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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."
Does Tokyo get stomped?
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
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.
Vision like this could only come the linux community.
I agree. No sooner have I downloaded and installed Mozilla browser that I have noticed by 17-year-old son looking at pornography and the images of filthy women on the Internet. Plus he started talking somce Communist manifesto stuff and once said he was going to install Lunix on our home machine.
I am not a violent man, but from good father's perspective I had to whip out my belt and show him that's the road to hell. That changed his perspective entirely, so right now he's quite happy using Internet Explorer 6 on Windows ME and paying for all the applications he uses except some cheap crap, that's so bad they have to give it away for other people to pick up.
I also own 100 shares of Microsoft stock in my portfolio, and so does my wife, so no Lunix talks are permitted in my house, since we are all planning for happy retirement.
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.
Does this mean that Mozilla will be integrated into GNOME? If yes, then isn't this doing the same thing as IE into Windows which everyone on /. says is evil?
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?
According to Google it's a lot of things, including a 3D image archive, a comic strip, an Apache project for service and component management or a Beowulf cluster.
However, there's no Microsoft stuff on the first ten hits.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
OSS developers tend to push the rather silly 'it's cheaper so they'll switch if we offer a similar solution' battle plan. No thanks. I'm still using Windows (actually, Mac primarily) although Linux is cheaper because Windows and Mac provide me with a whole lot of ease of use that Linux lacks, for what is relatively a small amount of money. (When you consider I work on these things 8 hours a day!) When Linux provides ease of use at more than a superficial level (no, having a GUI doesn't automatically mean "easy to use") then I'll think about switching.
Apple was smart when they took an attitude of "we don't *CARE* what Microsoft is doing, we'll just carve our own markets and create compelling value". This strategy works, because Apple isn't constantly trying to catch up with Microsoft. Instead, they're working on the best possible solution for *their* customers, not Microsoft's. They have a very good understanding of who their customers are, and which customers they're likely to switch over. They've done research on this.
What Mozilla should have learned by now is that the browser just isn't that important anymore. "Our browser is better than yours" will hardly cause end users to switch in boatloads. Developers, however, are more open to switching and more keen on using these technologies in their own apps. Yet, despite this, they say that embedding and the GRE are not priorities until FireFox 1.0 is released. So their focus is on making a good browser, which MS already has. (Don't start about the benefits of Mozilla over IE, I know what they are and most users neither know nor care.)
Their real potential growth market is in embedding, where Windows/Linux/Mac apps can share a similar rendering engine, in tools like Quicken/TurboTax. XUL is an added bonus. But embedding is not a priority nor is it easy to do. So while they could be getting Mozilla/GRE dumped on all sorts of desktops via third-party apps, they've chosen to focus on converting end users, a majority of whom just don't care about which browser they use.
Another great growth area would be Composer, which is already a decent contender to FrontPage, but which most people don't even know exists. Again, a compelling selling point for Mozilla (and embeddable!) but it basically gets ignored. In fact, I think editor embedding is actually a killer app for Mozilla - how many apps work with HTML these days? And unlike with the browser, Mozilla has very little competition here. FrontPage and Dreamweaver are expensive, and they don't offer a real, compelling benefit over Composer.
Instead of pursuing these opportunities, now it sounds like they're going to dump bunches of resources integrating with GNOME and trying to beat Microsoft at its own game (good luck, you're not the first to try!). Also, sounds like they're going to try reinventing portions of wxWidgets/wxWindows internally to provide a "native" XUL, like OpenOffice is now in the process of doing with their own toolkit. Talk about collaboration! It's a wonder we haven't tore Microsoft a new one yet...
But I was talking about GNOME and, more importantly, Mozilla. Are Mozilla and GNOME just targetting geeks? From what they've said in the past and in the meeting notes, I don't think this is the case. My issues were with how they intend to gain marketshare in the other markets, those who are using other OSes or other products.
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.Then, no disrespect, but it is failing miserably, and statements like "who don't see the elegance.." are indeed elitist and makes it sound like this target market is too dumb for Linux anyways. I use Linux-based distros (Mandrake currently, though not as my primary desktop), I've learned quite a bit about UNIX/Linux, the command line, etc., and while I see its benefits, it was (actually is) a painful and steep learning curve. It's orders of magnitude harder than learning Mac and Windows for someone who didn't start off on UNIX. How can something so elegant be so painful? I just don't see it, right? Well, if I hadn't been stubborn enough to learn how Linux works (and actually it's thanks to Mac that I got more of a sense of the command line), I would have given up on it long ago.
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.Actually, Linux is just a kernel. This is an important point. There are probably 100s of Linux-based OSes. So why can't you have your uber-geek distribution (Gentoo? Debian?) while I have my easy to use distribution? In fact, I think everyone talking like there is one "Linux" confuses the issue considerably.
Also, it doesn't *have* to end up like Windows, but if it does, it will be because the open source community made it that way. My concern is that this is actually where projects like Mozilla are trying to push things. Windows != easy to use. Windows = "one way to implement an easy to use desktop, although far from the best way to do it". Anyone who uses Windows as the gold standard for ease of use will never create a compelling reason to switch from Windows. In fact, as the saying goes, "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery". OSS software will thus be seen as the "cheap knock-off" of high-quality Windows software. And that's the last way I'd like OSS to be perceived.
The current problem with Mozilla is that it is a monolith suite. Where Mozilla succeeds is where they allow Mozilla functionallity to be imported into other applications.
One of Gnome's greatest strength is that developers can pick and choose which libraries to include to build their applications.
The Mozilla people need to extract from their code useable libraries that anyone can use. This alone will lead to integration with Gnome, as has been the case with the HTML rendering.
1. IBM's SWT requires C++ interfaces and it needs gnome in addition to current GTK bindings. SWT is the fastest best API supporting most common platforms it runs 10 times faster than mozilla because it uses native widgets.
;)
2. XUL needs to be mapped to SWT bindings so it has faster native cross platform support. This would be the quickest way to get mozilla to run and look like a native app on most platforms.
With these two changes people can develop cross platform apps with native GUI's either directly in C, Java or using XUL for layout.
3. Once that is done you can clone XAML/Avalon.
If I have any spare time this weekend I will put togethor the neccessary patches
Matt.
You know what I wish for? A visual XUL generator, just like Visual Basic in Windows. I also want the Mozilla team to make Firefox run XUL applications using the currently selected GNOME skins and widgets, so that it integrates cleanly. With that, Linux would have a true RAD environment, and maybe we could get more new developers into Linux.
This being said, I too hope they slow down production on Seamonkey and shift gears, but they're close and they're getting closer every release. And Firebird's already over 90,000 lines different than Mozilla, not to mention fast as hell on both platforms I use daily (Linux + Windows).
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Instead of the Mozilla Foundation, why the hell isn't the GNOME Foundation meeting the KDE Foundation?