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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.'
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???
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.
Can you say google?
Yes, we can. And so can the article -- In the paragraph immediatly above what you quoted.
Technoli
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.
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!
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
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.
As someone who has a reasonable understanding of "modern security measures", I don't do any online financial stuff.
I do have a reasonable trust in the security of the data in transit. What I don't trust (yet) is the security of the transaction information once it's stored on someone else's server.
I've lost count of how many times there have been news reports of credit card info (among other things) "leaking" off some supposedly secure system. Or of some worm taking out a bank's system, or some other breach of data storage.
Nope, I'll keep moving my money around the old fasioned way for a while longer.
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
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".
Now let me guess you will tell me you keep it all under your mattress and don't deal with banks at all.
Have you ever worked in a real office before?
Most companies now use at least one IE (sadly, almost all are heavily locked into ActiveX atm) based app.
I'd guess that most of new big backoffice apps are being developed for the web now. The benefits are so big.
Firefox is what we should be focusing our attention on. Not Linux. Linux is at this stage a pipe dream on the desktop, at least for now. All Firefox needs to get is killer installs in the office, which I don't see too hard especially with the status of IE patching, and those tricky ActiveX issues can be got round with the use of an icon that opens IE only for that certain site and for the rest of the things, Firefox is the default.
But, I've thought this for a long time that Linux is harping up the wrong tree. Look how quickly FF has got hold - this is the sort of real changes OSS can do. However, I'm not undermining Linux's achievements in the server room. I think that is where it will get hold next.
Anyway, this is what I think we as an OSS 'people' should evangelize:
1) Use of Linux in the server room. Mail servers, web servers. Anywhere that it works.
2) Use of XUL in Firefox/Mozilla. Get Safari to support it.
3) Get BigVendor (tm) cooperation. Show them how XUL is really a lot better than using ActiveX, especially as Microsoft is really not a great partner to work with.
4) Watch as the books, tutorials etc for XUL gathers up. Watch the small developer presence increase.
Basically what we want is XUL/PHP/mySQL (a very strong combination) is to become the new VB. Once we have this, it's going to be a cakewalk to get Linux on the desktop everywhere. Then the hardware support jumps up, and boom, desktop too.
IntechHosting - Free domain, 2GB, PHP, £4.95/$8.95
What an apt metaphor: an intelligent, young, adventurous member of the species "homo sapiens" (Netscape) gets gored by a bunch of dumb, overweight beasts with sharp horns (Microsoft).
A lot more applications should have moved to the web over the last decade. Microsoft prevented that because they were not ready for it yet, even though the industry was. Instead, we got nearly another decade of poorly written VB, Office, and Access applications.
Netscape was supposed to be a new platform ... ... ... ...
Java was supposed to be a new platform
Even Flash was supposed to be a new platform
Now Firefox is supposed to be a new platform
Did they kill MS? Nope.
XUL is cool, but so far I haven't seen MANY great applications done with it.
Mozilla (seamonkey)? Its been around a lot longer than firefox, and it is just as much of a platform as firefox can be. I guess people just like the cool name...
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
And sharing the gecko engine will mean more and more software will be able to ship smaller binaries once gecko already resides on your system.
It's a great browser. We can get into the security, but alot of what makes a killer app killer is the GUI. I don't know the legal specs, but I'm blown away no one else got famous using "tabbed browsing". Til now it's been the webdevelopers who've brought that to the average consumer through frames(sic) - who owns the rights to the concept? I sure hope M$ 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.
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.
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'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.
I disagree. We should focus on whatever tool is right for the job. That may end up being Firefox, or that may not. Focussing on the tool first is ass-backward.
"becasue of bloat !!! Yes !!!"
Because of bloat my Pentium II 366 Celeron laptop running a tweaked Slackware 8.0 (!) install seems to run faster that the Pentium IV Dell with Windows XP I have to use at work. The perceived speed (what the user sees as speed) difference between the two is nil. That is the downside of excessive bloat.
Axiomatic: Bloat attracts bloat! My bet is that after 30 days of running MS XP on the net your son's new emachine will have the perceived speed of a Commodore 64.
Have fun and be happy!
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
Firefox works far better than IE in most cases. If banks want to ignore standards and test only under IE, that's not Firefox's problem.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
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.
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
Really, how many of you would willingly use X11 if it was not free?
Not fair. If X11 was not free, it would have the possibility of being a better/different product. It is open source, and therefore it discloses all kinds of information to the general public, including video hardware details. If X11 was not-free they could enter into all kinds of NDAs with hardware vendors, and provide both better support for video cards and a more rapid development cycle./. sig.
Microsoft decided not to release a stand-alone IE application so they could circumvent the US Department of Justice ruling against them. They were found to be in violation of anti-trust laws because they were using their monopoly power to promote their product (IE) beyond their competitor (Netscape). Their best arguement in this situation was to eliminate the competing product, and [actually] integrate that code into the Operating System itself (the forthcoming Longwhorne).
By doing so, they get the added benefit[sic] of pre-empting future DOJ inquiries because it's a "different" product entirely.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
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.
Basically what we want is XUL/PHP/mySQL (a very strong combination) is to become the new VB
:) Let's just face, newbie developers (and experienced ones as well) likes vstudio and it's a major reason people are hooked in the windows environment later on.
Well, in that case, what we need is an IDE as good as Microsofts Visual Studio. And no, I don't want at emacs/VI war here
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 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.
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.
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?