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Firefox - The Platform
Strudelkugel writes "Business 2.0 reports Firefox is becoming a problem for Microsoft. But FF is not just a problem as a browser; its potential as a platform is significant. From the article: 'It all adds up to a business opportunity for startups, established software companies, and Web giants alike. Though Ross and the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation don't stand to make money, Firefox's open platform gives it enormous potential to hatch a new class of applications that live on the desktop but do business on the Web.'"
The potential for development within firefox is fairly impressive...microsoft had better be concerned.
Maybe Firefox is like the third-party candidate of browsers. Sure, it may not ever hold a dominant market share, but it will guide those who DO towards the right issues...
'If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit.'
Though Ross and the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation don't stand to make money, Firefox's open platform gives it enormous potential to hatch a new class of applications that live on the desktop but do business on the Web.
Can you say google?
Anything to attack Microsoft is good!
Go firefox!
Let's see:
Pro firefox - ding!
Anti MS - ding!
Good slashdot post! :)
Friends don't let Friends use Internet Explorer.
I make a dash to the Slash to the D-O-T
Coz them news for nerds makes sense to me
So let this serve as a warning to the spammers and trolls
You may have a fat pipe but you ain't got bawls.
There's a new manifesto by ESR
And the stats of the watts of a hybrid car
I gots love for Perens and miguel, et al
And I voted CowboyNeal on the Slashdot Poll
I'm Microsoft bashin' like every single day
Coz the OS got holes and Exploder's teh gay
Now SCO's talkin' trash so I give firefox a ride
To reply as a Coward so I can hate on McBride
I will flame you with language I won't say to your face
And I bet you can't guess who gots all your base
There's one way to know if your server is rotting
Just post a link and you'll get a slashdotting
You can mod me down coz I'm a karma whore
And I'm a decorated veteran of a recent flame war
Where they fought about an app with a K or a G
And a heated debate on what was meant by "Free"
As a slashbot, when Linux receives a threat,
My palms begin to sweat and my evil bit is set
You best believe I'll be posting a rant
And I'll be surfin' Slashdot 'til my mom says I can't.
Online applications clearly have many benefits, especially with the recent surge in broadband, but adoption and support has been slow in coming. Why is this?
Well, I think many companies are hesitant to move to online platforms, though, because they feel that it's a security risk. Putting sensitive data on a closed intranet seems safer in many ways, especially to those unfamiliar with encrpytion and other modern security measures.
It's about time the Mozilla foundation is getting the recognition they deserve. As a Windows user (yes, flame me), Internet Exploder has been nothing but a giant general protection fault.
Just goes to show, when you take out competition, you get stale, passionless software. Thank you Mozilla.
IGB: More fun than eating oatmeal!
as soon a browser reach a bit of popularity, everybody seem to try to have it substitute his OS. why can't it just be a browser???
Why when something is good for the userbase is bad for Micro$oft?
I love Firefox. It's fairly fast (not startup, but in use), it has a decent UI and the extensions are amazing. However, I'm becoming increasingly dismayed by the sheer amount of security holes being found. I mean - shockingly - if you look at sites like Secunia, there have been _MORE_ vulnerabilities in Firefox than IE in the last six months!
That isn't good. Sure, the FF crew may fix them faster, but ATEOTD it's getting hard to advocate FF over IE when effectively it's no more secure at present. I've already suffered this; a couple of people to whom I recommended FF have come back at me pointing out the recently discovered holes.
Being a 0.x release doesn't really count, as the Moz Foundation is pushing this to the masses - even looking for a NYT ad. It'd just be interesting to hear some thoughts on this. I'll be using it for years no doubt, but how do others promote it considering it has had more vulns than IE?
Problem with this 'We can do more' attitude is that you could end up with serious bloat for simple software.. like your web-browser being a 20mb download and supporting everything under the sun.
This wouldn't be the first times organisations have gone over board on something and ruined what they already had. Look at all the long term really successful products (WinAmp, Google.com, etc) they do so by keeping it simple. Not trying to re-write the wheel and do things like this.
FireFox is already extremely bloated (on Windows) compared to other Windows applications and the source code is hundreds of meg in size, the reason - it has an entire platform.
Blake Ross's minimal website reveals that November 9 is the day we "take back the web" i.e. the launch date for Firefox 1.0.
Sorry but if ActiveX was the answer MS wouldn't have bothered with Dotnet - those applications need to be distributable and portable.
Firefox with a VM might get some traction though...
People need to be vewy, vewy quiet, we awe hunting microsoft...
Is it possible that we could see a distributed OS where Firefox on one computer acts as an interface to multiple computers which act in concert to "simulate" a much more powerful machine?
No this would not be a beowulf cluster.
The maximum amount of processing power available to any one process would be limited to the fastest machine in the group, but it could be useful for anyone who can give thier computer difficult tasks faster than the computer can complete those tasks.
Every new task would be automatically given to whichever node has the lightest load.
Stop the world; I need to get off.
Wasn't this tried once? XUL + Javascript + CSS + XML + XHTML = the greatest programming platform?
Must everything become an operating system? How about quitting trying to become a brand and just make a simple quality browser?
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Most of the Mozilla code base is trilicensed under GPL, LGPL and MPL. So although Firefox can't use GPL code, other GPL projects can use Firefox code.
The MPL license, like the BSD license, means a company can incorporate Firefox into a commercial product, which encourages companies intending to do so to devote resources to Firefox development.
Shouldn't that be "Mycwosoft"?
However XP Service Pack 2 has taken a big bite out of many security, spyware, etc types of issues that formerly plagued Microsoft's IE browser. That said, users on other versions of Windows do not benefit from these new features.
Going forward, I would say that Firefox has more of a fight on its hands, now that Microsoft is starting to listen to the browser crowds.
I went strictly Firefox about seven months ago, and for the last few months have not even had the IE icon available on my desktop or in my menus. However since XP SP2, I've started moving back to using IE sometimes, because it blocks pop-ups, ActiveX controls, etc. Of course Firefox still has many extensions available which I (not the average user, but a developer user) have fallen in love with. However from the average Windows XP user's point of view, why would they switch to Firefox when Microsoft just made IE more secure for them and blocked annoying popups for them? It's definitely going to be harder to market those Mozilla features now that they doen't represent the edge over IE (XP SP2) anymore.
Uh oh. Didn't I hear this ~1996 from Netscape supporters? Not that Business 2.0 at all represents the average Firefox supporter or maintainer. But still, gives me shivers.
enormous potential to hatch a new class of applications that live on the desktop but do business on the Web.
.com era speak to me.
This sounds a lot like late 90's,
I am using firefox to type up this comment, and yes it is a great browser, but it's not going to change the way the world does business.
Nearly every business application that has been developed for the last 10 years does business on the web.
I hereby petition for a change to this article text so that it reads 'do business in a tab'. Now that's innovation!
Yet here was Andreessen publicly proclaiming in the summer of 1995 that Netscape's plan was to reduce Windows to "a poorly debugged set of device drivers." "They didn't save it up," Myhrvold said. "They fucking pulled up alongside us and said, 'Hey, sorry, that guy's already history.'"
"The tactic drove Redmond into a rage. The day after Andreessen's quote appeared in the press, John Doerr, the prominent venture capitalist and Netscape board member, received a chilling email from Jon Lazarus, one of Gates' key advisers. In its entirety, it read: "Boy waves large red flag in front of herd of charging bulls and is then surprised to wake up gored."
from Wired
Yes, I whish it was not, mainstream yet. Why? It is not ready... Simple example, related with safty. You're smart and you regular users do not have admin permitions in your windows/linux box. How do you update mozilla firefox automagically?
Hmmm log in as admin and run firefox... nah, I don't wanna surf as admin. Download as regular user and install as admin? Ok... but wait, that means that the automagical update is only useful if you are willing to surf with admin permissions! So there is a feature in Firefox that assumes that you are going to connect to some site using admin permissions. No you don't have to use it, but they are promoting that behaviour. I don't like it.
How to fix it? When a regular user downloads a patch/update it should ask for root/admin pass before trying to install. But it simply fails.
This is just an example that illustrates really dumb things about firefox now. I whish it would become more mature before becoming mainstream.
Sure, Firefox is great, I love it, I use it all the time, but before adding any more features could the Firefox team fix up the major memory leaks? PLEASE?
Before taking back the web, I think Firefox team should start by making their website W3C valid.
I noticed that today: Firefox page and "spread firefox" page are both invalid html code. Is it just be or they are supposed to be the ones caring about standards?
perception is reality
Firefox is a great browser, and there are a number of useful plug-ins available for it. It's also supported on many platforms.
But I have my doubts whether it's a good applications development platform as it is. Out of the box, you get, what, XUL and JavaScript? I'm sorry, but that doesn't strike me as a good platform for application development. In particular, JavaScript is just far too flaky to develop anything significant or complicated in it, and a lot of libraries just don't exist for JavaScript at all. And, like it or not, even if you put part of the application on the server, things still get complicated if you want a high quality GUI.
Maybe if Firefox shipped with a small, efficient JVM or CLR runtime and JIT that tie into the DOM, XUL, HTML, SVG, and event handlers (but without most of the bloated class libraries that Sun or Microsoft want to force on you), it could become a full platform. It would be even better if it included a small IDE out of the box.
As it is, I think it will remain limited to simple web apps created by rather dedicated Firefox hackers (and thank you for it, it is a great browser).
Anyone using Mozilla code as a basis for a product will pay out to people with a commit history.
After seeing this demo of exactly what Firefox and XUL can do in the way of fast, rich applications, I think its only going to take a few significant applications in XUL to get people moving to Firefox just to get it.
... then tell me that that wouldn't be an absolutely killer app for Firefox.
Does anyone know if someone is writing a webmail client in XUL? If not, someone really needs to (I've even started looking at trying to do it myself, and I'm no coder). Compared to current webmail interfaces a XUL interface would be almost indistinguishable from a local mail client. All you need to do is have browser detection send users to the old style webmail client if they aren't using a browser that supports XUL.
Now, imagine if GMail started doing that... IE users of GMail get the standard webmail interface, but Firefox users get a full fast XUL interface. Have a look at that demo site again, and do some clicking around
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
(which is very debateable), the idea of running apps on the browser is why Microsoft was so eager to kill off Netscape. If the browser is cross platform, it lessens the reliance on the underlying operating system, and threatens the profitability of Windows.
This may not be as much of an issue as it was back in the days of the Microsoft suit, though.
IM, Web, commerce, file sharing...these are all the apps of the future and they can all piggyback on a good browser codebase. Now I will preempt all of the people who tell me they actually spend 95% of the time on their computer using a spreadsheet or word processor....first of all, bullshit. Secondly, its only a matter of time before these are also embeddable browser thingies...via XAML, XUL or otherwise.
I stayed with Netscape through the disaster years, started using Mozilla at 0.7, and do my best to implement Mozilla (and perhaps soon Firefox) in the corporate environments where I work.
But - until I see some significant donations to The Mozilla Foundations, including some substantial in lieu payments from corps that are using Mozilla or Mozilla technology, I will have serious doubts that Mozilla will last in the long run. Serious cash is needed to fund a serious development effort.
sPh
They ought to fix it so that it has more of the menu options that were in Mozilla, works better when run in Windows limited user mode. It's still quite rough at the edges. I'm sure the program could do with more hardening as well.
As long as it is not Mike Rowe Soft.
badness 10000
Your bank? Check. Your brokerage? Check? Your government? Check. Your doctor? No, but thats because your doctor is still using Win95 and Office 97. Once someone consolidates the IT operations of law offices and medical practices, this will happen too...the cost of handling paper records is killing these industries.
Reminds me of a teacher at college. Well, not exactly a teacher, mind you. Teachers teach stuff, this guy just stood in front of the class and told us all to go learn ASP.NET from w3schools.com. If the guy was even at college to start with. But I digress. I recently argued with him as to why the hell we were learning ASP.NET while the course read "advanced programming". The moron gave me the following reasons why ASP.NET was to be the "entlösung" to all problems, including war, famine and dropbears*:
That's pretty much when I stopped listening and just started to stare in sheer amazement. The guy seems to be a bit right after all though, considering the possibilities that are now available for XUL regarding web-based applications. But hey, let's be fair; .NET isn't all that bad but riding the .NET car with ASP.NET is like driving a Ferrari with wooden wheels. C# would have been nice enough, instead. But this whole "everything will be web-based" idea was utterly shit and I KNEW there was a better solution than ASP.NET to web-based solutions. Then I saw a site with XUL elements plastered all over it and I was impressed. No more silly tricks with HTML forms and parsing it all through CGI scripts. It seemed like a clean enough solution for lots of things. Think of a small company; Items need to be tracked, clients need to be contacted and managed, rosters needs to be kept up to date and plenty more. Now all that can be done by HTTP with a standard webserver and a Mozilla platform.
The compant where I worked as intern could have used that. Instead they adopted a win2k3 server with office 2k-something premium, using it as a terminal server to log in to single Access database using remote desktop, which would function as a POS system with the aid of heavy VBA scripting. Not exactly an elegant solution, though it sure is a creative way to make an Access database centralized. Now imagine the same trick with a cheapo webserver running Apache 1.3.something, serving XUL documents that read/write data from an MySQL database... ( It WAS a rather small shop, after all... )
Hate me!
" Wasn't this tried once? XUL + Javascript + CSS + XML + XHTML = the greatest programming platform?"
What do you mean "tried once"? It's still there, and has been used. Just because every new use doesn't come with a press release, doesn't mean people aren't using it.
As far as why? Rich-clients are the future, even if all the luddites rally against them.
"Must everything become an operating system? How about quitting trying to become a brand and just make a simple quality browser?"
Must every bit of FOSS have a scripting capability? I'm browsing with Mozilla now. I'd say it reached "quality" when the majority of the "were's my browser?" posts dropped severely about two years ago. And YES brand is important. Quick! What is LINUX? Quick! What is Apache? Much better than "a browser" or "an operating system".
That already exists! Ok, it doesn't let people buy book yet, but you can search. I wonder if the author of the article knew that. Check it out here and here. I've actually tried it out and it works really well.
Get the firefox extension here.
Now let me guess you will tell me you keep it all under your mattress and don't deal with banks at all.
A web browser is not an operating system. I repeat a web browser is not an operating styem!
Google on the otherhand seems to not only integrate with the web but also the desktop. They are developing api's and may even challenge the database market soon.
Html on the desktop freaked out microsoft because it was something they did not control. Besides some XML its mostly html formatted documents. Big deal.
Google will began to act as an interface to data locally as well as on the corporate lan and internet and will open a huge wave of innovative software using google's api's and protocals.
Its still in its infancy but if I were Bill Gates my eyes would be aimed at google for the time being.
http://saveie6.com/
What an apt metaphor: an intelligent, young, adventurous member of the species "homo sapiens" (Netscape) gets gored by a bunch of dumb, overweight beasts with sharp horns (Microsoft).
A lot more applications should have moved to the web over the last decade. Microsoft prevented that because they were not ready for it yet, even though the industry was. Instead, we got nearly another decade of poorly written VB, Office, and Access applications.
Netscape was supposed to be a new platform ... ... ... ...
Java was supposed to be a new platform
Even Flash was supposed to be a new platform
Now Firefox is supposed to be a new platform
Did they kill MS? Nope.
XUL is cool, but so far I haven't seen MANY great applications done with it.
I can't believe it, nearly every comment is coming down on this incredible project. People on this site need to get over the very base notion that the contrarian viewpoint is inherently insightful.
..."because Ross and the non-profit MF don't stand to make money..." since that sooner or later seems to drop any group's focus onto making money rather than making good software.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The problem is, installing web applications right now sucks. It isn't double-click setup pretty, and not everyone has a personal web server running, and the libraries that web applications use, from PHP to JSP to NET arent evenly distributed, nor can they be installed (at least not easily) as part of a setup.exe type deployment.
If someone could rectify that, so that a person could receive MyCoolAccountingApp_Setup.exe, run it, and bang, it looks and acts like any other local piece of software, then it would definately be an advancement. But right now its more "Well install IIS or Apache, then install PHP and these 4 modules, then hand register this DLL with the COM server, then copy all these files to these 3 locations. Zzzzz. Totally fine for server central web-applications, but not for personal ones.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
Mozilla (seamonkey)? Its been around a lot longer than firefox, and it is just as much of a platform as firefox can be. I guess people just like the cool name...
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
And sharing the gecko engine will mean more and more software will be able to ship smaller binaries once gecko already resides on your system.
Though Ross and the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation don't stand to make money
Wow... and ouch... just throw the #1 problem, in many peoples eyes, of the GPL in their faces and rub it in why don't you.
Again, ouch...
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Yes, http://xulwebmail.mozdev.org/
Go Gusties
"why does everyone think it'll become an OS? Seriously."
Because a meteor has struck the earth wiping out all the uber-geeks. Leaving the new mammal-geeks who know nothing of what came before. What's an OS? What's a de..vel..op..ment plat...form?
all-day long
In Soviet Russia, Foxes stand in line for an hour to get food... So I don't know what the hell your talking about.
Good GRIEF!!! According to the article, "But in 1999 Netscape was sold for $10 billion to America Online." Nowadays, I personally find it hard to believe Netscape was ever worth that much.
"The MPL license, like the BSD license, means a company can incorporate Firefox into a commercial product"
I think you better read the MPL again, it hardly looks anything like BSD and more importantly you cannot incorporate MPL code into a GPL program but you can with the modified BSD license. You can see here what licenses are Free but incompatible with the GPL.
"Most of the Mozilla code base is trilicensed under GPL, LGPL and MPL. So although Firefox can't use GPL code, other GPL projects can use Firefox code."
This wikipedia article says Mozilla is released under the MPL and the GPL which indicates you are correct about it being released under the GPL. I don't see why they just don't stick with the GPL, the MPL doesn't offer anything above what the GPL already guarentees.
3dinfo@maficstudios.com
Have you tried NewsMonster? What about Komodo? Or Ozone's desktop featured last year on Slashdot?
Why hasnt IE been updated in so long?
Because IE7 was the biggest threat to microsoft. They nearly built open standards which would have let their users to everything as webapps. The only problem is they didnt have any lock-in.
Thats why IE7 team was stomped into the ground and we havent seen or heard a major release since Win2000.
Someone dig up some of those random facts i once had on this subject please? IE7 was a strong active dev team doing neat stuff. Then they were axed.
I remember a cover story in the late, great BYTE magazine (back when it was still in dead tree format) touting Netscape as the browser becoming the platform and making OSen essentially irrelevant. That was just a little before ms squished Netscape like a bug.
I am not an XP user, but based on what I see and hear from those who do, SP2 is creating all sorts of issues ranging from slow performance to completely breaking applications. As a result, many are avoiding SP2 like a plague, at least until its bugs are fixed.
No one looking for a clustering solution would try to control it using firefox; far better libs exist. No one developing a browser would bloat it by adding such stupid functionality. In short: yes, everything is possible; but you had to be out of your mind.
It's a great browser. We can get into the security, but alot of what makes a killer app killer is the GUI. I don't know the legal specs, but I'm blown away no one else got famous using "tabbed browsing". Til now it's been the webdevelopers who've brought that to the average consumer through frames(sic) - who owns the rights to the concept? I sure hope M$ doesn't. The recent cross-tab vulnerability notwithstanding.
Anyway, Firefox is more user-friendly than MSIE, without becoming a lecturing tedious drone(clippy). It's installation size (1.7.3) is roughly 9MB, compared to my MSIE at 14MB. It blocks most popups and allows me to configure/repeal this and other user-level-tweaks with intuitive ease.
The open source aspect DOES have a positive impact on it's development as well. As another poster accurately stated - the more eyes on the code, the more better. Microsoft can't compete in that way. I think they should continue extending the platform - do they do firewalls as and end-product? (ok, I'll go find out later)
We're discussing a free product that most of us feel is superior to the market leader. That itself is reason to celebrate. Way to go F^2!
Stuff that matters.
- Winamp rips, burns, and plays CDs, mp3s, wavs, and any other audio file you could think of; it has all sorts of eye candy (skins with transparencies, visualizations,
...) It plays videos. It washes the dog and takes out the trash.
- Google, too, has all sorts of extra features that have gone well outside its original mission (a search engine). Examples: Google is now a major ad server; the dozens of services listed here and here.
No, both of these huge popular, long-term successful products have certainly not been kept simple. The wheel has indeed been reinvented many times over, and the products are in fact stronger for it because Google and Nullsoft keep a close eye on their feature creep. They don't and they shouldn't stop their software from evolving to find new markets and improve old ones. The trick is to not go completely overboard with a new feature or product that works against other members of your product suite. Google and Nullsoft (and Firefox, for that matter) have been very good at this. They keep feature creep heading in the right direction.Sigh. What platform are we talking about? Don't resurrect the dead (and tarnish the good name of FireFox , Moz and friends).
If we need a platform then support Miguel and Co. with their alternative to MS dotnet...
I question whether the poster has a secret agenda here....
That does look quite interesting, would people care to share links to informative XUL documentation?
XUL is cool. Javascript is nicht so cool. I can't really imagine having to build or debug a complicated GUI application with Javascript as your primarily language for doing everything.
I realize that part of the problem with Javascript has been different browsers with slightly different interpretations of DHTML and DOM stuff, and that has given Javascript a worse rap than it deserves.
But that rap isn't completely undeserved. And trying to convince programmers that they should be building the key functional blocks of their applications in Javascript just isn't going to fly any time soon. At least call it something else. Like "XULscript", fix the marketing problem that Javascript has.
Yes, that's a great demo and it shows that there is a lot of functionality in Firefox. But look at what it took to write that code: a dozen JavaScript files and a lot of XML. JavaScript and XML just aren't very nice to use for engineering large, complex interactive software systems.
Cb..
One thing that needs pointing out: Firefox (and other mozilla based products, as well) does, in fact, have "zones." The only difference is that there is only one zone by default: the insecure/internet zone.
But the mere fact that Firefox has "zones" is a pretty solid indicator that at some future point in time, the Mozilla team intends to make use of "zones" in the base products.
If you wish to enable the zones, all you need is this plugin. The plugin does not provide this zones itself, all it does is provide an interface for the builtin zone capabilities that Firefox and Mozilla have.
/dev/random
"Now, imagine if GMail started doing that... IE users of GMail get the standard webmail interface, but Firefox users get a full fast XUL interface. Have a look at that demo site again, and do some clicking around ... then tell me that that wouldn't be an absolutely killer app for Firefox."
Gmail does do some kind of local scripting. I don't know the specifics, but it's very fast, much faster than it would be if it had to access anything online for every click. Also, there's autocomplete boxes that pop up when you start typing in a From: box that narrow down the list with each letter you type. That and other stuff makes me sure that a lot of what it does happens locally.
For that reason, I kinda doubt XUL would be much faster.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
hmmm slashdot seems to have cut out my href. so here is the link to the plugin in plain-text. http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_policymanager.html.e n
/dev/random
"Secondly, its only a matter of time before these are also embeddable browser thingies...via XAML, XUL or otherwise."
I know local based programs can be called up in a browser. Interchange (RH's ecommerce package) could use Gnumeric.
They're called capabilities. Not exactly the same, but do the same thing. Just 'cuz there's no GUI, doesn't mean it isn't there.
for 20 yrs, geeks have been whining about MS bloat. I can see it has really hurt them. Bloat whine is stupid. It is not a problem. If you have a highspeed connection, u can download a 20 meg file in - literally - a few minutes. And as to all those geeks who are gonna whine about ram or HD storage - GET OVER IT !!!! nothing is cheaper them mem. I just got my kid a new emachines computer with 160 gig hardrive and 512 ram, under 600 bucks with dvd burner - an d i know a lot of /.s cd do better.
Geeks - listen up !! do u know why MS is succesfull ? becasue of bloat !!! Yes !!! people want features, the more the better, I mean a duh, isnt features why u buuy a computer ??
As 2 FF displacing IE - there is a small problem: ff does not work as well as IE, at least based on my statistical sample of 3 machines. All it takes is ONE failed bank transaction, and FF will be toast - that is the thing about MS: they are the only people with a monopoly posistion, and thus the only people who can survive a failure.
Yes, that's a great demo and it shows that there is a lot of functionality in Firefox. But look at what it took to write that code: a dozen JavaScript files and a lot of XML. JavaScript and XML just aren't very nice to use for engineering large, complex interactive software systems.
Sure. I don't think web applications are ever going to take over as many people claim. I don't expect to see web based word processors of any note, nor web versions of any terribly complicated program - but XUL for webmail, for apps like the demo, for online tax calculation apps, for simple bespoke database frontend apps at companies etc. there is plenty of room (and value) in a fully cross platform web application. The utility of having the whole thing be cross platform and remote can be sufficient to justify any extra coding complexity if we're talking about relatively simple applications here.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Firefox is built on the Mozilla platform. An OS is nowhere in the roadmap. Google knows the Mozilla platform better than any other large company.
so why not support GTK+ in it's various forms anyway. Don't see that a browser is the basis for
a platform anymore (not since the Netscape hype a while back).
In any case, even MS is back peddling from the "browser as the ultimate UI" thing like crazy these days in case you haven't noticed. Smart (fat) clients seem to be the prevailing "cult".
If Business 2.0 is an Esther Dyson thing then I think the answer is go back to sleep people. Just the usual prattle....
Gmail does do some kind of local scripting. I don't know the specifics, but it's very fast, much faster than it would be if it had to access anything online for every click. Also, there's autocomplete boxes that pop up when you start typing in a From: box that narrow down the list with each letter you type. That and other stuff makes me sure that a lot of what it does happens locally.
You didn't click on the link did you? Sure a little scripting of GMail can make it fast, but as far as rich interfaces go, I don't think it would look so good in comparison to a XUL interface. Go look at the demo, and spend some time clicking around and using all the features of it.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
I'm not sure where they are getting 2%, with Microsoft having almost the rest...
a sp
According to this:
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.
Firefox / Mozilla is up to 17%, and IE is down to 75.8%.
I say to Microsoft: Good bye, and good riddance!
Lose Weight and Feel Great with Isagenix
"Why is it a big deal to buy books from amazon without visiting thier website anyway?"
MAB (and other programs like it) has the potential to do for eCommerce what CD-Burners have done for the music industry. Take a big load off the server end. Puts more of what you want in your hands (by changing the interface). Merge several together and you can have a meta-shopper interface on your end (pricewatch on steroids).
Everyone with a Gmail account should send Google feedback requesting an XUL interface. If enough people request it Google will almost have to comply
>>Firefox's open platform gives it enormous potential to hatch a new class of applications that live on the desktop but do business on the Web.'" old news. This is the same thing that was said back when Netscape made the first "Communicator" suite and it didn't come to pass.
...Firefox the Flame Thrower (the kids love this one); and my personal favorite, Firefox the doll--
"May the source be with you!" (adorable)
This is shamelessly ripped from http://xulplanet.com/tutorials/whyxul.html
I think it presents a concise overview of firefox as a development platform.
XUL and Gecko make an excellent choice for building sophisticated Web applications. It provides a rich user interface toolkit, an HTML and CSS renderer with excellent standards-compliance and support for web services, all completely cross platform.
Work is ongoing with the Gecko Runtime Environment (GRE), which aims to make Gecko a snap to drop into a standalone application, complete with your own executable, if you desire. The idea is to allow the right version of the GRE to be installed automatically with the application if necessary. If the GRE is already installed, there is no need to install it again, or even download it. For those that are interested, the GRE is about 5 to 10 MB, depending on your platform, which is quite small compared to other application platforms. It's also possible to have Gecko run directly from a network drive or CD.
Since XUL may be used on Web sites, it can be used with server-side architectures such as PHP and JSP to build dynamic content. This allows Gecko to be both a two-tier or a three-tier application model depending on your needs. There are projects in development now which aim to integrate Java, Python and other languages into Gecko directly.
Why isn't javascript ideal for doing business logic?
yeah, and for that, a good XUL IDE would be needed. I tried xulmaker but it did not even start for me. does anybody know any _working_ XUL IDEs out there?
Parent's clever humor exposes the heart of the matter: the newcomers who are clamoring for FF to become a 'platform' are jaw-droppingly ignorant (qv., Mozilla).
Sadly, none of the aforementioned newcomers will get the parent's joke...
are we talking about making it an os or an app to run little widgets on like konfabulator...i think it should remain an app not an OS an APP so that the average joe user can use it and have their dumb programs like MS works (oxymoron)
I think I am going to write an XUL interface to my site. XUL forums and chat, here I come!
Sig: I stole this sig.
"You didn't click on the link did you? Sure a little scripting of GMail can make it fast, but as far as rich interfaces go, I don't think it would look so good in comparison to a XUL interface. Go look at the demo, and spend some time clicking around and using all the features of it."
I did click in fact, and I don't really see much difference in user experience between gmail and the link you posted. The one you posted looks more like a native app, but to me they seem about as fast as each other,
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
How are you measuring memory use? TaskManager? It's fairly common knowledge that IE leverages libraries already loaded when windows starts. Won't show up on the task manager numbers.
You might say that I am arguing semantics...as total memory used is total memory used...but really...what's a few MB amongst friends and applications in 2004?
Blar.
Ah, the good old days. CPM worked, was simple yet powerful, fit on a floppy, and required just a few K of memory. Bells and whistles? That's what apps were for.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
(okay, okay, and partly out of ignorance...)
Does Microsoft have a bugzilla type of thing where you can report memory leaks in IE, Office, etc?
Browsers, as a "platform", suck.
You really don't want browsers downloading and executing code. It's just too insecure. That way lies the hell of Active-X. The great thing about HTML is that it's basically descriptive, not executable. Downloading code in some interpretive language is only slightly less insecure, and much slower. (Or, when there's a page with a dumb ad on screen, CPU usage goes to 100%)
Asking the user for permission to run code doesn't work. Not only will users answer "yes" for hostile code, they'll implicitly agree to EULAs your business's lawyers would never agree to.
Most free "plugins" are in some sense hostile code. They phone home. They look around the host machine. They burn CPU time when not doing anything for the user. Even the "good ones", like Google's toolbar, overreach. Others are much worse.
What we really need are good extensions to HTML for forms. Better validation and help are all things that can be done descriptively, rather than by running executable code on the user's machine. HTML forms are lame; they can't even set up a field that must, say, have five numeric digits and must be filled in. You could do that on IBM green-screen terminals thirty years ago.
I know that, personally, I find the ability to write things around firefox impressive. The current project that i'm working on requires a web based Rich Text editor, but with some twists to fit the data that will be modified. I initally looked into doing it to work for IE, but decided that I would develop it as a firefox extension, and when it's working properly, I'll share the source. I'd much rather a simple firefox extension than trying to do it based all in javascript to work in both firefox and IE. Most of that isn't important, but what it leads me to is this: With the extension only being for Firefox, it forces the end users of the product (there will probably only be a few hundred) will need to use firefox. I know they'll have to, because they're locked into using this tool when it's finished, so they'll need to use Firefox to get what they want accomplished. It might not be the best method to get folks to switch, but it works.
Apply for a patent!
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Parent is classic flamebait, and it's not even very well disguised.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
*PHB opens refrigerator and hears a dark, monstruous voice*
- A am XUUUUUUUUUUUL!!
...firefox in total,all platforms, or firefox as it exists running on top of MS OS? How does it compare to IE security-wise JUST on MS?
I really don't know, anyone? I think it's important to not leave out the little details with this.
It's funny because it's true.
"Sure. I don't think web applications are ever going to take over as many people claim."
Oh you may be surprised.
"My comment wasn't about the data, it was about where you put GUI code. Even if your ping times were typical delays for entire transactions, 170ms is too much of a delay for interactive response (and actual HTTP transactions are often much longer). If you want interactive response, you must put code on the client, and the only option for that right now is JavaScript."
Apparently hearing "browser" triggers a whole lot of preconceptions. The design of the underlying framework is powerful enough that communications doesn't have to be via HTTP. It could be jabber if you want. Or if you want XUL without all the rest, then try Luxour? Think outside the box. That's what geeks are suppose to do.
I am not all happy with the browser becoming the platform for applications. It would stifle innovative applications because the author wont think out of the sandbox the browser provides him with.
Various p2p tools, seti@home, bit torrent, q3arena etc are not browser based applications and we are glad they arent.
(see my sig)
SlashHack is a cool example of an app written on top of the Mozilla platform.
The article is correct Firefox (really Moz as others pointed out) is a fantastic development platform.
The technology is especially cool for me: I wrote a system in 2000 for a client that positions Java Swing widgets using XML, in order that the app could support pluggable skins. I view XUL as the ultimate application of that architecture. A fantastic decoupling of logic and presentation.
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
That's a great demo. But the first thing I thought when I saw it was, "Damn, when Microsoft inevitably steals this and puts out their own version in the form of XAML, we in the non-Microsoft world are going to have a really hard time keeping our platform software relevant and viable."
We've got to get this stuff out there and widely used before Microsoft does. The very future of computing is probably at stake.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
You might want to look at NewsMonster and Oeone's desktop for clues as to ways you can expand.
This was the Netscape threat of 5 years ago. That Java enabled apps running under Netscape would destroy Microsoft/Windows because any platform that that could support Netscape would run everything else as well.
Didn't happen then. Don't hold your breath yet now.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The design of the underlying framework is powerful enough that communications doesn't have to be via HTTP. It could be jabber if you want. Or if you want XUL without all the rest, then try Luxour?
Hello? Are you even bothering to read anything or do you just blindly type away? The whole thread is about about nice something like XUL could be if it weren't hamstrung by the limitations of what ships with Firefox, specifically the fact that Firefox only ships with Javascript as its sole choice of client programming platform.
Apparently hearing "browser" triggers a whole lot of preconceptions.
Yes: the correct ones in this case. It's not about whether XUL is good or bad, but whether XUL inside Firefox makes a decent client programming platform by itself or whether we need a little something else packaged with Firefox.
I work for a company that develops intranet-type applications for big mega corporations here in Canada. We've been developing and deploying apps written in XUL/JavaScript + PHP or Python for almost a year now... so far so good. Surprisingly (or maybe not surprisingly) no one has complained about the forced switch to Firefox. In fact we tend to get thank you emails gushing with compliments about Firefox :)
XUL is here, and it works. Having all of the advantages of web-based deployment, while being able to use proper user interface elements is a godsend.
Because Firefox is popular. Not much of a development platform when three people and the developer use it - no offense to the Mozilla team.
Serious cash is needed to fund a serious development effort.
t ml )
August 11, 2004, (Mountain View, CA). The Mozilla Foundation, in collaboration with Novell and IBM, today announced the formation of a project to implement the W3C's XForms 1.0 Recommendation. XForms is the forms module in XHTML 2, developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which enables developers to deliver the type of next-generation, rich, portable web-based applications desired by corporate IT.
(from http://www.mozilla.org/press/mozilla-2004-08-10.h
Firefox, a free open-source browser that loads twice as fast as Internet Explorer
I keep reading comments like this from time to time. I like FireFox and I find that it is pretty fast once it is loaded, but on every box I have tried it typically takes 8 to 10 seconds to load the first time I use it. IE always loads in under 2 seconds, usually less than 1 second. Is there some trick I am unaware of? Does anyone know why folks keep claiming that it loads faster than IE?
Send/track messages to 100K people: www.xPressAlert.com
The best one I know of is xulplanet.com. You can also google for some of the stuff from IBM (I think there was a series of 3 on using XPCOM); see bottom of this page.
... in PDF" on that page) from the publisher might help too, if you prefer going through that - or buy the book or something.
PDFs of the book Rapid Application Development with Mozilla (look for "Download
Note, though: devedge.netscape.com (the Netscape developer's site) appears to have been taken offline recently; so you'll need to go through web.archive.org if you find any results on that that look interesting.
(The folks on forums.mozillazine.org are usually quite nice too, if you're civil about things. Might be a better place to ask.)
ECMAScript? ;)
At least (at this point, anyway) you'd only be developing for Mozilla - nobody else supports their XUL - so you won't have to worry about cross-browser compatibility. It would turn out fewer warnings though - the prefs javascript.options.strict and javascript.options.showInConsole help somewhat, at least.
(JS definately has its quirks, of course - it's not exactly an OO / procedural language, I guess. I would probably have an easier time with it had I actually been in CS where people get to muck with Scheme...)
Yeah, Venkman doesn't seem to be the best debugger around... But it's not all that bad either.
You hate that phrase, too?
:-)
Yes, all the "Enterprise" (translation: big, over-complicated and bloated) mumbo-jumbo and impressive (?) sounding word-ifying logo-rhea gets old after a while.
Yes, and it's completely off topic, but I just had to chime in with a hearty "AOL!".
Yow! I'm supposed to have a plan?
It would be a good start to rename all those files ".es" instead of ".js" then. ;)
Hmm. Small fast good java runtime instead of "java"-script? What an intriguing idea.
Of course, you really have to be careful here. You would want to call it Java, but you have to meet SUN's requirements. So, what about the "Micro Edition" of Java for embedded devices? It is supposed to be quite a bit smaller. I personnally have not worked with it, so I don't know if it is fatally crippled in some way, or if it retains most general usefulness.
If it is mostly usefull, but lacks a few things, could a mozilla/fire-thing package be added on with enough XUL support to get the job done?
Any comments?
Yow! I'm supposed to have a plan?
"but if I were Bill Gates my eyes would be aimed at google for the time being."
Poor Frodo doesn't have a chance, unless we launch a counter strike at the gates of Mordor itself as a diversion!
Er, ah, carry on!
Yow! I'm supposed to have a plan?
Overall I can't see how doing stuff with XUL is a good idea until other systems support XUL also. The point of web based apps isa freedom to change at any time. If you write to XUL you have locked yourself in to one rendering engine essentially. If xul worked with khtml and opera then I would not have this problem.
I want to have the freedom that web based apps give me and my customers not remove that freedom. Tieing myself to one browser engine does remove that freedom. Right now if I do regular html, css etcthe stuff works pretty much everywhere under almost any kind of device. With XUL I would lose that freedom and it is important.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
The features it has now are just FINE. Stop adding them. We could probably even do with fewer. I am curious though. What makes you say it "isn't that great?" It's far and away better than IE (imho), and it doesn't feel as clunky as the Mozilla Suite. It does everything I want it to and for me it's been a pleasure to use. In fact I use it exclusively. What flaw am I overlooking? Is it something that only anal-retentive coders notice?
;)
But of course--security problems or not--almost anything is better than IE, eh? eh?
The security on bank computers and the security on merchant computers are two completely separate issues.
You are going back to IE because it blocks popups? Firefox blocks popups too. Why would you stop using a browser you have used for seven months and go back to IE because it blocks popups?
"We're sorry, but this site requires Microsoft Internet Explorer because it depends on DHTML behaviours and sloppy JScript coding. You can download Microsoft Internet Explorer at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/"
It would be a good start to rename all those files ".es"
(Español?
Just Look at JBoss, it's a kewl J2EE compliant application server.
How to deploy a web application: just copy the application WAR file into the deploy directory. That's all. It works right on the money.
The Entlösung? As in "solution involving ducks"? Or "the Duck solution"?
No, it's a solution involving walking, talking trees :-)
Even if .war packages are drag-and-drop to install, then how does one deploy JBoss itself? Is that double-click setup.exe easy?
Maybe you don't know this because... perhaps you weren't online at the time.
But I remember having to download 80 friggin' MEGS in my win9x for Internet Explorer _5_.
It was so bloated that i had to use a download manager (or did it have its own download manager? Can't remember well).
Now can you tell me now what's so bloated in Firefox? It just happened to have an excellent framework for a SPECIFIC web application (i.e. the browser). But its framework turned out to be SO GOOD, that you can build OTHER applications with it.
How can you call code reuse "bloating"?
We want to take back the web, not take down Mozilla.org. Unless they want us to direct download so they can use the stats on their favor?
Dilemma: waste bandwidth or get underrated stats? Hmmmmmm.......
Yes. Just go there, download the zip archive and just run the Jboss script.
you all must be really focused on this. I, for one, welcome our new Firefox overlords.
Firefox is touted as the best browser around. Having used it for a few months, across different rev levels, I am not impressed. It locks up periodically for up to several seconds, which is annoying when typing. It is just as flakey in rendering some html pages as Konqueror. And the plugin model is annoying when basic features have to be downloaded from random people you are supposed to trust.
Firefox is decent. But it is wrong to tout it as the best.
just thinking but wouldn't it really help to get the ball rolling if someone developed an ActiveX plug-in to support XUL in IE? That way even IE only shops can write XUL where there might have written it in AcitveX instead. This could prevent the construction of another barrier to switch over to Mozilla/Firefox at a latter date. This would be a great way for OSS to get a foot in the door at some major organisation.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
It has the potential to be great, but we need to get past all this "add more features" and fix security programs.
Maybe Firefox is not yet as secure as it should be. But people are intensely at work tightening things up.
According to The Burning Edge no less then 10 security related bugs have been fixed in the last week.
The developers are obviously using the random HTML script, and the security bug hunting program seems to pay off.
I'm under the impression that Firefox developers are working very hard to provide a secure version 1.0 of Firefox.
I don't think enough people are using (and hacking) .net/mono yet to be able to really know if this system is secure. But I do think it is a much more interesting system than plain old user-based permissions.
Get the most stupidest of all the investors, but
who are great in number and well organized and use
them to get the competition down. Offering heaven high profits is one of the surest ways of luring them. BTW, it won't be really stupid to get them to kill competition.
The intelligence behind is something as wiered as
Professor James Moriarty of SH.
-Aayee Oosa
A free software and open source web browser with an audience (increasing numbers of people getting the browser, the press talking about it, and lots of third-party add-ons)? I don't think Microsoft has ever faced that kind of web browser before.
Digital Citizen
The law has to realize that a (monopolist) operating system must not be allowed to bundle a file browser, a web browser, a multimedia player, a firewall, an instant messenger, and any other kind of software which someone else may want to sell. Otherwise that dominant position of that monopolist will be self-reinforcing.
We are spectators to the same phenomenon that happened on the earth, where a completely unregulated natural selection took place: humans have come to such a dominant position that other animals simply cannot compete with them anymore and have no way to invert the dominance. They are only free to adapt to niches that are of no interest to humans. (like MacOSX and Linux are doing)
There is a degree X of dominance that, when crossed by a species S, allows S to stay dominant, if no regulation happens. This has happened on the planet earth but must not happen in the market.
So we can only prevent monopolists to include products by default. Of course some users like to buy a product that does all those things out of the box, but 1. that desire is not necessarily to be fulfilled, because there may be more pressing matters, 2. the installation of products could be made embarassingly easy if you really want to. One click.
Modularity is the key.
" Just ask San Francisco-based Web developer Chris Pederick, ...
just millions of PC users downloading Firefox. That, and a really smart 19-year-old who's just getting started"
1. Make sure what you eat and drink are safe.
You should avoud foreign trips in the coming years. If you are absolutely sure you should, avoid eating at strange places. Keep a known neighborhood - or build a trusted one.
2. Keep an eye on your sleep disturbance patterns.
3. Keep an eye on religious build up in neighborhood.
4. Let your doctors be trusted ones.
...XUL/PHP/mySQL (a very strong combination) is to become the new VB
Ouch, that hurts. Please don't mention PHP, mySQL in the same phrase. As VB.
PHP and mySQL are technologies, while the other acronym stands for some badly designed dangerous toy.
This is the third or fouth time that someone points to faser.net/mab on this thread as an example of a good XUL application. No other examples mentioned at Score:5. That thing is very-very cool indeed. But I'd really like to know why aren't there many more of these.
I've been noticing more here than anywhere else that some are confusing Firefox with the Mozilla Suite(Someone even mentioned being a user of FireFox 1.7.3). Firefox is not bloated and will never be bloated. Extensions are optional and if you are like me, you would only be installing about 5 small features to the default installation. The option is there to bloat to your wishes though ;).
Now the potential as a platform isn't really going to be Firefox. It's starting with firefox, and will become popular because of firefox, but the platform is under development as the XUL Runtime Environment (XRE). This is where the magic starts.
One will be able to develop executable applications seperate from Firefox that automatically run on Windows/Linux/Mac. Right now, noone wants to tie their developments to a browser although a few like to tinker with it on their own. When the XRE is released, people will then actively develop XUL/Javascript applications with an optional backend of their choice. You will be able to create .exe applications. You can make those one-click installations someone mentioned somewhere here. No need for the browser although the browser can be used if you want to. Bad news is the XRE isn't being actively developed as Firefox is. So, who knows when they'll release it. But when they do, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc will be complete XUL/Javascript Applications that run using the XRE and GRE. I don't know much about GRE, but that's most likely going to stay browser-specific, although I'm probably wrong.
I'm one of the people who has starting learning XUL and such, and although I have big plans for it. I do not plan on coding for a browser ;) XRE all the way!
A native program running in a well designed OS is just as secure as Java.
That's why, for example, we used to let 20+ students at terminals at a mainframe or mini, in universities for example. They could run whatever programs they wanted on that machine, including their own code and including stuff they found on a hacker BBS. And in fact in all CS universities they're _supposed_ to program on those machines. Yet none of them came anywhere _near_ owning the machine.
The concept that a program once running on a machine automatically can retrieve or overwrite _all_ data, format the drive, or generally even blow an alien mothership up, is (A) Hollywood idiocy, and (B) never true except for the simplest single-user OS's like Win'95.
Or to put it otherwise: what do you tell Unix users? "Don't run as root except to install programs or other admin tasks. Especially don't go online as roo." Then they ask: why? "Because if someone takes control of the program via an exploit, they can't do as much harm if it doesn't run as root."
For all practical purposes, a modern OS is (or could be) just as virtualized as any Java sandbox. Programs no longer run directly on the bare metal, like in the days of DOS. (Which was barely a program loader.) They have to go through the OS to do _anything_. Including, but not limited to, reading or writing files, opening TCP/IP sockets, installing stuff.
Heck, even directly accessing RAM from other apps or directly poking machine ports can be blocked when running on a 386 or above (and _is_ blocked when you don't have kernel access).
Basically when running an app on a 32 bit CPU it can be as sandboxed as you want it to be.
E.g. don't want them accessing files? That's trivial. Just run them as a different user that can only access its temporary directory.
So ActiveX _could_ work, and it _could_ be extremely secure. Maybe not on Windows, and maybe not implemented by MS. I'll concede that point. But at least theoretically it can be at least as safe as Java, and without needing users to download 100 MB plugins that get wantonly changed by Sun.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I will also concede the point that coding for one proprietary platform is bad.
.Net or Sun's Java, it's still a proprietary non-open platform.
However, you know, I can't see a point in locking people up into Sun's proprietary platform either. Whether it's Windows DLLs or
What I would like to see is a good F/OSS environment. A good one.
Preferrably do away with the whole virtualization idiocy too. You _can_ be portable even without emulating a non-existent CPU and inventing a new machine code for it. (Java bytecode is just that.)
E.g., I'm thinking: GCC is portable, right? It may not always write the highest performance code, but it can generate code for more platforms than Java runs on anyway.
So why not use GCC as a platform instead?
Make an equivalent of the "class" files that's basically a semi-compiled C/C++ file. That is, right before the actual machine-dependent code generation. But otherwise already pre-processed and parsed.
Then the runtime on the client machine would just take this file and finish the compilation, abd links it producing the actual executable.
And, as I've said before, it can be as sandboxed as Java is anyway. Since you control the final code generation and linking, you can link it to libraries that are as sandboxed as you want them to be.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
That kind of stuff has been done already for years in plain javascript and HTML:
http://webfx.eae.net/
http://www.bindows.net/
No, MS has never faced such a dynamic browser before, and by dynamic, I mean "...responds to user's wants". Compared to IE, Firefox does very a good job at closing up security holes in a timely manner and providing a platform where a user can select a rich variety of add-ons (like "Bug-me-not", "Dictionary Search", "Zoom", "Cookie Manager" etc..). Also, Firefox blocks the snot out of Pop-ups, and I am eternally gratetful to it's developers for that! Also, the tabbed browsing is a god-send, too. Really...ever since I've been using Firefox, my web-surfing experience has become significantly more enjoyable and, I'll say it again, I am forever grateful to it's developers.
Now, given Firefox's superiority, it would seem that things should easily go thier way and IE would soon be history, but...unfortunately, those guys in Redmond still have a desktop monopoly and a lot of money - and it all begins and ends with that fact. At one time, Netscape's Navigator was everything - THE browser - and Microsoft's IE was nowhere, and then it all changed: Microsoft rolled over Netscape in a few short years despite the fact that politicians, courts and many of the computing public cried "foul" at MS's tactics; nevertheless, MS won. See, as long as IE was packaged with Windows as the default browser and was "Good enough, it put Netscape in a losing position from which it could never recover.
Anyways, we shall see. In the meanime, I will continue to use Firefox.
"It's fairly common knowledge that IE leverages libraries already loaded when windows starts"
Nice trolling. Do you really not expect anybody on slashdot to know what a user mode process running on a protected mode operating system is? Task manager measures the amount of virtual memory that was reserved by a process. IE is no more special than firefox other than the fact that Window's help browser and file manager use part of IE's shared libraries under certain conditions.
You know, I'm quite fed up with the double standards here. In fact, with the double standards surrounding F/OSS in general.
On one hand, "hey, ProgramX is cool, stable, 100% secure! You should switch to it right now!" On the other hand as soon as you mention a bug or mis-feature or UI problem... it's either (1) "uh, well, it's still work in progress", or (2) "it's OSS, so drop all else you were doing and fix it yourself, you idiot", or (3) "you didn't pay a dime, so WTF do you expect? Commercial quality?" Or some other variants of those.
The falacy works something like this. I'll use different product names to illustrate the point better:
Premise 1: "Excel could be better... for a commercial program made by a big corporation."
Premise 2: "The free 4-operations calculator written by the neighbour's 12 year old geeky son, is _amazing_... for a free program written by a 12 year old in an afternoon. That kid is amazing."
(False) Conclusion: "If Excel 'could be better' and BillysCalc 'is amazing', then BillysCalc is better than Excel. And everyone should uninstall Excel and download Billy's 4-operation calculator instead."
Which is just false. It's based on deliberately taking stuff out of context, and comparing it to something taken out of another context.
There is no such thing as "X is better than Y, considering that X is a pre-beta, so you should ignore all the bugs and security holes in X." It's either better compared as is, or it isn't.
If I uninstalled Y and installed X, would I get less bugs? More security? What? Is X, taken as it is _now_ and without the excuses and "yeah, but"s, indeed better?
No, I don't give a flying fuck about excuses as to why X should be excused for still being buggier. I'm not interested in what X _could_ be in a distant future and an alternate universe, but in what it is _now_.
That's all. All the rest is just piss-poor excuses and a piss-poor smoke-and-mirrors show.
And the sooner the F/OSS community as a whole can get out of this "but _I_ can be excused if my programs are buggy and unusable" mentality, the sooner it will be taken more seriously outside the die-hard fanboy circles.
Every single F/OSS project that did make it, even on the server side, was stuff which just worked here and now, on its own merits. No excuses, no "yeah, but it's still a beta." (After, what, 6 years already?)
Apache, for example, is usually _the_ example of a F/OSS project that not only is in widespread use, but which actually still keeps MS from getting the server-side monopoly they fight to achieve. But you know what?
Apache is also the prime example of a project that actually _worked_ and never made a "but I have a good excuse" show. Apache was always provably better _right_ _now_. Not "after we get around to fixing the bugs", not "really soon now", not in any other kind of wishful possible future.
You could do a straight apples-to-apples comparison between Apache and IIS to your boss, and never need to come up with excuses for Apache.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The difference is basically that:
1. First and foremost, GCC's bytecode isn't Sun's or MS's proprietary stuff.
2. It _is_ more efficient. Java on the desktop is still by and large a fscking disaster. It uses more RAM, its GC doesn't play nice with the swapping, and it _still_ runs at about half the speed of native C++ code in real apps. (As opposed to Sun's cleverly crafted micro-benchmarketting.)
(Virtualizing everything and emulating fictional machines instead of dealing with the _real_ machine, is every Computer Scientist's wet dream. When you live in a theoretical world, it's easy to forget about the concerns of the _real_ world. Such as performance. Or memory footprint. Or the fact that computers have finite memory and a swap file, so an idiotic GC will cause thrashing when the machine is overloaded.)
3. A Swing app tends to look-and-feel nothing like a native app.
(And it's not just about the "look", but about users being able to just use their existing skills on a new app. E.g., not having to learn yet another file chooser dialog. What's wrong with the existing Windows one? Coding yet another set of personalized widgets is every geek's wet dream, which is why every idiot just has to do that. Using yet another new widget set is, however, something every non-geek would rather avoid if he/she had half a choice.)
Now the last two points _are_ slowly getting better. JIT compiling has come a long way, for example. We're no longer in the days of Java 1.0 running 20 times slower than even the worst written C++ program. And IBM's SWT sure is what Swing and AWT _could_ have been, if Sun's engineers didn't have their heads firmly up their arse.
Still, you know... can't help wondering why we keep waiting for Sun's proprietary thing to eventually get fixed, instead of using the open alternative that already exists and which already works better. Are we _that_ addicted to Sun's marketting and lies, or?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Yes, it compiles to the Flash virtual machine now, but it is being ported to other runtimes, and will probably be the standard rich internet app language eventually.
Yes, but my grandmother isn't reading w3schools.
As has been said many times before, the traffic w3schools gets is not representitive of the web using population as a whole. People interested in teaching themselves web design/development are going to be more technically knowledgeable and more likely to seek out technically-superior alternatives to the browser that came installed with Windows. The vast majority of people out there are not part of this group.
I like my women like my coffee... pale and bitter.
That was covered on Radio 4's File on Four last week.
The reason Firefox is considered safe is mainly the slow startup. In the time it takes to start Firefox most users have the time to get 2 viruses and 6 spywares through MSIE. Robert-
Firefox is still fast becoming the browser of choice. See this chart.
Interesting. I wonder which page has been created first: The project page or the product page.
perception is reality
The product page (invalid one) has been created last.
perception is reality
Actually, now you can embed .NET controls in webpages. Would be an alternative to ActiveX.
.NET web controls, right? Web controls run at the server end and manifest themselves as bits of HTML and JavaScript in a web page. No .NET code is run on the client. The whole point of using ActiveX is that you need more that HTML and JavaScript have to offer. So, no, .NET web controls would not be an alternative to ActiveX :)
You're talking about
In this world nothing is certain but death, taxes and flawed car analogies.
Do you have more believable stats? Because the ones I have seen have either been using a script that works only in IE, thus gaining 99.9% IE, or failing to adjust for the fact that a large percentage of Mozilla/Firefox/Opera users set their user-agent to display as Mozilla/4.0; comaptible; MSIE, because of sites refusing to work with anything but IE.
I can't understand why everyone says that Firefox is fast. On a brand new install of WinXP on a brand new 3GHz computer at work, I downloaded and installed Firefox. Not only does it take about 10 seconds just to open, but pages load about 3 to 4 times _slower_ than in IE. Don't get me wrong, I love Firefox. I'm a web developer and I use it as the standard when creating all my stylesheets (if it works in FF then I know it's right - I'm willing to add hacks for other browsers as needed), but it is *****SLOW******.
Working in a university setting I have a 100Mbit line direct to my workstation and web pages (especially images and tables) are noticably slow to download on FF while IE is nearly instantaneous. I'm not working through any hardware firewalls or proxies. The problem isn't limited to a single computer or this specific internet connection either. Regardless of the problems I have with it, I use it exclusively at home for security.
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Didn't Netscape try this tactic. Maybe my memory is fuzzy, but I thought they tried to position the Netscape browser as a platform.
Maybe it will be better the second time around. Or are we just watching reruns?
I guess I should put a sig here
It was a very interesting article and it did mention toolkits available for this type of development, but did not mention any addresses/groups. Would be nice if someone could comment on some nice Open Source kits out there.
I think it would be a fantastic platform, like VB was to small office developers. Most of the slashdotters would scoff at this, but think of the acceptance this platform would gain if you had the ability to simply drag/drop a from control and create an entire website from scratch...
Sig it.
For web based applications.
Following szenario comes to my mind in the long run.
Server an application server with java server faces.
JFS has an MVC model on control level.
Now it is thinkable to have more dynamics on the control level, with XUL als the view part for the Mozilla engine, Xaml as the view part for the IE, and normal HTML forms and Javascript for the rest of the world.
Therefore you can get more dynamics with certain browsers, and UI building might become easier if you program against platforms which either support xul or xaml.
Face it the current situation with HTML forms and nothing else is god awful. I'd rather program 10 programs in Qt or Swing than one HTML form with the needed dynamics of input checking weird custom controls which are not supported out of the box etc....
Somehow this destroy the competition seems so bush like. You cant destroy IE for any number of reasons.
I think the ideal solution for a FireFox on every desktop is to use it the way I do -
Intranet apps - use IE
Internet use - use FireFox.
FireFox will have its exploits and all but it is my spare tire approach - sell it as the necessary backup all the time. Once you get needed credibility and 'eyeballs' behind it, it will start replacing IE.
Narsi
Internet Explorer is what it is because Microsoft stopped thinking of it as a web browser and started thinking of it as a development platform. Many of the most abused, insecure features of IE (the infamous Browser Helper Objects being the best known example) were bloated on after a few versions in an attempt to make IE a more viable development platform.
It is precisely because Firefox lacks those "features" that I use it.
With MX2004, Flash is a serious, practical OOP environment. Obviously it's not systems programming, but for user applications it's fairly ideal.
And it runs on Windows/Mac/Linux, including in Firefox. (Admittedly it only runs on i386 linux)
Arete
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
for some of you reading, they are already hacks that release a format in msi. but i wouldn't want to depend on this on the long term especially if we are going to deploy this en masse. more work to do guys. it's like from the saying "so near yet so far." with all the publicity lately in oss in general, it seems that everybody is interested. but a good product alone does not translate into a general adoption. the critical path of proprietary -> oss migration is not being addressed. it's like saying that you have created the most fuel efficient car but requires a fuel that cannot be bought easily by the regular consumers.
imho, i say that most new installations are starting to use oss. but it is still difficult to 'convert' the proprietary to oss still i think due to the lack of migration tools and support in oss. remember, if big corporations start adopting oss in their systems, the consumers will follow. so target the enterprise first!
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
A new platform is always interesting, but is it really good when compared to other platforms?
Take Java, for example. You can write a Java Web Start application that launches like a locally-installed application. It's got a reasonable set of GUI components. It runs on most of the platforms I care, it has probably got a bigger installation base than Firefox is.
And then there's a difference in productivity. Java is way more productive than Firefox as a platform. Go to a book store, you see a whole bunch of books on Java. There are countless FAQs, articles, mailing list archives, communities, and local user groups that covers every aspect of Java. A whole range of IDEs and debuggers to make you even more productive. Hundreds of commercial/free libraries you can use.
All of these things help you get the job done quickly.
So what does the Firefox platform bring to the table? Why a developer like me should be intereste in it?
Haven't we been hearing on Slashdot that Microsoft products are inherently insecure because security needs to be designed in? Timely fixes are a good thing, and I understand that Firefox isn't 1.0 yet. But if it or any other browser for that matter doesn't appear to be designed any more secure than any other, then a major reason for switching from IE is greatly reduced.
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
I use Firefox, but it seems to make a lot of the same mistakes Internet Explorer does, as well as a few new ones.
First, regardless of what everyone says, Firefox is big. It's a mozilla app and uses millions of lines of code. Anything that big is going to have tons of bugs ready to be exploited. This is especially so considering that firefox/mozilla has very few developers, most of them being current/former Netscape employees. This is why you see them putting up a security bounty to get extra testing: people still aren't looking at the code (which is quite big and ugly) despite it being around for 5 years.
Second, XUL allows remote websites to spoof the entire interface easily. This is a major security hole and is not yet fixed. The only solution to it is to disallow remote websites to display XUL unless they are trusted. If that happens, what's the reason for developing XUL in the first place? If it can't be securely used except on a predetermined set of websites, it's useless for the web-apps that pundits say are going to take over the world.
Much of Firefox is affected by these over-designed useless features. It would do better with a redesign for understandability instead. The XPCOM-garbage is another example. Firefox uses XPCOM as its internal architecture. The primary motivation for having XPCOM is to maintain binary compatibility. But Firefox has the source available, so having binary compatibility between internal components adds nothing. The only thing XPCOM contributes is a different API that people have to learn to use and will make mistakes using. It's buzzword-compliance syndrome ("My app is object-oriented. Therefore, it is leet and you should use it..."). They would be better off using a signals/slots mechanism similar to Qt, which is a superior component structuring technology.
So what you're saying is that it's normal for a web browser to use 100 MB of memory?
Perhaps the fine folks at Opera might like to know that. They must be breaking the rules by using a tiny fraction of that amount.
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The problem with that demo is that it depends on XMLHTTPRequest. In other words, you need a webserver for it to work, and all the work is done on the server, except display. The other solution proposed by XUL advocates is to use RDF, which is just rediculous. I'd much rather build a SOAP interface in javascript. (Actually, I could probably already find one.) What we need --and I've said it before-- is a way to communicate directly with a database or the local OS. XPCOM can read/write files, although it's ugly and really slow, but that's what we need that ActiveX has. ActiveX is not secure but it gets the job done. Java is secure, but hard to deploy, annoying to use, and impossible to build a decent GUI in a reasonable time frame. Mozilla has GUI with XUL (and HTML) and Gecko. It almost has the other 2 with XPCOM, but not quite. And then it needs to be able to use a language that has the libraries we can all use. That means Java, Perl, PHP, or VB. And then it needs RAD tools. I think the pieces would all come into place if XPCOM could fix file access and add sockets or DB drivers. Maybe the best thing is to open it up to Java, since Rhino is already a java app, it shouldn't be that hard.