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New Linux Desktop Environment Built on Firefox
IL-CSIXTY4 writes "'Pyro is a new kind of desktop environment for Linux built on Mozilla Firefox. Its goal is to enable true integration between the Web and modern desktop computing.'
This looks like an interesting marriage of the web and the desktop. In Pyro, Web apps run in windows on the desktop, right alongside desktop apps (through compositing). Features expected in a desktop environment, like task/window selection and an Expose-like function, are written in Javascript." "
...that I can write application in php+css?
Already slashdotted after the first comment, so ... this is what the future web-desktop will be like huh?
Didn't we learn our lesson with Active Desktop? This is one of the reasons I use Firefox instead of IE. It's not so tied into the OS that when it crashes, it's taking down other apps as well.
the apps include a very simple word processor and a spreadsheet that could work from a server hosted within the company intranet... this would be a very useful project indeed. Basic features would do - no need for all that fancy schmancy stuff.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
This strangely reminds me of Microsofts Desktop in Windows 95/98 and the resulting law suits. I am no programmer, but wouldn't the performance of a desktop system written to support java script etc. be lower than that of a regular written desktop? So, in the worst case it would slow down the whole system.
right alongside desktop apps (through compositing).
At first I thought that said through composting. Guess you'd have to call that organic computing.
On a serious note....Instead, trusted Web sites and extensions are given access to the full range of interactivity and control enjoyed by native applications today.
The "trust" issue would loom very large in that statement. Provides some interesting possibilities all the same.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Didn't we decide this was a bad idea when MS did it? They might not have done it as completely as pyro, but that just sounds like a bad idea.
I can't of course RTFA at the moment due to the flames rolling out of the webserver it is on.
Wasn't this done with MS in Windows 98, the Active Desktop? See how well that worked? Why would anyone want this?
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
This guy is probably doing something similar. Symphony OS.
c reenshots/index.php?linux_distribution_sm=Symphony %20OS%202006-12%20Beta
http://www.thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/s
Got Trader Joe's? friendwich.com RSS feeds work now!
This idea has been around for a little while. See the ByzantineOS has had releases on Distrowatch since 2003.
It was a pretty cool idea. Basically the whole desktop is a web browser and you write apps as XUL extensions. There is possibly a future in this as corporate and institutional thin client platforms to run custom apps.
This is already the third project called pyro.
"Python Remote Objects" http://pyro.sourceforge.net/
and "Python Robotics" http://pyrorobotics.org/
and possibly there are even more.
In order to head off claims that this environment would be useless if network connections were down, I should point out, that in modern business and private settings, having no network is almost as bad. In other words, being dependent on the network is probably not a liability.
Here's the Google Cache:
p yrodesktop.org/+http://pyrodesktop.org&hl=en&ct=cl nk&cd=1&gl=us
http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:6EoAZGSE90IJ:
Yay for coral!
Huh? What's this? For Linux users who wish they were running Windows?
I am glad to hear that someone is working on a real solution to this problem, because many people do not even seem to be aware of it. XSELinux sounds like exactly what is needed. More information here.
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
Didn't Microsoft try this with XP and IE??
Look what happened to them..
I will believe it when I see it.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
So, Active Desktop is making a comeback, is it?
StoneCypher is Full of BS
And the website isn't down, it's merely resting. :-)
Insert
oh my god it's full of ads!
Agree with your comments.
The whole thing sounds to me like running web applications as popups that are exactly like the locally run application windows, both in appearance and in all, or most, of the infrastructure behind them.
I can't think of a better way to assist malicious web apps in fooling the user by removing any clue that they're not something local and innocuous.
A phisher's dream.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
If you hadn't posten it on slashdot ...
[My english is better than most other people's german, so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]
"posted"
(Unless there's some variant I'm unaware of, perhaps in UK English or a reference to a comedy routine, where "posten" would be proper or humorous in that sentence.)
Your use of English idiom is excelent.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The people who write the code that drives web apps are programmers, but they all know languages like Ruby, PHP, Java, and so forth. That's what they use to write web apps in the first place. You can't use AJAX if there's no server for you to send your AJAX requests to, and the code running on that server is not written in HTML. It could theoretically be written in Javascript, of course, but that's pretty rare, if it happens at all. Why? Probably because more programmers know languages like PHP and Python than know Javascript...
Basically, I do not believe there is any significant number of people who are capable of using Javascript to do more than copy and paste trivial scripts, but do not know any other programming language. Yes, Javascript can be used to write complex applications; but my point is that the people who are capable of doing that are also capable of using conventional tools for the same purpose, so while this project might indeed enable some interesting new applications, it is unlikely that there will be many people capable of developing with it who would not be equally capable of developing without it.
To really "know" your favorite languages (HTML, CSS, Javascript) is quite rare. Lots of us can get some minor thing half-way working on one browser. Writing solid code is not at all a trivial task; very few people can manage. Not even Google always gets it right.
While I've seen some very buggy and unportable C code, fixing one platform doesn't tend to break all the others as is the case with the web stuff.
Until Firefox can solve some of the many, many bugs still present in it's product, I think that this entire discussion is silly.
I don't respond to AC's.
Obviously their webserver is running as a web app from within Firefox, or else it would be able to serve more than 5 simultaneous clients at once.
"There are 11 types of people in the world, those who know binaries and those who don't."
i realy hope ths was typo as the quote/joke is wrong in so many ways
the correct one is know/uderstand are interchangeable but understand is the common one
There are 10 types of people in the world, those who know/uderstand binary and those who don't.
as 11 == 3 thus makes the joke nonsense
and binaries equally makes nonsense of the joke
It's back up now. Sigh...
My personal project hosting provider, DreamHost, actually *moved* the main directory on pyrodesktop.org due to too much server load. I'm using the totally bundled MediaWiki version that DreamHost provides, mind you. I was on a train to London, and just realized something was up now.
So I've just moved the wiki directory back. Let's see how long it stays up...
There is a damm lot more to a desktop environment then pretty looks. It look easy at the beginning and sounds like a great idea but becomes quite complex over time. And in the end you have a mess like GNOME. And it is a mess: gtk, cairo, pango, bonobo and no common line.
Martin
This just sounds like its follwing Microsoft's trend of adding even more layers of middleware to suck down all our CPU time and resources just to do the simplest of tasks.
Got another one: I a desktop evironment you can's just declare plugin "incompatible" from one version to the next - the way firefox does not. A desktop evironment just jsut have to keep compatible with your past.
This is the most stupid idea I heart this year!
Martin
Given that Firefox already has issues with ignoring user input at various times, I guess Pyro will also bring that ability to ignore the user to the Linux desktop, as it has existed in Windows since the beginning?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I thought about something like this recently, and decided against it, because Firefox is very memory-inefficient, and seems to (I may be wrong) leak more than Harry Potter spoilers. So while it sounds interesting, I wonder if I could really run it, in practice, without having to log out every day or so to release memory.
The fact that you called C and "unpopular language", no matter what you meant by it, completely invalidates any opinion you may have on any programming related topic.
Maybe not
There are 11 types of people in the world, those who can count in binary, and those who can't.
Are any projects going to bundle or supporting download of pyro desktop? I wait until I here one does that way it will run fine with the project. Anyone who has been using python had to know this was coming from other similar type current projects.
MS can only keep program developers out of work for so long.
You don't know binaries as well as you think you do.
All the other responders are also wrong.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Firefox tech airhead
Brendan Eich is not only the original inventor of JavaScript, he's one of the smartest guys I've ever met. Calling him an "airhead" is really pretty sad.
More to the point, he's correct: threads suck, in that mere mortal programmers have pretty much no chance of getting them right in the general case, and even superstars have problems with them. We need a better programming paradigm for taking advantage of multicore, but threads are NOT the right approach for a scripting-level language like ECMAScript.
Wonderful, now my desktop can be a memory eating hog that hasn't worked right sine v. 0.8 AND crash all the time. Awesome.
brian botkiller "Condensing fact from the vapor of nuance" - Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
I don't know about anyone else, But the main reason i use FF is because i don't want my browser to be an integral part of the OS.
They always say, A feature that isn't a solution to a problem, is a problem in it's self.
God Be Gone
Pyros for porn
Use the hammer! When you need to insert a screw use a hammer to bash it in! When you need to saw some wood, use a hammer to break it apart! When you need a pair of tweezers to carefully manipulate a tiny electronic part, use a hammer to bash it into smithereens!
When you're so tunnel blind that all you can see is the web, then everything starts looking like a web page.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
lots of "rich" stuff there; sounds fattening. i see "incredible" "leveraging", too. the clincher, however, is "trusted". now we can rest easy.
bingo!
We already have emacs, why would anyone switch from that?
--- Do you believe in the day?
No, I think that a good desktop environment needs to be multi-threaded. Heck, single-threaded apps are bad enough.
(I also replied to this because of my signature)
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
It also has a bit to do with the structure of our tables and queries. Pulling related data and referencing from inventory and invoices and PO's would be a hassle unless we set up a real client/server paradigm (sorry, I think I was forced to read a white paper recently, I never say 'paradigm') and used a data mining app (I would use Oracle's whole stack just for their datamining and datawarehousing that JBoss just doesn't have) to translate all the data.
Other than that, yeah, you can't use Office for reporting of any useful kind. I just happen to be in a crappy, legacy position where Excel just happens to be useful, for lack of options.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Am I the only one to be mightily impressed at the idea of implementing Expose in javascript??
I haven't looked yet at how well they accomplished this, but damn, I love the idea of having a common Expose-like function available to me on all the modern OS's I am forced to use daily.
If it's GPL'ed I will check it out.
A combination of the speed and stability of Firefox with the app and hardware support of Linux.
the pyro expose code is adapted somewhat from compiz's (it uses compiz's code to compute the destination x/y/w/h of the windows.)
the compiz code is MIT licensed, and the pyro adaptation is MPL'ed.
No one complains about Konqueror's kind of similar integration...
But anyway, I think this kind of concept could be done well. Just two obstacles:
No web browser that's advanced enough to run AJAX apps is simple enough to be as secure and stable as we need. It's not that we couldn't write such a browser, it just hasn't been done.
HTML/CSS/JavaScript will always suck, performance-wise. We really should create a better standard GUI toolkit for the web, if we're intending to run applications on it.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
we've seen this before in windows 98, and many people where against it.
Microsoft had to remove this GUI or change so that win98 could also run with other web brouwsers...
Just wondering how it will end up in linux
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
Fixed it here. Sorry about that.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
http://gears.google.com/
BTW: I don't know why so many posters are saying that msft tried to do this in 1998, or whatever. Msft has never had anything like this. Pyro would not make FF and integrated part of the desktop. And msft is always 100% proprietary. With msft it's all about vendor-lock-in, Pyro would do just the opposite.
I can see a lot of advantages to browser-based apps. The apps can run on any platform. The apps can be server or client based. The apps can run locally, or a local intranet server, or a remote internet server.
There are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary, those who don't, and those who understand that this is a joke about ternary.
...those who think it's about ternary, and those who know it's a joke about quaternary? ;-)
A cheerful little bird is sitting here singing.
There are two types of people in the world. Those who put people into one of two groups, and those who don't. I'm one of the one's who don't.
Wow, lots of talk, but who's tried it? I just ran it on a test machine - an older laptop that was humming along running Ubuntu Feisty. The machine was a tad slow before running it, but it has crawled nearly to a halt upon trying out pyro. My older (read: slow) hardware may exaggerate the slowdown, but it is ridiculous. Also, my desktop is showing at about 100x its normal size, which means that I am lucky to see one of my launchers. Thought (regardless of the security problems) that I would give this a shot, but my short test has come to an end. Next time I see some FUD about this, I'll look the other way.