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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."
To be fair, most of the memory issues in Firefox are because of the way it keeps previously visited pages stored so they can be quickly opened again. Unless their text editor/email client/whatever acted in the same manner then it shouldn't be too big an issue.
In my opinion, Mozilla should really leave this kind of idea to other developers. Songbird developed by itself just fine and I'm sure after this idea's been mentioned there will be other random developers toying around with the idea. Firefox and Thunderbird are good but attention should be focused on them before moving on to bigger, wilder ideas.
If we can hit that bull's-eye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards... Checkmate.
I've done a bit of stuff with XUL.
It's great if you want to do things like, say, a custom web browser or write your own iTunes -- The kind of thing that you'd usually write as a web-based app but you need local file storage and maybe access to online content that cross-site scripting preventative rules would prevent you from accessing in a regular browser.
If you need to do more than that, it's quite a chore. You have to start writing your own XPCOM components, which you'll have to compile on each target platform separately. There goes your easy cross platform compatibility.
The documentation for XUL and XPCOM isn't very helpful or well organized, and that's putting it nicely.
Language support is thin. C++ and Javascript are pretty much your only choices, although Python support is coming soon, apparently.
The question is, if you were going to develop a desktop environment from scratch, would you start by writing XUL? Would you then extend that by embedding JavaScript? I don't think so. Both Gnome and KDE tried the whole component thing with CORBA and abandoned it for performance and complexity reasons. Cross-platform is nice, but Java, GTK+, QT, and even C# provide better cross platform benefits with greater support and language compatibility than the XUL suite of tools.
Not only that, but I'd wager a Java desktop environment would be a better performer than one based on XULRunner. Not to mention, it would support more languages through Jython, JNI, etc.
It's a shame, because XULrunner could be a great platform. I hope they focus more on documentation and supporting other languages than redundant pie-in-the-sky projects like this one.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
If you've got both Seamonkey and Konqueror installed on your system, browse the same set of sites with both. Make sure you disable caching for both, to prevent such caching from inflating each browser's memory usage. Also start from a raw X session, just to further eliminate any sources of inconsistency.
I just did that sort of a test on my Linux system, visiting a variety of sites (Slashdot, BBC, Tom's Hardware, FSF, Digg, etc.) with both Seamonkey 1.1.1 and Konquerur 3.5.5. I've also used Opera 9.01. Checking via top, I see that Seamonkey currently has a virtual memory image of 357 MB. Konqueror, on the other hand, is using a rather minimal 43 MB. Opera is just over Konqueror, at 45 MB. As this is the total size in virtual memory for each process, it also includes the overhead of any shared libraries.
So from those results, I think it's safe to say that there's a major problem with Seamonkey. Both Konqueror and Opera manage to keep their memory usage within reasonable bounds. As for the cause of Seamonkey's excessive memory usage, I can't say. It could be due to memory leaks. I'd guess it's partially due to their extreme overarchitecturing of their software. Regardless, it's a troublesome issue for them.
SymphonyOS is a Linux distribution which uses a special desktop based in a browser.
They wants to talk to GNOME people about GNOME 3
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