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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."
Here's a direct link to the slideshow itself.
Type n, right-arrow, down-arrow, or space to advance a slide. Type p, left-arrow, or up-arrow to go back one slide. Type t to go the the first (title) slide.
Instructions taken from here
When will the Mozilla team learn that Mozilla will never catch on until it is standards compliant?
Of course, by standards compliant, I mean the standards that Microsoft sets for the web.
Abortion is advocated only by persons who have themselves been born.
--Ronald Reagan
Maybe "Integration with operating system" would help.
FireHydrant is a great OS - If only someone would write a web browser for it.
The Mozilla logo may be so so, but the Mozilla Firefox logo is probably the nicest logo I have ever seen.
Buckethead
A way to view slides with the window maximized.
They've been working on SVG for a long time...
Why the heck isn't it included in the default build already?
SVG's gonna be killer when we can actually use it (and count on users being able to use it too)
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?
There's plenty to keep them busy for the forseeable future. Lemme see, there's :
Fire - fly
Fire - storm
Fire - engine
Fire - hydrant
Fire - alarm (add-on for the calendar module)
Fire - bird (doh! no already had that one)
Fire - at will
Fire - in the hole
Fire - those responsible
Fire - those who did the firing
Fire - ooh oh oh I'll take you to burn
Come on now, join in everyone ...?
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 agree, Mozilla is a bit bloated. However, Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird are meant to tackle problems like that.
The design of Mozilla has been to make it easily embeddable so other developers can use its rendering technology and make their own interface and use a different widget set. Many projects already do, e.g. Galeon in GNOME and K-Meleon (using MFC) for Windows.
My operat~1 system unders~1 long filena~1 , does yours?
Here is the road map to the future of Firefox:
1. Rename Firefox to Foxfire.
2. Add better support for XHTML and CSS 2.
3. Rename Foxfire to Foxxy Brown.
4. Change the XML parsing engine to support new DTMLs.
5. Rename Foxxy Brown to Thunderbird (#2).
6. Put in a proactive pop-up blocker that DoS attacks websites that have pop ups.
7. Rename Thunderbird (#2) to Internet Explorer Jr.
8. Rename IE Jr. to Underpants.
9. Collect Underpants.
10. ????
11. Profit.
Step 10 is going to be the hardest.
You mean, like ActiveX? Er,.....
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?)
Tokyo... Check... Going across Pacific... Check... Stomping on Seattle... NYI (not yet implemented) MS should change their browser's name to King Kong, then we would have some fun, eh?
Was I the only one to read the parent as
"mozilla works perfectly, at least more perfectly than any other windows app... it does not install on my machine..."
And it actually made perfect sense.
"We are excited to use Mozilla as our new operating system," exclaimed Steve Ballmer, jumping around like a monkey. "The recent inclusion of web browser functionality in Mozilla makes it the perfect operating system for modern users."
Or, shall we say, Emacs is a great operating system, it just lacks a decent editor.
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. --
Hopefully the new integrated operating system kernel will have decent threads performance -- I hear they still haven't got that figured out in EMACS.
He who laughs last is stuck in a time dilation bubble.
...see if you can sort out the swing, awt, eclipse native widget fiasco.
J2EE seems strong at the backend. With a strong frontend, maybe MS has to react for a change.
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
> Why did they think this was a good idea?
d gets.html
See http://www.ocallahan.org/mozilla/why-no-native-wi
Why do you want to integrate everything? You integrated mail, news, irc, calendar and probably million of other shits I never used in Mozilla. What is so amazing in one integrated monster? Do we really need to follow Microsoft path? I always though Unix way is to build many small tools, not one big piece of shit.
"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).
multizilla.mozdev.org
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
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?
This is more than a cosmetic issue. Mozilla has the OK and cancel buttons in dialog boxes in the "wrong order" compared to the rest of my desktop, and so I frequently find myself hitting the wrong button by reflex. I also run into bugs in the mozilla widgets all the time. Try middle-clicking on the scroll bar of a textarea widget (under X): its supposed to absolute-reposition the scrollbar; it does that, but in addition pastes the clipboard into the textarea! Another benefit of native widgets would be to decrease memory usage, since the widget libs in memory would be shared.
Its nice they've been listening to their users.
--
Wanna play some word games?
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.
I always found the "users want a standard look across platforms" argument a little ridiculous.
That may have been a justification, but I think that the real reason for Mozilla to have non-native widgets is that it's a lot of work to maintain all the platform-specific codebases. There are already platform-specific issues, but in general someone can add a feature to Mozilla without knowing how to code for every platform under the sun.
I don't know exactly how this will work with native widgets, unless the Moz folks want to take a least-common-denominator approach.
Plus, I wonder if they can rely on sizes of various widgets. Remember that they're integrating widgets with chunks of their laid-out document, when placing, say, a Submit button on the window. With their own widgets, they know exactly how big everything is.
Another issue might be different code structures. For example, the Macintosh Toolbox uses an event loop. GTK uses callbacks. How does one reconcile differently structured widget APIs?
I believe that Netscape Navigator 4.x tried to do this with native widgets back in the day...but the widgets operated different from regular widgets on my classic Mac.
I agree that native widgets would be wonderful from a user standpoint, but there *are* issues with having an extremely cross-platform program with native widgets on each platform. Remember that the MSIE developers only have to worry about one platform...
May we never see th
A more flexible toolbar (ability to stack toolbars left and right and not just up and down).
If you're going to compete with IE, javascript is the way to go. Start with matching the functionality (IE the ability to reference objects without needing to go through getelementByID the way you can in the MS browser, this will eliminate 90% of the javascript incompatibilities between the two browsers).
3] Realize that as far as the end user is concerned browser rendering technology is done and will be done until there's enough bandwidth for full motion picture browsers (Think tivo on steroids). Adding more features just adds to bloat for very, very minimal gain. To that end the focus should hinge on a better, more intuitive interface -- the more you can make it disappear while still providing easy access to navigation and google the better. And don't forget the art, IE still makes pages look better that definately needs to be fixed.
4] Firefox and Thunderbird are killer apps but Thunderbird especially has a lot of room for improvement. When Thunderbird can piece together split usenet files and handle Y-ENC then it will probably truly have arrived for many usenet junkies. After that you need to out exchange exchange and realize email is a centeral pda application and to that end we need scheduling, address books that sync with our newtons, and help us manage our lives. Indeed, do Thunderbird right and you can really shake up the world because there's a real hunger and need for an ultra powerful email/usenet/scheduler/contact/pda manager.
That's interesting. I've often thought that some bad Acrobat and FireFox interaction is causing problems.
FireFox 0.8 has memory leaks. Load enough instances and tabs, and it will always crash. (This has been verified under Linux and Windows XP.)
When FireFox crashes, it also crashes Windows XP SP1! Windows XP SP1 doesn't show an error message, but the OS becomes unstable, and it is necessary to reboot.
This is shocking to me. The explanation seems to be that the features of Windows XP that most users see run well, but a little below the surface, Windows XP is not a finished operating system. I think a fundamental definition of an operating system is that a real operating system can handle bad behavior of a program without self-destructing. So, after all these years of development, Windows is more a sociological phenomenon than an operating system. It amazes me that Microsoft managers are unable or unwilling to take care of business.
When FireFox crashes under Linux, Linux remains completely stable. (I suppose you could have guessed that.)
I have copies of all the browsers, and in my opinion FireFox is by far the best. Browsers are windows on the world for an increasing number of people, so it is important that the world has an excellent one.
I think FireFox's memory management issues should be fixed before any other work is done. Of course, that is for the FireFox/Mozilla team to decide.
(Posted using FireFox, of course.)
SVG is much different from Flash. Flash is currently primarily used for two things: (1) to provide crummy interfaces (an ugly wart from designers coming from the "multimedia era" when CD-ROMs came out and later the ".com era" when people thought that novelty was what made people keep coming back to websites). (2) To provide an efficient format for vector-based graphic animation.
SVG is lousy at both of the above. I have a friend that looked into the feasibility of SVG as an interface medium, and came back pretty depressed. At one point, I got a bit interested in using SVG for animation, and took a look at the format. I'm reasonably comfortable making the claim that it would be extremely difficult to make an efficient rendering engine for animations using SVG. Furthermore, SVG does not provide functionality for synchronizing audio and phases of an animation (which I believe Flash does).
SVG is good, IMHO, for the following:
1) Tagged diagrams. SVG allows tagging elements with data. This could be a big benefit for CAD and diagram usage.
2) More complex webpage layout. I've never seen it actually done, but it seems that SVG could be used to define arbitrarily-shaped regions in a webpage...up until now, the only regions designers have had to work with, the only thing they could flow text around, was rectangular regions
3) Vector graphics. Plain and simple, it's a standard format for storing vector graphics. This is good for both standalone files and for efficient web-based transmission of graphics.
As for your question about what SVG-based graphic tools are out there -- take a look at sodipodi. It isn't Illustrator (yet), and it isn't going to be for at least a while to come, but it's usable for basic work.
May we never see th
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.
A question: Does Mozilla/Firefox/Phoenix really need to do this itself?
Something like this is ultimately a gamble which may or may not pay off...and if it doesn't work, there's a huge amount of cruft dumped in the codebase?
I'd rather see something like the approach Apple used with KHTML in making Safari. If someone wants to make a program called, say, "Mozilla Platform" that *uses* Mozilla, I think that'd be a lot safer than trying to make one massive integrated push.
I think that trying to integrate everything has been the largest problem facing the Mozilla project. I have, many times, contributed patches to open source projects. I have never contributed to Mozilla, because the project was (at least to me) very large and overwhelming...and I only really cared about fixing problems that affected me. If I ran into a problem, it was often something that would require learning a huge amount about how Mozilla is structured to fix. I'm okay spending a day or two fixing a minor problem on a project that's irritating me. I'm not willing to spend a week doing so.
The "integrated" approach is a turn off from a resource standpoint. It made the Mozilla suite large from a disk and memory usage standpoint.
It meant that releases had to be spaced widely apart, and that one broken component could hold up releases of the rest of the package.
It meant that you had to lug around a mail client, web page design program, etc that you might really not be interested in.
In general, I think that Open Source does better if taken in smaller chunks. It makes rewrites and bugfixes more localized, it lets users choose the best option for them (rather than using that mail client that's bundled and always in their face), it keeps resource usage low, and it lets developers release on a more timely schedule.
May we never see th
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 ?
Much as I hate to admit it, and as strongly as I feel that rollover highlighting is a flawed UI concept, enough websites rely on rollover capabilities being present in a browser that it may be rough to disable them.
On the other hand, I think there there are few compelling reasons for allowing websites to modify the status bar information. Doing so is a serious security issue. Users (well, they won't think in about this in rigorous terms, but they do so unconsciously) treat the status bar as a source of trusted communication between their browser and them. If remote websites can muck with it, they lose the ability to trust that area.
I suspect that there are more sites that break with popups disabled than with status bar text and rollovers disabled combined...but we still do it. The main reason remote websites have so much control over browsers today is because of a Microsoft-started prescedent of trusting websites, of treating web developers as application developers. They aren't. Every website you visit just plain isn't trusted, and there should be much tougher rules on what websites can do to a browser. Allowing a website to, say, change the appearance of widgets is, IMHO, unacceptable.
May we never see th
Agreed, small chunks are better. Thats why breaking up the original suite was a good idea. But a framework is just a collection of small pieces. Firefox for instance may still just be shipped with what is essentially just a wrapper for the networking and the layout modules. In fact, frameworking like that would probably require factoring the existing code into even smaller discrete chunks. If people want to be able to run a thin client application that uses the mozilla framework, then it could run off and download the relevant XPIs (which you would keep very small) by itself as it needs to. As an example, at the moment MPlayer is undergoing a major redesign led by Arpi in the form of MPlayer G2. It too is much more of a framework than MPlayer is, but in terms of monolithicism and bloatedness, its better in every way.
People frequently ask why Mozilla implements its own widget set rather than just using the widget set available on whatever platform it's running on. This document is an attempt to explain why. Transparency and Z-ordering
Consider this testcase. It's a text field behind an element full of "blah" text. The "blah" element is transparent, so you can see and even edit the text field with the "blah" text overlaid on top. This simply can't be done in with Gtk or Qt widgets (unless this has changed in a very recent version of these toolkits). In Win32 it can only be done in Win2000 or WinXP, and then it is tricky and inefficient. If you don't believe this, try implementing the same effect using your favourite platform toolkit, and email me if you succeed.
Getting this right isn't optional. It's a requirement for a correct CSS implementation. Other HTML/CSS functionality
An HTML BUTTON element can contain arbitrary HTML. It's practially impossible to get that to work with any platform button widget. (Note that the HTML inside the button is part of the same document as the button itself.) Printing
On many platforms it's very difficult or impossible to get a native control to print. International languages
When you browse the Web you find content in every language that computers can handle. It is important for the browser to have strong support for uncommon languages. This means it is important for the browser to display form elements containing strange characters and scripts. Many platforms (e.g., older versions of Windows) do not provide good support for locales other than the locale that the operating system itself is installed for. Therefore their widgets aren't good enough for strong browser language support. Performance
On many platforms the per-widget memory and time cost is quite significant. This is OK for most GUI apps because you typically don't have more controls per window than fit on the screen. But in a browser, you sometimes see pages with hundreds or thousands of controls. (Think "a long comments page in Slashdot when you have moderation points".) This has to be fast and not consume too much memory. On some older Windows versions it's simply impossible to create 1000 edit boxes without crashing the system! Event handling
The DOM Events model defines ways for a page to intercept events such as keyboard or mouse input before they are dispatched to the control with focus. It would be very tricky and error-prone to implement this using platform-specific hacks. Arguments For Native Widgets
Here are some arguments for using native widgets, and how we answer them. Native look and feel are critical for usability
Agreed. We have started using platform-specific APIs to render our widgets as if they were native widgets, wherever we can. For GTK, WinXP and MacOSX we actually call theme APIs so that Mozilla picks up whatever theme is currently in force. It really looks like a native app. All of the above advantages are still retained because we're still not using actual native widgets. It also means we automatically "keep up" as the platform look changes, which has been a big problem for "cross platform" UI toolkits in the past.
We're still working on the "native feel" problem. Feel doesn't vary as much as look, it seems, so it's less of a problem, but we have a number of tweaks that vary the feel of our widgets across platform and we'll add more. Native look and feel are critical for accessibilty
We're building in support for platform accessibility APIs in GTK and Win32, so our widgets will be just as accessible as the native widgets. Too much work for developers
Yes, but it's worth it. Too slow, too much footprint
Yes, rolling our own widgets requires some extra code and may not be as well optimized as the platform widgets. But as noted
What are you talking about? The Firefox logo, when it's rotating looks like a rotating quad-damage.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Yeah, i stopped using msn messenger, er.. windows messenger, or whatever it is.. the name changed so many times I just couldn't handle it.. ok.. it was always obvious to me what it was, and ok the icon didn't change too much.. but the name.. the name changed.. my life was ruined.. I broke down at work and needed a months holiday.. my wife divorced me, the dog died.. and the world as I know it came to an end.. all this from the name change.. but finally i just stopped using it, and went to investigate more promising and viable entries in the IM sweepstakes.
I've been a bit hesitant about posting to Slashdot for a while, after being unfairly branded a troll and personally insulted just for expressing my views. But I have to say something here about my experiences with Firefox. I recently tried out Firefox, and found it to be a easy to use, speedy, convenient and powerful package which really improved my browsing experience. A bit like setting my filter to only show +5 posts on Slashdot! But I went back to Internet Explorer for this reason: my uneasiness over the morality of tabbed browsing. Bear with me here, I'll explain.
;) I find it difficult to admit to surfing the Internet to my Bible group. I can see the thought in their minds, that I'm misusing the Internet for the purposes of perverted onanism.
Pornography is a major problem on the internet, it is in fact THE major problem, worse than spam, hackers or even Windows!
But what has this to do with Tabbed browsing and Mozilla? Well, I have to admit there was time in my life when I was very low and accidentally found a web page containing a host of pictures of a woman in a state of undress. I believe they are called thumbnail gallery posts. Now, with tabbed browsing, it is possible to easily middle click on all those thumbnails and download the lot, then flick through each picture one handed by just pressing a few keys, so my friends tell me. Luckily, I am stronger than that - I place my faith in the Lord, not my flesh in my shameful hand.
It was at this moment I realised that tabbed browsing made certain activities just TOO EASY, and as such Firefox as a whole was a temptation too far for many surfers. I deleted the History, and sold my computer and after a few months, when I felt safe again, bought a new one. I continue to use only Internet Explorer and have never looked back. With its cumbersome habit of only opening new windows, it is simply impossible to get up a good rhythm and click open the next tiny box on the taskbar at the same time, thank G-d.
Really this post was a call to the Mozilla and Firefox developers- please take this so-called "functionality" out of your product. It degrades woman.
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
It looks like some furred animal is humping the Earth.
Not that there's anything wrong with that...
And before you flame me, I'm a staunch Mozilla fan and this was posted using Firefox.