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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."
Why don't they just pool their web browser, e-mail client and calender application into one big package. That would be a great start...
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Think about the memory usage. Firefox struggles enough, think about running a full desktop environment. I won't until some of the memory usage comes down quite a bit.
What are the goals? How will it be different? Or are they doing it just to do it?
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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).
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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.
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Ok, I'm no moz dev, though I loves me some Firefox, but didn't we learn not to mix our browser and desktop scripting languages before? What is there about this arrangement that would not be screaming for holes to be found and malware to creep across boundaries? It could be very cool, but it could really suck bigtime, too. Where do you want your file system to go today?
10 Create web browser and email client.
20 Merge applications into single suite.
30 Steadily add programs and functionality to suite until it does everything badly.
40 Announce innovative new project to create simple, lean apps that break up bloated suite.
50 GOTO 10
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
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.
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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.
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.
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