Slashdot Mirror
FireFox and Longhorn: Meant For Each Other?
News for nerds writes "According to the internetnews.com report, Microsoft's technology evangelist Robert Scoble said in his blog and interview that while he is a user of Firefox it can be improved if Mozilla developers take advantage of Longhorn technologies such as XAML, Avalon and WinFS, instead of making it only within GNOME/Mozilla coalition."
Sorry, but I believe that Safari (Apple's only browser for OS X) is based on the KHTML rendering engine - y'know, Konqueror?
The only OS X 'specific' browser I'm aware of that uses Gecko is Camino, although the rest of the Moz browsers run just fine.
- GNU/Anonymous Coward
From what I can tell the only thing that 'taking advantage of WinFS' could mean is the metadata aspect, or hooks allowing Firefox to render the preview images of files. Both these features could easily by added to Firefox and would not necessarily break cross-platform support. For example with metadata, you provide the option to write it, but if the underlying system API does not support it, then it just gets ignored. Since there are continual hints that MacOS X may one day get metadata, that we know Longhorn definetly will and that this is always a possibility for Linux and other OSs, I would feel this would be a good move. For example, imagine you download a file and as part of that meta data the URL where it orginated from was stored with the file, then that could be handy for the day that you decide to organise your HD and want to return to the source.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
M$ does not innovate! If you ever looked at xaml it is almost an exact duplicate of xul. They want to enable it for doing the same things that activeX does - open huge and unfixable security holes. What truly new and inovative things has M$ ever done? Not the gui, not security, not word processing, not networking, not xml! What they are good at is taking good open/free tech and making it suck.
We've seen what happens to those who trust Microsoft.
IBM and WordPerfect trusted Microsoft's promise of support for OS/2, and look what happened to them.
WordPerfect trusted Microsoft again when they moved to Windows, only to discover that Microsoft had kept the good API calls hidden, while the API calls provided to WordPerfect were slow and unreliable.
Go (the company) trusted Microsoft with their Pen Computing technology. Go is now suing Microsoft for having stolen that technology. Stacker also successfully sued Microsoft for having stolen Stacker's disk compression technology.
Sun trusted Microsoft, when Microsoft contracted to provide Java support on Windows. But, Microsoft had no intention of living up to their promises, as later shown by Microsoft's internal memos:
> When I met with you last, you had a lot of pretty pointed questions about Java, so I want to make sure I understand your issues/concerns....
> 1. What is our business model for Java?
> 2. How do we wrest control of Java away from Sun?
> 3. How do we turn Java into just the latest, best way to write Windows applications?
Or, as a Microsoft marketing presentation put it:
> Kill cross-platform Java by grow[ing] the polluted Java market.
Of course, Java developers also trusted Microsoft, and here's another memo showing what Microsoft thought of that trust:
> At this point its [sic] not good to create MORE noise around our win32 java classes. Instead we should just quietly grow j++ share and assume that people will take advantage of our classes without ever realizing they are building win32-only java apps.
But none of this should surprise us. We've known exactly what Microsoft was planning, ever since the publishing of the Halloween Document:
> OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market.
XAML is just Microsoft's decommoditized copy of Mozilla's XUL, or XML User Interface Language. If Microsoft had been honest about sharing standards, then Microsoft would have simply used XUL, which has become a published standard.
I think what Microsoft is really afraid of is that, by the time Longhorn and XAML come out (plus the two more releases to get them to work acceptably), Mozilla and XUL (and Gnome, and Mono) will have already filled the Internet-based application development niche. Thus, these Open Source technologies could end up doing to Longhorn what Apache did to IIS, and then it's bye bye Microsoft monopoly.
As a result, Microsoft is borrowing another page from their anti-Java strategy:
> We decided rather than trying to outrun sun at their game to change the rules.
Or, as Microsoft VP John Ludwig put it:
> Subversion has always been our best tactic... subversion is almost invariably a better tactic than a frontal assault... it leaves the competition confused, they don't know what to shoot at anymore...
No they're not.
Why is anything anything?
Wrong again. Wal-Mart is has several times the sales and cash that Microsoft has. And Wal-Mart isn't near the biggest company in the world. Microsoft is the largest and most profitable software company in the world, though.
> if I wanted some kind of megalomaniac
/ library/co-pyxp1.html
> "application development platform" I will use
> Python, thank you very much.
See http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices
Seriously, see http://mab.mozdev.org/ for the sort of things that can be done with an "application development platform" and compare it to the HTML Amazon search stuff...
Fixed last month:
Bug 238684: Onload XPI installs should be blocked by default
Phillip
They are not even the largest IT company in the world - that title still goes to IBM.
Just saying it like it are.
WinFS isn't a low-level filesystem, more of an abstraction on top of NTFS. I'd imagine that he wants the Mozilla developers to offer some of the browser's data such as bookmarks, browser history, or email in a WinFS-compatible way so the user could use WinFS to search through those things using standard Windows tools. I'd also imagine that they plan on having IE do the same thing.
Karma: Contrapositive
"Each user can install plugins to his own profile directory."
/usr/lib/mozilla, then change it back after installation. It's a pain in the ass, and there should be a better way. Maybe there is, and I just couldn't find it. Any suggestions?
How? When I tried to install mouse gestures, it gave an error about permissions. I had to chmod a+rw the chrome folder in
Karma: Contrapositive
And Wal-Mart isn't near the biggest company in the world.
Actually, Wal-Mart is the biggest company in the world. With sales in excess of 200 billion dollars, Wal-Mart tops the Fortune Global 500 list.
Now, if you choose to measure in terms of total company assets, the way Forbes does when they compile their Global 500 list, Citigroup wins. They've got assets worth over $1 trillion.
Personally, I've always been more interested in a company's gross revenue than their assets, so I go with the Fortune list. But that's just me. Others have a different opinion.
I write in my journal
I beleve what he ment was that EXT3 (and none others I can think of atm but i'm sure there are some) don't need to be manualy defragmented at all. The FS handles fragmentation dynamicaly as files are created and deleted. Any FS can be defragmented by moving files around on the disk. But the file system dosen't actualy do it, a seprate program does.
Don't judge me by my spelling
This was filed at bugzilla and has been fixed. Some of them considered it a "showstopper" bug and were willing to delay Moz 1.7 until it was fixed.
The next version of Mozilla (and I assume FireFox) will disallow XPI installers from anywhere but approved sites, with the main download sites being pre-approved. The user will be able to whitelist other sites if they choose.
The problem you refer to was an advertiser running an I-Frame to load a javascript. The javascript triggered an XPI install of a spyware with an onload command. All it did was pop up a dialog, it never installed automatically because extensions aren't allowed to do that by Mozilla.
At worst, it gave what is a best case scenario for MSIE in that the user was given a prompt asking permission to install the thing. That particlar spyware (xxxtoolbar) regularly hijacks MSIE and it's damned hard to remove it.
Only on
Actually, most of the spyware vendors have found ways around this. In one of my latest forensics review, I found that as long as any part of ActiveX and scripting is enabled in any way in IE, you can get infected and a dialog box will not come up. These spyware creeps write a Javascript script that downloads the binary representation of the file to your machine. Then an ActiveX call is made to rename it and run it. Bingo, your infected. This is on a fully patched machine. The only way around this is to not use IE as your default browser.
Quit playing Monopoly with Bill.
Linux - of the people, by the people, and for the people.
slow, bloated and buggy
You forgot to add broken. I've been trying to write some CSS stuff that looks even half reasonable on Windows when it just f**kin works in Moz / Firfox.
Bitter and proud of it.
Now, I do have some complaints about NTFS. First, it's SLOW. You usually end up taking a 10-20% performance hit compared to the simple FAT/FAT32 filesystems. Second, the journalling seem broken. If you crash a machine, on next boot it has to do a chkdsk, and despite the fact the journal should prevent metadata damage, chkdsk will frequently find errors on the filesystem. Third, the file locking is poorly designed. Files that are in-use can not be deleted or modified, which means replacing files for programs that run amok because of wrong DLL versions, etc, can often mean you have to reboot just to get access to those files again. It also means those Internet Explorer updates, that should only require a log out, or a restart of IE, require a reboot instead. Forthly, the interaction between file locking and online defragmentation is annoying. Files that are in-use can not be defragmented with an online defragmenter. That means your pagefile, and a good deal of the operating system itself can never change position on the drive because it's just plain impossible for it to do so. Defragmenters have no option to reorder files on the disk to optimize boot times because of this.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,