Mozilla Rising ... As A Platform 397
ceswiedler writes "Salon is running a story about Mozilla's potential dominance as a platform for application development. They discuss the community development centering around Mozilla, and point out that its cross-plaform GUI environment is 'exactly the kind of thing Microsoft was trying to prevent when it launched its war against Netscape. It didn't want Netscape around, because Netscape was becoming a platform.' In what might be a Salon first, they even include a reference to a Slashdot comment by SkyShadow."
mozilla as a common library for linux? (Score:4, Insightful)
this will pose to be a problem for microsoft; why bother using microsoft components, which are bound to windows, when i can program across multiple platforms using mozilla components?
SVG (Score:5, Insightful)
My vote is for SVG, even though the current support for it in Mozilla is pretty fragile [YMMV, I'm on 1.1 Linux].
With full support for SVG, Web applications could really take off in a big way (graphical and not just text interaction) that is unhindered by platform specific nonsense.
One big hitch though seems to be in rendering quality outline fonts. Everyone would love to have the precision of PostScript for determining exactly where text is located, how far it extends, etc, but there seems to be big players that are nervous about releasing outlines of their fonts and have punted about precise layout of fonts inside SVG, deferring to upper level CSS specifications and what not that permit layout decisions to change when we really need a web layout engine that doesn't change from platform to platform (and is free and open).
Re:mozilla as a common library for linux? (Score:4, Insightful)
IE's already there. IE has been there for several years. Hell, I use IE components daily.
IE's already in place, and it works very, very well, and the components are well documented. I'm seeing *many* shrinkwrap programs coming out now that DO use IE as a framework. Quickbooks Pro 2002, for example, is built on IE.
I want to believe... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think that in order for it to really drive the nail in the coffin, it's going to need a niche market. Incredibly good functionality really isn't enough to make the average user go out of their way to get it. The future is likely in the ability to discover the niche application that makes it undeniably more useful -- then all it has to do is hang on for a couple of years (which is harder than it sounds...)
I think a cross-platform GUI is a red herring. (Score:5, Insightful)
Each platform has its own quirks with how it should behave. For example, menus in Windows are expected to be static (that is, they stay visible after the user releases the mouse button), while Macintosh menus tend to be rubber-band (menu disappears when user releases mouse button). In Windows, a menu action simply happens while on Macintosh, the selected menu item flashes several times.
I could go on and on with the differences between the Windows and Macintosh platforms (to say nothing of UNIX!). The point is that an application that acts differently from every other program is an application that is harder to learn. Users are forced to keep two sets of expectations, which completely defeats the purpose of using a cross-platform GUI!
Yes, you can tweak the UI so that it looks more like the host operating system. This is a thin veneer, however, as the emperor's proverbial clothes come into view when the OS theme is changed.
It makes sense that the UI should be abstracted from the rest of the application, but XUL is not the answer.
Nathan
Open Source Makes This Possible (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd say the fact that the Mozilla team took all that time to get its building blocks right is a major contributing factor, despite the widespread misgivings about Mozilla being so late.
If you have great code - clean, well documented and full featured -, make it freely accessible to everyone who asks, AND have the high profile that Mozilla has, who can beat that? Definitely not a commercial platform, whatever its merits.
Congrats to the Mozilla dvelopers, inside Netscape and elsewhere!
Re:SVG (Score:1, Insightful)
The level of integration between the various components of mozilla is really quite a beuatiful thing.
Re:Is it a good idea? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:mozilla as a common library for linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
IE! Ooo... it's sooo cross-platform...
How do they figure the numbers? (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm a fan of Moz's pop-up disabling abilities, but if this company uses TOTAL requests, then every other browser has an artificially inflated total.
Like when I use IE, I send out requests via pop-ups all the time and each can, in turn, make more requests. With Moz, I don't make any such requests.
With this in mind, to a particular site I can tally '1' visit with Moz and '1+x' visits with IE (x>=0).
That's the easy way to track general browser use, but since Moz doesn't conform to this general rule, hopefully they have adjusted the numbers accordingly. Any idea how it's done?
Article misses reality (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft doesn't really need to worry about the so-called platform threat, and they never did. They made IE the platform, and then welded it to Windows.
And could Salon really think that Moz as a platform could possibly compete with .Net? The API for the next Windows OS? Unlikely.
Microsoft, IE and Mozilla (Score:3, Insightful)
I like XUL. I think it's a great idea and the implementation rocks. But most of all, it's simple. There are no DLLs, no IUnknown pointers or registry issues to deal with. Mozilla is a great browser, in many respects superior to IE, and in some inferior (my dream browser would be a combination of IE, Mozilla and Konqueror which runs on Windows, OSX and Linux. Oh well). But the difference it was designed from the sart to *be* a platform, where with IE platformitis was an afterthought.
But I disgress. The key here is going to be Mozilla's ability to gain critical mass with average developers in Windows for it to take off. I'm not talking about XPCOM hackers, I'm talking about the ones quoted in the Salon article. It will do Mozilla no good if it takes off in Linux, because Linux has no desktop presence to speak of, and it has a far greater variety of browsers that, while good for competition, also cause fragmentation.
I think Microsoft's response to this (if they do get to the point where they consider the Mozilla *platform* a threat) will be to essentially take IE and turn it into a .NET platform. If they can offer a platform to people writing C# and VB.NET and JScript.NET, they'll be all set - assuming the .NET thing does take off like they want to. Of course, one of the catalysts to .NET acceptance will be how many computers it happens to be installed in - imagine if anyone who wants to use the next version of IE has to download the .NET runtime?
Still, Mozilla has the upper hand because it's off on the race and Microsoft is standing in the starting line wondering what the futz is going on and why are all these geeks cheering?
Re:Open Source Makes This Possible (Score:3, Insightful)
Hell, I own my own retail store, and I get about 60% of all potential customers in my area, and that's more than enough. Why would I bother watering down my product line to pull in everybody else? It'd ruin my business. One size doesn't fit all in ANY product.
Non-commercial developers? What does that have to do with anything? I write apps all the time for myself using IE. What's your point? There aren't any restrictions if you write a shrink-wrapped app that grabs a few IE objects. You don't have to license IE. You just specify that IE is required to be able to use your product. And with a nearly 100% saturation on the Windows platforms, which have a 95% desktop saturation, that's not a problem.
Re:I want to believe... (Score:2, Insightful)
The average user receives a free AOL CD and uses it. Or buys a computer at Best Buy and signs up for MSN. Or worse yet, contracts with a company like Adelphia or @Home or ATT and uses their home page (recommended browser? IE 5.5).
The average user doesn't have the same interest as 99% of the
1) Linux is free and far more stable than Windows or
2) Mozilla has better security than any version of IE.
The average user really ONLY cares that
1) his kids can do homework using MS Office;
2) that he can access the Internet using something that is easy and familiar (like the browser at work, which is more than likely IE)
3) that AOL was easy to install and setup and his family and friends use the same
4) that the free "parental control" software he downloaded works on AOL and IE; and
5) that Quicken runs on his system.
My only point is that Mozilla and Netscape will grow, yes. But like Apple & Linux, they will more than likely compete for a small portion of the marketplace.
Is there a way that these products could take a larger portion of the marketplace? I don't know. Probably. But, you would have to convince the average consumer that these products are "the thing" they can't live without... just as Microsoft has done for the past 10 years.
Anyway, I have to say I like it the way it is now. No corporate fingers exercising control over the development cycles of Mozilla and Linux means good stuff in the future. And with the advent of Micorsoft and Intel's efforts to cease all "pirated" software and media files; Mozilla and Linux, (et al) development is very important to me.
Re:BullS**T (Score:3, Insightful)
Since when was "no users give up" the only criterion for evaluating a program's usability?
Re:Is it a good idea? (Score:2, Insightful)
But the article is making a point that the cross platform application interface that the browser was built on can easily be used to create other networked applicatoins with little more knowledge than it currently takes to build an advanced website.
A developer creating a non web related application would only have to use the components that are necessary for their application.
As more applications are created new developers have more than the browser that was initially created with the framework to base thier own applications on.
Later, Seeker
Re:Mozilla OS=ByzantineOS (Score:2, Insightful)
That's three more things than you should have to do.
Joe
Re:mozilla as a common library for linux? (Score:3, Insightful)
I have a very nasty feeling that Palidium is going to be Microsoft's answer to fix things like interoperability and Linux. First it will wipe out Linux due to legal issues rather then technical. Second Alot of websites especially porn websites or hollywood movie websites will have drm protected pictures and video's. If I was in charge of www.2bigirls.com for example, I would love to drm the pictures and video streams for obvious reasons and raise my rates. With people using the net more and more for entertainment purposes, this market will explode and sadly the RIAA/MPAA really do have a clue. They want hardware protection in place and then they will offer as many
Then it wont matter how good mozilla is as a browser or its components. People have shown over and over again that they buy things for compatibility and to get things down with the least amount of effort. If they can not view web pages with anything but drm pc's with IE then thats what they will use. Isn't porn and entertainment how VHS won over the supperior beta?