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Mozilla Foundation Meets The GNOME Foundation
An anonymous reader writes "The board of directors of the GNOME foundation recently met with a few representatives of the Mozilla foundation - discussing how they could collaborate a little closer in future. A number of interesting things were discussed, including XAML/Avalon and the future of Firefox in GNOME/Linux. Check out the minutes of the meeting on the Gnome mailing list."
Better to standardize on Firefox rather than have the desktop environment people keep churning out half-assed browsers like Konq and Nautilus.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
It is really odd that Gnome opted for Epiphany as a default browser in 2.x, when Galeon is a better and more featureful choice. I've read that the reasons were that Galeon did not follow some UI guidelines (this could surely be worked out?), and that Epiphany is simpler to use.
I just find it hard to believe than anyone would pick Epiphany over Galeon, even considering simplicity, since Galeon mostly works like Mozilla. Galeon seems simpler to use to me - Epiphany doesn't look or feel like any other browser I've used.
Comparing Nautilus with Konqueror is pure nonsense, comparing GNOME with KDE is even bigger nonsense. If we get a team of developers on a Table and discuss all the crap we find between KDE and GNOME then I can tell from own experience that the answer is clearly that GNOME will fail horrible here.
What can you say... most of that isn't even coherent enough to be deemed english.
But KDE had exactly all these things 2 years ago already. There is a development difference of 4 years between both Desktop solutions.
And there's a development difference of 2-4 years in the other direction on other issues. What's surprising about one (very good) desktop system having different priorities than another (very good) desktop system?
Slightly amusing, but incredibly stupid.
one company controlling the browser, the desktop, the OS, the applications, the server apps, and...whatever else...that is what is innappropriate. Not having a choice - that is what is wrong.
Don't want your browswer to be integrated? Use KDE, or the gnome fork that won't be integrated. Take the source and do it yourself, if you'd like. Not that you're making a serious question...
Such is the case here. The need to more closely integrate the web rendering model and the desktop model is clear, and Microsoft is probably on to something compelling with Avalon/XAML. ActiveX was a disastrous first brush with integration but its clear they see a need and there is a need. Safe local applications integrated with the network do make sense.
On the open source side someone will have to lead to get this done - and not be afraid to leave some groups out. Epiphany should be an early victim - a "default" app no one uses.
Konqueror, Nautilus, Epiphany, Galeon, Firefox, Mozilla et etc.. I have to agree that its getting kind of ridiculous.
Ok, choice is nice and all, but this duplication of functionality and work is probably extremely unproductive as a whole for the progress of open source software. It should be enough with 2-3 choices for browsers instead of 20: one or two lightweight ones á Firefox, and one or two "fully featured" like Mozilla.
Isn't the whole point of open source that there's as many choices as there are people to invest the time and energy? Shouldn't that broaden the possibilities of a given piece of software, if each is trying to bring something new to the table?
That being said, I agree that it would probably be best to focus efforts on the more mature technologies. But I wouldn't go so far as to say it's unproductive: rather, they're producing something, but there may be a lot of overlap between it and any other browser-type app out there.
I hate to feed the trolls but criminy...
The emphasis is in the original post and it's an utterly ridiculous claim. Trust me, these fantastic features are every bit as useful and functional for downloading and cataloging even low-key, family-friendly porn that has nothing to do with whips, chains, or farm animals in leather pants.
Besides which, your cheap attempt to inject a little extra hype carries a distinct tone of shrill hysteria, which detracts from any attempt at a more reasoned argument. Your attempt to use one narrow aspect of the whole broad, rich spectrum of glorious pornography is misleading enough that it probably has its own latin name.
I guess it also goes without saying that the uses for tabbed browsing are limited only by the imagination and intelligence of the person who browses.
Consequently, your options may be severely limited. Let me help you get started.
To sum up: tabbed browsing is your friend. Whether you are cruising www.hotasiansluts.com or www.jesus.com, tabbed browsing can make your internet experience faster, easier, and better.
The Dalai Llama
...tab for the children...
P.S. - I gather that your tirade against tabbed browsing is a recurring theme. Feel free to bookmark this post and refer to it as needed.
My sig could be your sig!
Please, please, please let this fail. The last thing I want is my favorite browser family tied to freaking GTK or Gnome.
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
...mozilla wants to collaborate closer with GNOME and that they asked for it first, according to the release of the minutes of the meeting. Cool Beans. Something that I like, more focused direction on unification for a polished product. *Choice* is good,but it's subjective without some sort of rational goal, choice by itself is mostly used as a buzzword, there must be a *goal* in making the choice and having multiple choices, not just that there *are* multiple choices extant.
And my choice and I bet millions of others would be a "linux thing" that worked cohesively together, and that just won't happen very quickly with thousands of directions taken, many of them just parallel trails with each other.
I most certainly would *chose* an operating system/distribution that worked all well together. A choice of a chaotic mish mash of thousands of incompatable apps and a so-so functionality is not much of a choice if you want quality over quantity.
Richard Stallman and George W. Bush get routinely bashed for the same reason - public perception. Stallman is perceived as unsanitary and idealistic. Bush is perceived as stupid and evil. Neither popular perception is accurate, but they're easy targets, so they persist.
I would say that (much like you decided to take a hit on your karma by posting your opinion) Mozilla is simply supporting their own right to allow others to develop extensions on their open platform. Mozilla didn't develop these two extensions which I admit may aid in surfing for porn but come on, let some people surf for porn. There are numerous extensions to Mozilla's browsers and most of them are quite useful. Saying that because a browser lets you flip through a collection of numerically ordered images is supported pornography is like saying all browsers should be banned because they let you type in URLs and the URLs may point to pages that contain pornography. There are image collections out there that are definitly worth flipping through that do no contain porno.
steal this sig
You say, first, that Linux is hard to use because it's tools are superficial. Then you say that Apple did it right because they chose to carve their own market.
Linux has already done this. It's current market is full of geeks who don't think that Linux is hard to use. I think Windows is hard to maintain, and that's why I use Linux. The Linux community is now trying to expand their market to people like you, who don't see the elegance of how things are handled in a unix-ish OS.
Is my response elitist? A little bit, but it's true. I think you're original post was ignorant. I've been tossing the idea around in my head that maybe it would be better if Linux -wasn't- the most used OS. It'll end up like Windows.
:wq
... then we would have KNOMzilla.
On a more serious note, imagine if KDE/GNOME/Mozilla all joined forces and worked under common leadership towards a common goal. That's an environment I would like to see someday! Throw in the WINE project and we're talking some major software muscle.
-- Stu
/. ID under 2,000. I feel old now.
Others have replied, but let me be very specific: Microsoft was not wrong FROM A TECHNICAL STANDPOINT. Tight integration between the browser and the desktop is TECNICALLY sound. The problems were that a) they did not publish the API for tying a browser into the desktop, so only IE could implement the API and thus IE was essentially part of the OS b) they had competition in the market that they were attempting to squash by making their product useless... such a melding of GNOME and Mozilla would not render Opera useless on Linux, as long as Opera played nice with GNOME in the same ways as Mozilla.
No one in their right minds would claim that tighter integration between the browser and desktop is bad, only that it can be done badly.
From you:
From the Magpie site:
From me:
You can use Magpie to go to a page with nothing but sound clips from the movie "Clerks" and you can download all the quotes. No porn involved.
From you:
From me:
Mozilla is going to support anything that will improve and extend the functionality of their browsers. The more valuable and flexible a tool is, the more widely it will be used and the greater the number of uses to which it will be put.
Much like the word "tool."
The Dalai LLama
...tired of tilting at windmills...
My sig could be your sig!
Isn't it strange that everyone bitched about the lack of necessity for IE to be integrated into the shell of Windows 98, then went right out and redid it for KDE without a second thought? I never understood what a filesystem browser had to do with the program that renders my HTML for me. It's like people just accept it because Windows 98 did it--meanwhile bitching about the non-innovation of Windows 98 and Microsoft.
Don't get me started on taskbars and start menus, two things that don't belong ANYWHERE near a Linux desktop yet somehow got adopted as well "just because."
Instead of the Mozilla Foundation, why the hell isn't the GNOME Foundation meeting the KDE Foundation?
Allright, I'll bite. First, just for reference, if you look at this guy's posts, almost all of them are rated (-1). So, his statements aren't merely bad; they are consistently bad to the point where (we must assume) multiple moderators over time thought it was worth it to burn their mod points to take this guy out.
Major premise however, is the question: what's wrong with looking at porn? Honestly. How does looking at pictures of nude (or naked) women (or men) destroy the moral health of a country?
I'm not sure what ``moral health'' is, anyway. But even assuming the US ever had, I think after Wounded Knee, Vietnam, Nisei camps, etc., it's pretty much gone. How does a person looking at porn have a worse effect on a nation's moral character than would killing women and children?
As George Carlin put it: Of all the things you could do to a person, giving someone an orgasm is hardly the worst thing in the world. In the army they give you a medal for spraying napalm on people. Maybe I'm not supposed to understand it!
Embedding is hardly a growth market. There are at most a handful of apps that might embed Gecko on Linux, and Mozilla would get little or no funding or user-agent market share from them. The embedding apps would free-ride on the funding from AOL, and on recurring funding from strategic partners that the Mozilla Foundation has gained through application-based strategies since its founding.
Consider that PTC, maker of ProEngineer, has been embedding Gecko for years in ProE on Linux (on Windows, ProE uses Trident). Good for PTC, we support their embedding -- but it has not benefited Mozilla with either funding or measurable user-agent market share.
This may be heresy to open-source true believers, but maintaining and extending Gecko requires a minimum number of paid, full-time hackers, managers, and QA and release staff, in addition to the wide and deep volunteer community from which those staff were hired. Currently Sun, IBM, Red Hat, and the Mozilla Foundation, at least, employ such people. The need for paid staff comes from the complexity of the web: 5 billion public pages, millions of private intranet pages and web apps, lots of quirks and buggy content, de-facto standards, gaps in de-jure standards.
To fund an effort of this scale, you need a successful business strategy.
You propose a "killer embedded library" strategy, which would be a departure from what works. Let's look at three strategies already in use in Mozilla's area, Internet client software:
Mozilla already has "killer app" strategies in place funding the browser and, more recently, Thunderbird.
MS's "killer apps on OS monopoly" ping-pong strategy is well known. MS also has "killer tools for programmers" and "extensive developer support/documentation" efforts that undergird a "developer mindshare" strategy that builds on and perpetuates the OS monopoly, and that may yield killer apps (which MS then can acquire).
Macromedia made the right moves early with Flash, building great tools and gaining >90% distribution of the FlashPlayer plugin, and they're parlaying that into a "killer rich client app platform" strategy. Good for them, but Mozilla lacks that well-distributed a front end, and lacks the tools (and the need for tools -- the web was and probably will continue to be mostly built by hand).
The striking thing about these examples is the emphasis on end-user or developer applications that make real revenue. No one is just purveying anything like a web content engine library to be embedded in unknown applications, and getting any kind of return on investment. This is not surprising. There is no commerically viable "killer embedded library" business for web content engines, thanks to MS subsidizing Trident to zero cost on Windows, and Apple doing the same for KHTML on Mac OS X.
(Yes, MS and even Apple, for all I know, have tried and are trying to recoup some of the huge costs they've sunk, by for example charging AOL or Intuit for the privilege of embedding a supported version of Trident, or licensing its source. But that does not make a viable business out of the subsidies.)
Those subsidies also made browsers free on those OSes, but browsers are still killer apps, mainly because they are sufficient front ends to web apps, which have displaced fat/proprietary/vertical client/server apps.
There are still people, not all end-users, who will pay for browsers, and not only on Linux. Some customers don't want to be locked into the OS vendor's browser, especially when it is IE. Some customers value cross-platform reach, for migration and coverage. "Customer" here includes anyone helping fund the engine and the killer app that uses it
Just because the w3c endorses a specification does not mean that spec is a good or necessary standard (which, sorry to disappoint you, I and many others who agree with my point of view do believe exist).
The w3c uses a closed, multi-year process where too many big and small companies pay-to-play and design-by-committee, with too little backward compatibility, and not even consistency among their own specs (e.g., the CSS and DOM deviations in SVG). Specs go to REC status without complete implementation or widespread market testing.
The consequent neglect of HTML, DOM level 0, and other under- or un-specified de-facto standards used by billions of web pages, has aided and abetted MS in cementing its monopoly. And now that monopoly vendor is moving the goal posts on the entire web client game. I do not whine about this (unlike you, who seems content to whine in /. about bad ol' me) -- I'm actually working on ways to combat web monoculture. This focus is about to curtail my time responding on /., but feel free to mail me.
If your idea of fighting the bad effects of IE or Windows Longhorn on the web is "implement XForms in Mozilla", then you need to calm down and explain how that does anything except waste time and bloat Gecko's footprint. Without any browser market share to speak of, even if Mozilla supported XForms, web content authors in a few years are much likelier to use XAML than XForms. Apple, Opera, and IE will never support XForms natively, and XForms plugins are neither well-distributed not transparently integrated with HTML and other supported standards.
So give it a rest -- try fact-based opinions instead of w3c authority trips for a change.
If your "I want a standards compliant browser" demand means anything here, it can only mean that this is all about *you* and *your wants*. "Uncompromising" standards compliance is a goal of Mozilla for standards that actually matter in the real world, like HTML, CSS, and DOM (including the unspecified parts). If on your planet, XForms matters, get busy implementing it in Mozilla. We're accepting patches.
What everyone wants, what even Microsoft is "reacting" to, is the graphics capabilities of modern PCs, the ease of UI and graphical design inherent in XML declarations and managed code driving a layout and rendering engine, and the current failure of web standards to marry the two. MS can cut through the red tape and make a UI and graphics language that rivals XUL and Macromedia's Flex markup language combined.
Matching MS's every move is stupid, and it wasn't what anyone proposed. Building a competitive graphics and UI toolkit together was on the table, because otherwise the open source alternative to things like XAML (or MXML) is fragmented and weak.
BTW, Active X plugins are supported in Mozilla, conditionally (whitelist empty by default). Too many sites use Windows Media Player, and it requires Active X plugin glue. Last I heard, http://www.gamespot.com/ still showed hot new games' cut-scenes using WMP only.
You should know that mozilla.org does not endorse Active X, but Netscape/AOL funded the WMP plugin work in order to "make sites [like gamespot] work". The complaint that "too many sites don't work" is still hurled at Mozilla and Netscape by PC vendors, when justifying their decisions not to bundle a Mozilla browser alongside IE, just as an alternative.
I'm tired of repeating myself. I don't "recoil" at reasoned consideration of any spec, and for that reason Mozilla implements many w3c recommendations. But no one should bow down before a standards body blindly, especially not a minority market-share browser vendor that cannot cause content authors to increase the support of standards simply by spending (considerable) scarce resources on implementing the long list of w3c recommendations, out of blind faith in magic standards fairies causing the world to change for the better.
Here's yet another fact: XForms is not new. Four years in the standards process, about a year and a half at CR (Conditional Recommendation, which is a greenlight to implementors). Good luck to it, it needs it.