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."

Comments

Re:this guy is clueless

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Mozilla's Reply

[rmohr02]

Ben Goodger made a reply to the blog entry:

The way I understand it, WinFS is independent from Avalon, so there'd be little stopping us from "adopting" any part of its technology that made sense to us in a platform specific way - all of ths independent of how we do graphics. We already have budding shell integration services for things like default browser, with designs on further integration with each platform, e.g. using the existing Win32 Shell API.

Moreso than most projects we're aware of the cost of rewrites. You're right - it's all about RSS. We're not about to throw away all that we've done to undertake some "convert to XAML/Avalon" folly when we could be creating more useful applications ;-)

-- Ben Goodger Lead Engineer, Firefox

Meta Data

[Midnight Thunder]

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.

Microsoft Offers a Poison Pill

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Microsoft Offers a Poison Pill

[Anonymous Coward]

There are many others who have mistakenly trusted Microsoft:

For example, there's Bristol Technologies:

> The judge was also critical of a speech by Bill Gates in which he made "an affirmatively false statement and not merely an omission of material fact" at the Unix expo in New York (attended by some 20,000 people) in October 1996. Gates said: "... we work together with [Bristol and Mainsoft] to make sure they've got the very latest Windows API technology. Bristol and Mainsoft also provide source and binary compatibility, and again that's a close relationship where it's not just some old version of Windows, it's the very latest." It's the bit about the Microsoft claiming to offer the latest version of Windows that particularly caught the court's eye, because in fact Microsoft had refused to give Bristol access to the latest version of Windows.

> ...Microsoft was in fact already undermining Bristol's ability to develop its WIND/U (Windows/Unix) product by refusing to provide the latest source code, and that Bristol's users would be unable to get the expected functionality to run Windows programs on Unix as Microsoft would only supply Bristol with a subset of the NT code.

> The judge also said that Microsoft and was playing a bait-and-switch game in which it "baited" Bristol into continually devoting substantial resources to developing and selling WISE software, and "switched" on these converted Microsoft customers (and Bristol).

And let's not forget Apple and customers who use MS Office on the Mac. Little did they know that they were just pawns, to be sacrificed if Microsoft's edicts were not obeyed:

> Gates informed those Microsoft executives most closely involved in the negotiations with Apple that the discussions "have not been going well at all." One of the several reasons for this, Gates wrote, was that "Apple let us down on the browser by making Netscape the standard install." Gates then reported that he had already called Apple's CEO (who at the time was Gil Amelio) to ask "how we should announce the cancellation of Mac Office...."

As long as the same people are running the company, and as long as the law keeps looking the other way, there is no reason to expect Microsoft to change.

Microsoft is dishonest; Microsoft will break any promise; And, Microsoft treats Linux, not as a competitor, but as an enemy in a war.

Thus, compromise with Microsoft is not an option.

Re:Portability?

[Finuvir]

They're the biggest company in the world

No they're not.

Re:Use 'em and get screwed

[pmsyyz]

Fixed last month:

Bug 238684: Onload XPI installs should be blocked by default

Re:Portability?

[a_n_d_e_r_s]

They are not even the largest IT company in the world - that title still goes to IBM.

Re:Portability?

[cubic6]

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.

Re:Portability?

[Twirlip of the Mists]

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.

Re:Use 'em and get screwed

[mikeswi]

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.