New Alliance Hopes To Standardize Web Plug-Ins

mksolutions writes "As reported on heise online and mozilla.org 'Apple, Macromedia, Opera and Sun Microsystems join in push to modernize plugins and create a richer web experience.' They are to develop a common, cross-platform plug-in interface which will be used in Mozilla products as well as Opera and Safari and will be released under an open source license."

Comments

Where's MS

[breadiu]

Why are they scared of working towards a standardized future?

Re:Where's MS

[Daengbo]

A consortium like this normally doesn't happen with the big guy on the block. It's an attempt by the Davids to join together to fight Goliath. That's what these things are and what there're for.

Re:Where's MS

[Nurseman]

" They are to big to care about the standards - the IE is the major, dominant browser - which is quite unfortunate, but true."

This has always been a minor annoyance for me. I use Mozilla and FireFox. BUT I keep a older version of IE for pages that will just not render in Mozilla/Firefox. I thought Java WAS a standard, but many pages with a Java plugin for log-on will just not work. I have been told over and over that "MS breaks the standards" but what good are standards if the browser with 90% market share doesn't use them ?. If I was designing a buisness site, and had to choose between a "standard" or compatability with IE, it would be a no brainer.

Re:Where's MS

[xyvimur]

By not being compliant to standards - speaking about IE and page rendering - MS forces the webmasters to create the webpages that are displaying correctly only under the `one and true' :) browser.
I had a situation that I had to adapt some HTML - that was rendered perfectly under Mozilla and Opera to be displayed correctly under IE.
There is chance that more users will start using `alternative' browsers, due to various malicious `add-ons' to IE.

Re:Where's MS

[gad_zuki!]

>What I have been doing is simply swapping hard drives

I hope you are telling people that you are taking their drives, other than the fact this is fraud and theft you are destroying their warranties. Dell or whomever is not going to replace a third-party drive.

If this is true

[dmomo]

I Hope that all browsers involved would allow me to point to my own plugin directory, so I don't have to have a different copy of the same file for each browser I use.

You know what this means, don't you?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, regardless of browser, everyone can have 10,372 smileys and valuable advertisements from Hotbar.

Oh no!

[callipygian-showsyst]

Don't reinvent Active-X with all its problems. Maybe browsers *don't* need standard, easy-to-install extensions (think BHO and ActiveX)

Re:Title Correction

[Red Alastor]

There is a difference between standardize and monopolize. You need to be alone to monopolize. Standards *are* good. As long as they are open and everybody can use them.

If only they'd go a bit further...

[Ma�djeurtam]

...and release the plug-ins themselves (hear Flash) under an open source license.

I'm not playing the open source fanatic here, but I'd really like them (*cough* macromedia *cough*) to realize that Linux is more than Red Hat.

Being a Gentoo PPC user, I still have no way to play flash on my iBook (well, I can boot it on OS X).

If really they want to protect their trade secrets (are there any? Isn't .swf more or less an open standard?), at least, could they release their plug-in for other archs?

Think about scumware NOW

[Boss, Pointy Haired]

Whilst it's all very well for us "FireFox on Linux" users to gloat about our immunity from scumware; we must be aware that the developers of scumware only target IE _because_ it is the most prolific browser. The security weaknesses of IE are more likely the second reason.

Now if a critical mass of Internet users migrate to FF/Moz/Saf etc., scumware authors WILL target this shared extension architecture.

Now, it is all very well saying that the Mozilla platform may not allow drive-by installation (to the best of our knowledge); but remember that scumware is often installed through social engineering of the user. "This website requires Hyperviewing 3D Spatial Extension" (bundled with scumware for your convenience); and the user may click "Yes" to install without second thought.

How you go about allowing extension installation whilst maintaining a level of sanity needs carefull thought at this stage.

Re:Wow

[hackstraw]

If this could be completed quickly, this would be a huge boon to consumers everywhere, making life much simpler for Joe Sixpack.

First off, its good to see people on /. still care about Joe Sixpack. Noone has really mentioned him lately, and I thought noone cared :)

OK, now for the meat here. Joe Sixpack, odds are he will buy a Dell computer with Windows [0-9A-Z]{2,4} that has an internet icon on the desktop that loads Internet Explorer which at worst will have a slightly older version of the flash plugin installed, where the hip web developer can detect the version and say "Click here to get the latest version", and since its too easy to install software on Windows, a click away, and he's off and running.

Let me say this about plugins. I HATE THEM. Some of it is because I've been through too much with them, that even if they work now, I'm still scared.

Back in the day, there was the plugin craze. This was probably the first instance of spyware for some of the plugins. Then you could not go to a website that did not require a laundry list of exotic plugins so that you could look at the text and pictures on their site. Being a Linux user, these plugins were few and far between, and the ones that did exist were very sucessful in crashing Netscape (something it didn't need much help with as it was). Recently, I had a conflict with flash on linux and it was blocking my soundcard and would just hang. In my web experience, plugins have not been a feature, but a problem. I've never found them useful, eyecandy at most.

My personal opinion is that plugins should not exist for the web. They are unnecessary. If you want me to download something and run it with a helper app, thats fine, but I do not need this junk inlined with the html. I don't like the old versions of the embeded acrobat reader that didn't allow you to save the document, and did 202 requests or whatever to get partial content, so the 1st page loaded fast, and every other may be slow. Same with movies, let me download and double click on them, I don't need them in my browser window. Currently, I have 10 windows open, plus 4 webpages in tabs. I can manage an 11th window to get some "featurerich" content. Odds are, you are using a mutitasking OS as well. Also, its really annoying when I'm navigating a website via the keyboard and my mouse pointer goes overtop of an obnoxious flash advertisement and it siezes the keyboard input. Thanks.

Now that I think about it, standardizing plugins could be the revamping of the plugin craze (read spyware). Maybe I'm too simleminded, but I still cannot think of a need to have 3rd party code running inline with my webbrowser.

no thanks

[dekeji]

I don't want a "richer" web experience. Things already blink too much. Worse, plug-ins kill a normal standardization process. If there hadn't been any plug-ins, people would have been forced to standardize something like SVG much earlier instead of relying on Flash and similar systems.

Also, the problem with plug-ins is not their availability, it's version hell: you need to have the right constellation of library versions, operating system versions, and application versions. A plug-in standard usually still uses APIs other than those provided through the plug-in standard, so a standard won't change that.

Altogether, I think it's a bad idea. Let's get rid of plug-ins altogether and instead work towards better, universally implemented, open web standards.