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.'"

Comments

Google?

[sh1ftay]

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?

Security of Online Apps a Hurdle?

[spin2cool]

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.

Re:Security of Online Apps a Hurdle?

[Erik Hollensbe]

I really think you missed the point.

The tool for the job does not really leave room for an all encompassing smorgasborg of half-assed features.

The tool for the job is sed, or awk, or perl. It's cp, not mv. It's FreeBSD on the server but not on the Desktop. It's Windows for gaming.

Really, is this so hard to understand? Are you really advocating that your multi tool have a soldering iron, ball peen and crow hammers, cross-cut and standard tooth saw, and everything else that might be in your belt?

Frankly, I am concerned with my desktop performing window management and placing things in spots and in ways that make sense. Everything else is just shit and fluff in a nice little glossy package. The OS, being a more complete idea, should be something for a desktop role that makes sense for my needs. It should not be something that's also my first choice for a server, unless it truly merits that.

Really, how many of you would willingly use X11 if it was not free?

Re:Security of Online Apps a Hurdle?

[mrjohnson]

Personally, I have never used or considered using ActiveX since it only runs on Windows. What I know is it's a program, usually Visual Basic cab file, running within the browser. There have been several security problems, mainly stemming from the fact that once running, it has programatic access to the whole computer.

Other than the security issues, and that it only runs on Windows and within IE, I understand it's generally a pain to work with and debug. But it does allow you to run programs on the client and use normal Windows widgets in your design. Painfulness is measured differently by me than somebody who programs for Windows. I imagine they would disagree.

Somebody will correct me if I'm wrong on the ActiveX details here, I'm sure. :-)

XUL is meant for addressing the same problem -- bad interfaces on the web, but it takes a drastically different approach. The dialogs are described by lightweight XML files that are pretty painless to develop. The client programming is done in Javascript, which is not as bad as it sounds. The main problem Javascript faces is cross-browser support, which is negated by only using gecko. There's also a decent Javascript console which make it a lot easier to fix script errors in Mozilla than in IE.

The main advantage is everything is still done on the server, only a little user interface junk is left to the client to handle in Javascript, which is arguably where it belongs. You'd do the same in a normal webapp, write html and use Javascript to manipulate objects for a better user experience.

Also, I've seen far too many ActiveX programs that do database access from the client, for example. Typically, there's no security or verification of who's doing what at that level, a difficult thing to get right in any client. Often times you can take the ActiveX object and use it's own objects to access the database and change whatever you like. XUL leaves all of that up to the server which makes it easier to manage and more difficult for bad programmers to leave gaping security holes.

Anyway, there's no 'trusted' environment. All companies should prevent internal users from abusing the system. :-)

November 9 lauch day

[solferino]

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.

Firefox as a platform...

[OneDeeTenTee]

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.

sshh

[guet]

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

Huh? Who isn't online yet?

[Ars-Fartsica]

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.

Re:Mozilla?

[FuzzzyLogik]

a development platform doesn't necessarily mean operating system. look.. the idea is simple, write your code in XUL + javascript using the backend of Mozilla and 99% of that will work on every platform that mozilla/firefox already support. write once, run in all those other places... it's not an OS, it's a development platform. why does everyone think it'll become an OS? Seriously.

Re:What about security?

[darnok]

Your points are valid, but I can see a potentially huge market for Firefox in intranet applications. Many browser vulnerabilities are simply irrelevant in an intranet context, where users' PCs are already locked down.

Most/all large customers have internal-only applications that have been client-server or n-tier with a custom front end. These apps tend to be brutal to deploy, particularly the front-end, as they are prone to DLL hell and various interdependency issues with other applications (it'd be nice if a customer's IT was mandated to only ever use version X of app Y to develop all apps, but that never is the case). In many cases, customers have resorted to deployment "hacks" such as deploying these front-ends to a small number of servers, then using e.g. Citrix terminal services to expose them to their users.

Enter Firefox and other Mozilla browsers. Now it's practical to build your front-end GUI using XUL and related stuff, and have it talk to the backend over sockets, XML-RPC, SOAP, etc. The only thing that gets deployed to the end user is the Firefox/Mozilla/etc. browser (plus possibly a few addons, typically JavaScript), which is self contained and very easy to deploy.

This is a potentially huge market, which is why MS is keen to grab it with Avalon. Unfortunately for MS, Mozilla is here now and Avalon is over a year away; Mozilla is easy to deploy, and Avalon will presumably be bundled with Longhorn and all the installation/testing issues that go with it.

Finally, I suspect that it will be relatively easy to develop an XUL-based app solution and later retrofit it to Avalon using XSLT and not a huge amount of extra effort - an investment in Mozilla app development now *won't* be lost if a later decision is made to jump to Avalon.

IE7

[LordMyren]

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.

Re:What about security?

[DigitalRaptor]

I agree totally.

To say FF is more buggy and less secure than IE because of the number of bugs found is higher is as stupid as it is inaccurate.

I spent 4 HOURS at my inlaws house on Saturday removing OVER 800 different bugs and viruses (750 removed by Ad-Aware, 50+ had to be removed by hand) from their XP machine. I would never have believed it if I didn't see it.

This is an old man and an old woman. ALL they do on that computer is suck in pictures from their camera, read email, and occaisionally surf the web. They never download and install programs.

Firefox is infinitely more secure than IE in real world usage. The vast majority of bugs are only minor issues and do not lead to the entire computer being owned.

Compare that to IE, where the vast majority of bugs ARE doozies and DO lead the machine being compromised. Tying IE so deeply into the OS was the stupidest thing MS could have done. I'd like to send them a bill for my 4 hours, just to see if I get a response.

works for us

[Gunark]

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.

Not unti l XUL is beyond just mozilla

[Ambassador Kosh]

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.

Re:no, the cat HASN'T got my tongue.

[Anonymous Coward]

Three years ago I had a fairly full function IDE for creating XUL applications working in Mozilla (project creation, form designer etc.). It was written in XUL+CSS+Javascript+RDF+XML.. I even demonstrated it at Netscape in Mountain View - Zero interest. At that time Netscape was entirely engaged in finishing the Browser, nothing else mattered.

The problem is that Mozilla was designed as a platform to develop a browser (unsurprisingly), not a platform to develop applications. I believe they were wrong in this decision as they could have finished the project sooner if the platform had been powerful enough to bootstrap itself. Unfortunately the rush to finish the browser lead to a mish-mash of api's which treat HTML, XUL, XML and now probably XHTML documents entirely differently. For example, some api's had a large number of unimplemented functions. Embedding HTML documents in XUL or visa-versa led to bizarre problems. Also the parsers did not have a round-trip mode in which DTD, entities, comments, CDATA etc. were preserved. Writing an XML editor was an exercise in frustration.
Application development in Mozilla/Firefox is possible. However, I believe that the current technologies seem to have been designed for excessive hand crafting - lots of exceptions and hard to comprehend mechanisms for overlaying functionality. Robert Ginda's excellent Javascript debugger was a labor of love and a triumph over adversity. It shouldn't be that hard.

Unless Mozilla.org has had a change of heart, MS has nothing to worry about.

Some maybe Most are getting confused...

[vivehosting]

Alot of people are confused about the facts and the potential of Firefox, even the ones that use it. First, let me just say to those who claim IE is faster... IE loads up faster initially, but Firefox renders faster. Unless you are the type to go to a website, close the window, open ie, go to a website, and so on. Firefox is going to be a much faster solution.

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!