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A Mozilla Desktop Environment?
Andreas writes "A discussion at the mozilla.dev.planning list has given the birth to the idea of a Mozilla Desktop Environment. This sure sounds like a possibility for Mozilla as it already has many of the applications needed; and the company is thoroughly familiar with XUL, which is a more-than-potent language upon which to build a desktop environment. By building a desktop environment Mozilla wouldn't have to worry about drivers (and such) and could choose from a variety of kernels, and still be in the center of attention. Mozilla has to expand some of the applications for this to work, though, like adding local file management with Firefox."
Maybe we need to remind ourselves of the trials, tribulations, and pitfalls of both cruft (old junk) and feature creep (glitz and glam just for the sake of glitz and glam are neat--but they don't make for a good project path until it's stabilized).
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
The link which masquerades as being informative is to the submitter's website. It is no more informative and filled with just as much random conjecture as the summary here. And you get the thrill of seeing ads.
The Google Groups link is a dozen or so messages from a handful of people. It's a thread of "I like XUL and I think this could be a neat idea but there's no special work being done on this."
This is an article about something being possible, a something which has been thought of a hundred times before.
Breaking news!!
"Both Gnome and KDE tried the whole component thing with CORBA and abandoned it for performance and complexity reasons."
Actually KDE came up with KParts, which are used all throughout KDE. In fact, Konqueror is pretty much just a universal KParts viewer (which feeds the KParts info from KIO-Slaves).
I remember searching for such a Desktop Environment a year or two ago after experimenting with XUL, I ran across Symphony OS (http://www.symphonyos.com/) which uses the Mozilla platform for rendering and applications. It is called the "Mezzo Desktop Environment" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mezzo_%28desktop_env ironment%29), and is available in Debian package format.
I remember testing a live-cd of symphony about a year ago and it seemed pretty intriguing. I really liked the desktop interface.
But anyway, from what wikipedia says, the Mezzo Desktop Environment is an incomplete platform (whatever that means), and if it is correct there appears to be work unfinished. However, anyone interested in contributing might want to take a peek under the hood and see if that project can be helpful and exactly what is "incomplete" about it.
"Progress comes from the intelligent use of experience."
This project http://www.symphonyos.com/cms/ seems to have something of the same ideas. Their GUI is simply based on FF.
First off, it's not an OS. It's a Desktop Environment. ("Graphical Shell" in old skool parlance.) The Desktop Environment goes on top of the OS. Which could be Linux, FreeBSD, or even OpenSolaris.
Secondly, it's not that crazy of an idea. I've played around with the concept a bit myself. Both through the HTML engine and the XUL engine. The HTML engine makes more sense for "thin" (or "rich") applications that are downloaded on the fly and communicate with a server. The XUL makes more sense if you want a heavyweight desktop that can integrate with the X11 framework. Programs based on the XUL/XPCOM framework would use XULRunner to launch. All neat and tidy; though a bit of a pain to develop XPCOM interfaces between Javascript and C/C++.
The concept works because X11 is about as flexible as you can get for a desktop system. All you need is a Window Manager that recognizes standardized messages and Atoms (the X11 kind, not the Mozilla kind) and you can position, place, float, stick, minimize, or maximize any window you want pretty easily. So you throw a taskbar window out there to track the other windows, throw a start menu applet on there, have a file-browser application stuck as the Desktop, and you're pretty much ready to go.
XPCOM is even reasonably complete enough to where it provides services similar to the NeXT/Cocoa APIs. They'd need to be extended some if you wanted to support access to the complete environment (especially fixing that mess they have for File I/O), but it's a very workable base.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Byzantine has been doing this for the last few years. Not bad to use. Surprisingly, even though it uses mozilla as a desktop it has much less memory usage than almost all other distros. And opening a browser is always instant on since it's already in memory. http://byzgl.sourceforge.net/old-index.html http://byzgl.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_P age
This very much could be a step in the direction they already took.
Doesn't have to be. Actually, this idea has already been done, and done beautifully. It was called OEOne Homebase Desktop. It was a complete desktop environment built on XUL, and incidentally "XUL desktop environment" is the appropriate name for something like this. "Mozilla" is either the foundation or the former browser suite built on XUL. XUL is the platform.
So, you can see what the OEOne desktop looked like if you search Google images for oeone or oeone homebase. It was a fully integrated environment, which means mail, calendar, contacts, browser, text processor, image album, music and video player, basically everything you'd need for your basic office/home desktop.
OEOne still appears in the Mozilla Hall of Fame as such, even though they renamed themselves Axentra.com at some point. The Homebase desktop still appears in their press releases up to 2002, then it was released as open source as the Penzilla Desktop and abandoned as far as OEOne was concerned. But while it ran it also sponsored a few other developments, such as AbiMoz, which integrates AbiWord inside Mozilla.
Homebase wasn't a "traditional", "generic" desktop, but more of a specialized environment, aimed specifically at office productivity and entertainment. It had a "home page" which aggregated news, weather, contacts, new mail and whatnot. It would have been ideal for PDA's. I never understood why it was so poorly publicized and why it seems to have missed so many trains.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
I know this is Slashdot and all, but the article summary is grossly misleading. This is a public newsgroup. A random person, not affiliated with Mozilla, posted a message saying "hey, you guys should make Mozilla into an OS!!"
Mike Beltzner and Stuart Parmenter, who actually work for Mozilla, respond by saying "no, that idea actually sucks".
Somehow, this makes it onto Slashdot as "ZOMG Mozilla is making an os CONFIRMED!!!!!111oneeleventy!!11" Please stop spreading ridiculous, baseless claims.
Rock over London, Rock on Chicago. Wheaties: Breakfast of Champions.
Yes, actually. It's shocking to me that you don't know that.
The mods usually do a pretty good job, but when it comes to this topic it would seem that they've all been on crack.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade