Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
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!
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
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".
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
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.
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.
I suggest you go back and review your history. The people who founded Netscape were as much hardasses as Gates and everyone else at Microsoft. These are the people who claimed they had "invented" the Internet (even before Gore) and took all the glory away from Berners-Lee and his team. It's just that they were not as good at the game as Microsoft were. They released a buggy unstable 3-4.x product that couldn't possibly compete with IE4 and then when they got reamed (Navigator was free, just like IE, remember?) they went to court to claim that Netscape engineers were not "weenies".
poorly written VB, Office, and Access applications
Yes, because I'm sure that the same people who wrote those applications would have done wonders with C, Python and Perl. After all, we all know it's the language, not the developer.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
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.