between web applications and thin client applications.
Microsoft is heading in this direction. Rumours are that the next major IE that will ship with longhorn will have a framework similar to this idea, with complete integration between the HTML forms and the windows.form components Microsoft is working on. If we stay statically focussed on supporting just the W3C standards, which don't extend to something as encompassing as an application framework, then Microsoft will be allowed to take the iniative again.
At best, this is an attempt to refocus upon what XUL was originally a vision of, just done right this time. At worst, its an attempt to think long term and make sure we aren't taken by surprise when Longhorn ships with a new beast of an IE. We need a framework like this, and I see noone in the opensource world in a better position to do this than the mozilla project.
Ah c'mon, you're being a tad harsh there. I use firefox at home and mozilla 1.6 (with *all kinds* of xpi goodness) at work and they are both rock stable under normal usage conditions. I'm a web developer, and things like the form manager, password manager, and live http recorder are - at that price - pretty damn fantastic. Top it all off with the "preview in IE" feature for that final sanity check and bob's your uncle.
/t
Sure, 1.3 was still kinda buggy and even 1.5 had a few remaining issues, but 1.6 is almost perfect for day to day use and firefox is so cool you could install it for your parents.
In my mind, mozilla.org is where you download the ultimate IE patch.
#!/usr/bin/english
Mozilla seriously needs more threading. I hate not being able to interact with anything for a few seconds whenever a tab is loading in the background.
For great justice.
I know it's how IE does it, but just because it's MS doesn't mean it's wrong
On a side note, does anyone know why my Mozilla periodically deletes my favourites, cookies and passwords and resets my homepage to Mozilla.org?
Agreed that any component object model (COM) is heavy and it does have its own problems. But the fact that Mozilla is built on a cross platform com is a huge advantage. If anyone wants to use these apis then they can do it without worrying about platform specifics. Even though currently xpcom is not very feature rich, it is a respected library. With everything else in the browser (or platform) running on xpcom, why do they specifically want to reduce the com support for SVG ?
I can't believe you're an IT manager and trying out tabbed browsing for the first time... If Firefox is buggy, you can get help or try a different browser for now. If tabbed browsing is something you're going after, try any browser that isn't IE or Lynx, e.g. Mozilla, MyIE2, Opera, K-Meleon, Safari...
I run Mozilla 1.2.1, which came with Red Hat 9 and which works mostly ok, but of course is now old and buggy. I tried upgrading to 1.5 and then to 1.6, and they're newer and better, except their fonts look like crap. A little research indicates that unlike the 1.2.1 that I'm running, the default 1.5 and 1.6 builds don't have Xft enabled. I ended up rolling back to 1.2.1 just because the fonts look so much better. 1.2.1 as shipped from Redhat has font selections in the appearance menu called "System Default" which gives good looking fonts. The Mozilla builds don't have that choice. You have to pick from a bunch of specific fonts which all look bad.
Any idea why Xft and good fonts aren't enabled by default in Mozilla? What do I have to do to enable them in 1.5 or 1.6? I'd sure like to be able to quit using 1.2.1 but feel stuck with it until I find the time to make some big project of figuring out what's going on. Blecch.
Yes, and I doubt it's Windows XP on its own crashing it either. Must be some hardware or other software doing it. I'm also having trouble seeing how Firefox, of all software, could take down XP as it very rarely crash due to bad software. Writing outside its allocated memory will for example only force XP to crash the application.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
You're complaining about 6 errors, all of them trivial (except forgetting to close <head>, which is a bit odd).
That's nothing in comparison to the code soup IE has encouraged on the web.
Just for fun, let's try to validate http://microsoft.com
(http://mozilla.org validates just fine, incidentally)
Navigating a tree-structured history doesn't entail the use of a platform-native tree widget. I'd consider that pretty awkward, actually, considering the low average branching factor of such a tree.
Heck, it could even be a set of generated webpages.
From a storage standpoint, it isn't a big issue. What would that be, the equivalent of an MP3 or two each month? I know that being able to locate where I was at some point in time would be quite valuable to me, much more than an MP3...and most office workers have far more hard drive space than will ever be used in the life of their system.
I suspect that one of the major improvements that has not been made to business software that *could* be is in the area of version control and history. Why aren't Office documents version-controlled? Workers have plenty of disk space, and this would clearly provide a bunch of valuable data. Why can't I look at a file on my disk, search through an sha1-indexed downloads database maintained by my browser, and determine where I downloaded the file from? Why can't Windows hand me a list of things I did during the last boot before my system stopped working properly -- installing software, registry settings that have been modified by software -- and provide the ability to roll back to a known good state? These are all things that would be useful in an office.
May we never see th
I hate when a site has some annoying music in the background, or when I am listening to something like Winamp and some site plays some other music. Maybe that would be a good thing to have.
That and maybe a way to filter out junk newsgroup postings that would work in the same way as the email filter does.
Whoa, chill down a bit and you'll also see that according to his unconfirmed bug, Linux indeed also becomes unstable. I'll spell it out for you:
That was all he was saying.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Yes, this is fair. Firefox is an implementation of Gecko, and has been branded my Mozilla org. However, you can download and compile yoru own verion, you just cannot call it Firefox, you have to rename it somethign else (waterfowl, for example).
Personally I think thats fair enough. The last thing i want is some unscrupulous types (eg SCO, russian spammers, spyware developers) makign a "special" version of Firefox and distributing it as the "real thing" + a few hidden extras. By copyrighting and securing the brand and logo, it gives Mozilla.org legal teeth to stop them.
However, it doesnt make it less open, since you ARE able to make your own version. Nor does it make your version nessasarily any "less", since shoudl the Mozilla official version tank, your version can possibilly take control (code fork)
BTW, The logo ROCKS, i have downloaded the wallpaper, and it looks absolutely STUNNING on my Dell 17" Flat Panel display at 1280x1024!
Have a nice day!
Really? Are you sure you read about SVG and not about something else? Read the Animation chapter again. Especially, note that you can use SMIL animation mechanisms. Or you can use DOM:
SVG cannot replace Flash today -- mainly, because Flash has widely installed software support and SVG doesn't. However, I believe SVG has huge promises for the future including the uses you listed. IMO, the most important feature of SVG is able to apply the same stylesheet to SVG image/animation that has been applied to a (X)HTML document.
Obviously, Flash has more mature development tools as it has been on the market for longer. Unfortunately for Flash, you practically have to use Macromedia's proprietary tools to create your work. I can see absolutely no reason for SVG not being able to display every content Flash is able to display. I expect to see a converter from Flash to SVG in the future.
As for the performance, I've a bit hard time to believe that you cannot make SVG animations fly when you take a look what latest PC games do. Sure, SVG will require some level of support from hardware but if you try to run your X server without any acceleration, you'll realize that not having any hardware acceleration is too slow for even drawing simple rectangles with high performance, let alone blitting some images.
_________________________
Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
Even the godly can have tabbed browsing in IE
Is it not true that all sex is degrading? If it's any good.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
What does 'deCOMtamination' (from the slides) mean? Perhaps ditching XPCOM and going native?
It should be possible now that even MS Windows have a measure of POSIX compatibility with both Cygwin and MS UIS.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
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Building an entire platform would be in contradiction to that.
Contradicting the *nix philosophy is not such a bad thing, but where would be the utility in *nix platform.
The stuff they make already has speed and resource issues.
Assuming they could get over these, what is the need for such a platform and why?
Steve
What is so amazing in one integrated monster?
Because the developers have absolute control over how different components of the application talk to one another. If Calendar needs Something from Mail, it can just reach over and grab what it needs. Programming is faster. And end users of the AOL variety seem to like "integration" and don't care if they can't see under the hood and hook up their own applications to it.
But I agree with you. From a social perspective, I appreciate developers that take the time to create well-designed interfaces that are open published, easily comprehended, easily implemented. Whether that's done effectively by pipes, sockets, DCOP, Bonobo is a matter of opinion.
Illustrating the long term benefits of such an approach: it's so much more powerful to learn just grep instead of a different damned GUI-based "Finder" integrated into every different application.
Personally, I like using firefox as my "HTTP client/HTML renderer/Bookmarkmanager". For Mail etc. I use Evolution, which does have Kitchensink builtin.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I also realized that default firefox is MUCH more responsive under win2k than on linux - noticable especially from v0.5 (or 0.4?) onwards. But I just installed this simple theme (here)on my linux firefox and it performs now much better - even better than the default theme! I'm running all this on my PIII 450MHz.
The toolbars are a lot thinner and the icons are smaller which is something i've really been looking for for a long time. (the default 'theme' has its toobars quite a bit thicker than the default 'theme' in windows)...
my blog
He probally had the gall to load a .pdf document is his browser.
When doing that, Firefox/bird and recent Mozilla Suites lock up the explorer.exe process for some reason.
So the OS doesn't lock up, but a locked explorer.exe is a big deal.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
As the document says, we do aim for the platform look and feel. We can (and on some platforms, do) use the platform file open/save dialogs etc. We should do that everywhere, it's a work item.
If you want fully native chrome, you can use Camino or Epiphany or K-Meleon or write your own thing for KDE. We didn't want to maintain N platform-specific browser UIs, but we're happy for other people to do that.
Turns out though, that an XML+Javascript crossplatform UI framework is a very cool thing, especially since we can share a lot of the implementation with our XML/HTML rendering engine. Because of that framework we have this large and growing library of Firefox/Thunderbird/Mozilla extensions that simply work everywhere. And of course, because of that framework we have Firefox and Thunderbird running on all platforms from day 1.
If you use another cross-platform UI framework, the problems I mentioned in my document don't go away. That framework ends up having to solve the same problems. For example did you know that on Windows, Qt doesn't use native widgets?
XUL apps which can be installed on the server side and not on the client desktop - I am not sure if this is already possible. Allow integration to server-side scripting languages so that server-side databases can be accessed and this could really be useful.
I mean, I should be able to define an entire site as an XUL application - say, I might have my website www.myshop.com as an XUL app and mozilla users could, on visiting the site, access the site like they would a local XUL application.
Like I said, I don't know if this is already possible. The last time I saw, all XUL apps needed to be registered manually and placed somewhere in the mozilla chrome directory to be used.
If XUL could use SVG for rendering the UI widgets, that would be great. But does SVG have support for UI widgets? I know about the SVGGUI project, but I don't see any code coming from it.
It's certainly not good but easily recovered from without rebooting.
Launch task manager
Kill explorer.exe
File - New task - explorer.exe
Ah, the things we learn with an OS that can't/doesn't protect itself.