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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!
People need to be vewy, vewy quiet, we awe hunting microsoft...
The title is a catchy one because Firefox is "new and cool". Really, it's Mozilla as a Platform, and that just really means XUL as a Platform. XAML is Microsoft's attempt at XUL, because it's XUL's a "Good Idea".
Get Firefox!
Can you say google?
Yes, we can. And so can the article -- In the paragraph immediatly above what you quoted.
Technoli
It is a browser. But the components that were used to BUILD the browser are very cross platform (hence you have firefox on 3 major different platforms, windows, linux, and mac). in doing so the backend of all of this is cross platform and can be used to create other applications besides just a web browser. you only really need to know javascript, xul, and a few other things and you can use the stuff that was used to build firefox and make your own application. it's a novel idea and hopefully it'll be put to good use.
Kyle
http://www.unlogikal.net/
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
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).
Firefox is a 4.5MB download. That may be bloated compared to sol.exe, but it's tiny compared to IE, and not much bigger than Opera (3.5MB).
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
The reason so many holes are found are due to the Bounty that the mozilla foundation puts forth for each security hole found. this means that people are actively looking for security holes to turn them in and get i think $500.
Why are they doing this? Simple really. Find the holes now and lock firefox down pretty good. Better that the holes are found and fixed ASAP than found but not fixed at all... say.. like internet explorer. they're simply trying to make it more secure and this is a pretty good way of doing it.
Look at it this way, if you develop software you look at the same code all the time and once you see it so many times you don't potentially see the security holes that you might otherwise see because you've looked at it so much that you kind of become numb to the fact that something could be wrong there. by having new eyes looking at the code you are having new eyes put on that older code and they're finding the problems, $500 is just an incentive to get people to look at the code.
Kyle
http://www.unlogikal.net/
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
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.
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.
If you're interested in helping find memory leaks, look at how David Baron has been finding them:
l s. htmlw nbag.h tml= 25682 2#c2d =25721 8#c0
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xpcom/MemoryToo
http://www.mozilla.org/performance/leak-bro
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?i
Or e-mail David Baron and say "I'd like to help find memory leaks in Firefox. How can I help?".
If you're not interested in helping, and you're just trying to get people already volunteering to shift their priorities, that's ok too.
The shareholder is always right.
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!