Mozilla - From Browser to Desktop Environment?

An anonymous reader asks: "A while ago OEone released a thingy called Penzilla which was basically a Mozilla desktop environment like GNOME or KDE. Everything was written in either DHTML or XUL and ran within the Gecko engine. Recently a new project, Robin was released that is basically a desktop running within Mozilla using XUL as well. There is NetWindows that attempts something similar for more interactive web applications. What advantages would a 100% Mozilla engine desktop hold and what are the disadvantages compared to much more complex environments such as GNOME or KDE? Is a Mozilla desktop possibly more elegant or efficient for the typical user? Is the XUL runtime environment more robust than troublesome C/C++ widgets? It seems like most applications could make the transition as the growing collection of Firebird extensions like ChatZilla and Gnusto and have shown."

Comments

Re:Robin Homepage is trippy

[ErisCalmsme]

I tried to go to the homepage to look for screenshots and thought it was broken. Then I realized that it was a running version of Robin. It has a "start button" menu thing with some programs. Crazy stuff!

Re:HTML on Steroids

[costas]

Let me just point out there are other ways to make more interactive web apps: JSRS is a free JavaScript Remote Scripting library that lets client-side JS communicate with the server: think listboxes or menus that get populated based on button clicks or check-boxes in the web page, without re-loading the page. It works here and now, and on IE, Gecko, KHTML and Opera (not a plug, just a happy developer).

You can see JSRS in action on my newsbot, where it lets you rate articles dynamically without re-loading the web page or submitting forms (in my example the server-side solution is Python Webware, but JSRS is simple enough to get to work with anything, and in fact there are already libraries for PHP, Perl, ASP, etc).