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Mozilla The Internet GNOME GUI

Mozilla Foundation Meets The GNOME Foundation 380

Posted by Hemos from the working-together-for-bettering-us-all dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The board of directors of the GNOME foundation recently met with a few representatives of the Mozilla foundation - discussing how they could collaborate a little closer in future. A number of interesting things were discussed, including XAML/Avalon and the future of Firefox in GNOME/Linux. Check out the minutes of the meeting on the Gnome mailing list."
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Mozilla Foundation Meets The GNOME Foundation More

Mozilla Foundation Meets The GNOME Foundation

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  • Mozilla meets Gnome. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 26, 2004 @01:04PM (#8973777)
    Does Tokyo get stomped?

  • Do not annoy the Stallman (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rick the Red ( 307103 ) <Rick.The.Red@nOsPaM.gmail.com> on Monday April 26, 2004 @01:05PM (#8973781) Journal
    the future of Firefox in GNOME/Linux
    Isn't that "GNU/Linux"? Has GNOME taken over GNU?

  • It'd be nice (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GigsVT ( 208848 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @01:06PM (#8973799) Journal
    Better to standardize on Firefox rather than have the desktop environment people keep churning out half-assed browsers like Konq and Nautilus.

    • Re:It'd be nice (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      yet the engine for konq is used by apple.

      and nautilus isnt even a web browser. (it has html capabilities, but so do lots of apps)

    • Re:It'd be nice (Score:5, Insightful)

      by BuddieFox ( 771947 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @01:16PM (#8973907)
      Konqueror, Nautilus, Epiphany, Galeon, Firefox, Mozilla et etc.. I have to agree that its getting kind of ridiculous.
      Ok, choice is nice and all, but this duplication of functionality and work is probably extremely unproductive as a whole for the progress of open source software. It should be enough with 2-3 choices for browsers instead of 20: one or two lightweight ones á Firefox, and one or two "fully featured" like Mozilla.

      • Re:It'd be nice (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Malc ( 1751 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @01:32PM (#8974098)
        Firefox is based directly on the Mozilla browser, and it's almost as fully-featured as Mozilla Seamonkey. Unless you're referring to all the other non-browser bumpf that's ignorantly part of the same process space as the Mozilla Seamonkey browser... but Firefox is closing that gap too when it's bundled in a like-feature suite including products such as Thunderbird, Sunbird, etc.

        I wish they would stop wasting their time with Seamonkey and put their efforts in to closing the gap more quickly.

        Anyway, I know what you're saying, but there's got to be a reason why KDE developers chose to write their own from scratch rather than integrate Gecko.
        • I think (not know) that it has something to do with leveraging the QT framework for widgets and themes. Don't quote me on this though.

        • While on the topic of wishes (Score:4, Interesting)

          by ciroknight ( 601098 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @04:03PM (#8975712)
          You know what I wish for? A visual XUL generator, just like Visual Basic in Windows. I also want the Mozilla team to make Firefox run XUL applications using the currently selected GNOME skins and widgets, so that it integrates cleanly. With that, Linux would have a true RAD environment, and maybe we could get more new developers into Linux.

          This being said, I too hope they slow down production on Seamonkey and shift gears, but they're close and they're getting closer every release. And Firebird's already over 90,000 lines different than Mozilla, not to mention fast as hell on both platforms I use daily (Linux + Windows).

          • Under development (Score:3, Informative)

            by superyooser ( 100462 )
          • The project is called Vixen [mozilla.org].>

            "Vixen is designed to be a Visual XUL IDE similar to Visual Basic, Delphi, Macromedia Dreamweaver and Glade, but for the XPToolkit technology developed by the Mozilla project. The initial goal of Vixen is to allow developers to quickly develop professional quality dialogs and windows without having to write any (or at least much) XUL or CSS by hand. The long term goal is to create a comprehensive development environment for rapid development of XUL applications."

            What I

      • Re:It'd be nice (Score:5, Funny)

        by jdifool ( 678774 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @01:43PM (#8974192) Homepage Journal
        The socialists, the communists, the social-democrats, the conservatives, the libertarians, the absenteists.. I have to agree that its getting kind of ridiculous.
        Ok, choice is nice and all, but this duplication of thinking and criticism is probably extremely unproductive as a whole for the progress of democracy. It should be enough with 2-3 choices for political parties instead of 20: one or two lightweight ones as the libertarians, and one or two "fully featured" like the democrats and the republicans.

        oh wait...

      • Konqueror, Nautilus, Epiphany, Galeon, Firefox, Mozilla et etc.. I have to agree that its getting kind of ridiculous.
        Ok, choice is nice and all, but this duplication of functionality and work is probably extremely unproductive as a whole for the progress of open source software. It should be enough with 2-3 choices for browsers instead of 20: one or two lightweight ones á Firefox, and one or two "fully featured" like Mozilla.

        Isn't the whole point of open source that there's as many choices as there a
        • That being said, I agree that it would probably be best to focus efforts on the more mature technologies. But I wouldn't go so far as to say it's unproductive: rather, they're producing something, but there may be a lot of overlap between it and any other browser-type app out there.

          From a development point of view, maybe it isn't unproductive. But from a technology adoption point of view it is.

          Companies and web sites that consider whether or not to certify on a particular operating system or browser will
      • Nautilus, Epiphany, Galeon, Firefox, and Mozilla are all the same browsers with different front ends. They all use the same Gecko rendering engine.
      • What exactly is lightweight about Firefox? With the right plugins, it runs everything that me *brrr* IE used to, plus the popup-stopper, tabs, etc.

        It doesn't have a built-in email client, but then that's what thunderbird or other apps or for.

        Some people do have problems getting Java support going though, but I've had good success running sun's Java under firefox more recent.

      • Konqueror, Nautilus, Epiphany, Galeon, Firefox, Mozilla et etc.. I have to agree that its getting kind of ridiculous.

        All of the above, except for Konqueror, use the rendering engine from Mozilla, and the Konqueror rendering engine is reused in Apple's Safari. Nautilus isn't even a browser, it's a file manager (though it can embed a web view provided by either Galeon or Epiphany). So at the level of the rendering engine, there's very little duplication of effort.

        Also, all of the above have differ

        • konqueror is not as such, as web browser. it can do anything that there is a kpart for (such as khtml - the web renderer). thats why you can edit text files and listen to music, and view files over smb or nfs through konqueror - thats not duplication of effort. kparts minimises this a lot.
      • Konqueror, Nautilus, Epiphany, Galeon, Firefox, Mozilla et etc

        Konq is a lightweight browser designed for general-purpose desktop integration, and it was the right choice at the time.

        Nautilus is not a browser, and could not be replaced with one.

        Epiphany, Galeon and Firefox are all Mozilla. They're just UI layers on top of the core browser, and I have no problem with making them available, just as I have no problem with making 200 skins available. No functional or administrative difference that is so prof

    • Re:It'd be nice (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Moridineas ( 213502 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @01:19PM (#8973946) Journal
      Half-assed browsers like Konq?! It may be hard for you to believe, but some of us actually find Konq better to use than Mozilla.

      That's certaintly true for APPLE, as Safari is based on kparts as well. Because of that alone, it wouldn't seriously surprise me if KParts browsers have a higher marketshare than mozilla.

      • Re:It'd be nice (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Abjifyicious ( 696433 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @01:32PM (#8974100)
        Yes Safari is based on the same HTML rendering engine as Konquerer, but the user interface is completely different. On the surface, Safari is far more similar to Firefox than Konquerer.

        • Re:It'd be nice (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Moridineas ( 213502 )

          Yes Safari is based on the same HTML rendering engine as Konquerer, but the user interface is completely different. On the surface, Safari is far more similar to Firefox than Konquerer.

          And where exactly do you think the bulk of the code in Mozilla goes? The rendering engine IS the single biggest component of any browser.

          Besides--what's so different about the interface of say Konq and Mozilla? I like Konq because it's faster in my experience--what makes the UI's so different?

      • And I prefer Stan Wagon's new invention, the xheel [weblogs.com] over the old wheel. Sure, they're square, and new roads will have to be build to accomodate them, but think of all the new jobs that will be created. I can't wait for the IPO.
        • If you really need to use the half-assed metaphor of reinventing the wheel, consider this: Wheels are different, and they are made different because they have different purposes. Your bike doesn't use the same wheels that your car uses, and a mountain bike doesn't even use the same wheels as a bicycle made for velodrome racing (whatever those are called). This is because of the simple fact that nothing is practical for every purpose. No wheel is perfect, and no browser is perfect.

          So I prefer Konqueror when

      • Re:It'd be nice (Score:3, Insightful)

        by ajs ( 35943 )
        Half-assed browsers like Konq?! It may be hard for you to believe, but some of us actually find Konq better to use than Mozilla.

        It's nice to have another browser around to keep Mozilla moving forward. Stagnation is, of course, bad, but Konq isn't a full-featured browser, and has years of development to go before it is. This is why Safari is so under-featured. That's unfortunate, but they made their choice. Apple users can, fortunately, still use Firefox or Mozilla if they wish.

    • Re:It'd be nice (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Bricklets ( 703061 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @01:24PM (#8974000)
      I use Firefox when I'm working in Windows and Linux, but I use Safari when working on a Mac. Safari uses KHTML (developed for "Konq"). Different strokes for different folks. Just because you don't like a particular browser does not mean others feel the same.

      And by standardization, that does not mean the elimination of all other browsers. It just means basing multiple browers on the same standard (i.e. user interface, rendering of pages, etc.)
      • Those of you on OS X might be pleased to know that Firefox is available for that platform, and even features a pretty damn good theme that looks native to Aqua (see here http://kmgerich.com/archive/000049.html). What's more, is this same theme is now availble for Thunderbird on OS X (nightlies so far) (http://kmgerich.com/archive/000056.html).

        And even though there hasn't been any press about it recently, Camino development has started to pick up again, which actually *is* a native OS X implementation of G

    • Re:It'd be nice (Score:5, Insightful)

      by arkhan_jg ( 618674 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @02:33PM (#8974763)
      Actually, I use konqueror these days as my primary browser, rather than firefox.

      For a start, being able to have a tab with an sftp session next to a samba session next to a webdavs session next to a https session is very useful when web developing, or even just integrating stuff between different servers.

      Secondly, konqueror launches a damn sight faster.

      Finally, it integrates a lot nicer into my kde desktop than firefox or it's other gtk-varients.

      Now, if you could use the gecko engine as a kpart, that would rock quite nicely. That said, with safari feeding back their improvements into khtml, konqueror is moving ahead by leaps and bounds, and it's a rare page i have rendering problems with these days.

      All power to the mozilla team - I deployed thunderbird onto the staff windows machines at work as the standard imap client - and I think integration of firebird further into the linux desktop is a very good thing for both parties.

      Ultimately though, a bit of healthy competition is a good thing - otherwise, we'd all just be using IE!
      • Ultimately though, a bit of healthy competition is a good thing - otherwise, we'd all just be using IE!

        Bzzt. Not to sound like an asshole but we'd all be using Spyglass Mosaic/Netscape (these two didn't so much as compete.. mosaic was more of a proof of concept to me, whereas netscape was the real deal.. but maybe I'm just erred too)... and as we all know, Netscape spawned Mozilla so...

        • Re:It'd be nice (Score:3, Informative)

          by arkhan_jg ( 618674 )
          Grin, I don't think you remember all the facts.
          IIRC this is how it went...

          NCSA wrote the original mosaic. Spyglass licenced the tech and trademark from NCSA, and wrote spyglass mosaic from the ground up.

          (mosaic communications corporation) MCC was a spin off company of a bunch of the staff from NCSA, and after a trademark wrangle they renamed to Netscape.

          Spyglass mosaic went down the embedded road, i.e. a rendering engine for other software, netscape went the standalone browser road.

          Then came the formati

  • Preliminary list of agreements (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 26, 2004 @01:07PM (#8973809)
    The GNOME people have agreed to cooperate subject to the following conditions:
    • The organization name "Mozilla" must be changed to "GNU/Mozilla".
    • The project name "Firefox" must be changed to "GNU/Firefox".
    • The technology name "XAML/Avalon" must be changed to "GNU/XAML//GNU/Avalon".
    • Can please someone explain me in clear and sound terms the recurrent FSF bashing ? And especially, why it is regularly modded up ?

      There's definitely something I don't get here.

      jdif

      • It's marketing. "As long as they spell the name right."

        Sorry, GNU/Marketing.
      • Not FSF per se, but GNU in particular.

        To start with something that sounds trivial yet annoying for many of us, GNU (Guh-new) is perhaps the worst acronym in the software world. It sounds harsh, and the thought of an infinite recursion point wrankles a lot of us.

        English speakers, as a generality, hate having a common term with more than three syllables. GNU/Linux brings it up to 4. There's a reason we don't always call it "Microsoft Windows."

        Many of us also get annoyed with this sense of self-importance.

  • It's genius (Score:5, Funny)

    by teamhasnoi ( 554944 ) <teamhasnoi AT yahoo DOT com> on Monday April 26, 2004 @01:08PM (#8973821) Journal
    They're going to incorporate the browser into the OS. It's a sure sign that linux is ready for the desktop, because obviously you can't have an OS that isn't tightly integrated with the internet.

    Vision like this could only come the linux community.

    • obviously you can't have an OS that isn't tightly integrated with the internet.

      Even more: I hear they'll be giving the browser away for free. It's madness, I say! Madness!

    • Re:It's genius (Score:3, Insightful)

      by bonch ( 38532 )
      Isn't it strange that everyone bitched about the lack of necessity for IE to be integrated into the shell of Windows 98, then went right out and redid it for KDE without a second thought? I never understood what a filesystem browser had to do with the program that renders my HTML for me. It's like people just accept it because Windows 98 did it--meanwhile bitching about the non-innovation of Windows 98 and Microsoft.

      Don't get me started on taskbars and start menus, two things that don't belong ANYWHERE n

  • I find it odd indeed... (slightly OT) (Score:4, Insightful)

    by henriksh ( 683138 ) <hsh@freecode.dk> on Monday April 26, 2004 @01:09PM (#8973830) Homepage
    It is really odd that Gnome opted for Epiphany as a default browser in 2.x, when Galeon is a better and more featureful choice. I've read that the reasons were that Galeon did not follow some UI guidelines (this could surely be worked out?), and that Epiphany is simpler to use.

    I just find it hard to believe than anyone would pick Epiphany over Galeon, even considering simplicity, since Galeon mostly works like Mozilla. Galeon seems simpler to use to me - Epiphany doesn't look or feel like any other browser I've used.

    • Re:I find it odd indeed... (slightly OT) (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      How about Galeon developers not wanting to integrate with GNOME? While Epiphany has helped develop and test leading edge GNOME apis, like the toolbar editing feature.

      Epiphany IS much more integrated into gnome, and is simpler to use. Those were the reasons. They are facts so its not really a matter of opinion.

    • Re:I find it odd indeed... (slightly OT) (Score:4, Insightful)

      by KingJoshi ( 615691 ) <slashdot@joshi.tk> on Monday April 26, 2004 @01:23PM (#8973998) Homepage
      The multiple choices are both the good and bad of GNU/Linux.

      From the discussions, it's also evident. You have different distributions and you want and need some standards but then the more parties involved, the more difficult that can be. That's where Microsoft has an advantage.

      Reading that, it was worrying more than anything else. GNU/Linux and FOSS can't always play catch-up to Microsoft. But you have all these different groups with their own agendas in GNU/Linux.

      You know the saying, "United we stand, divided we fall." There has to be balance between unification and diversity and more importantly, there has to be initiative and goals from that unified group. I know some have tried and it's nice to see attempts at initiatives here. Hopefully, more progress is made.

    • Re:I find it odd indeed... (slightly OT) (Score:5, Interesting)

      by 13Echo ( 209846 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @01:36PM (#8974133) Homepage Journal
      This topic about Epiphany really opens a new can of worms. Now, I'm going to go off about Gnome in general. Epiphany, itself, really is a good example of one of Gnome's major problems.

      I'm finding that many Gnome developers are going with making things so ridiculously simple at times that it is almost getting stupid. I use Epiphany, but I prefer Galeon as well. Comparing Epiphany to more feature-rich browsers like Galeon/Konqueror/Firefox makes Epiphany seem almost like IE to some degree. I suppose that is the point. I can browse with Epiphany and still get a reasonably good experience, where if I am forced to use a Windows machine (and IE) I am greeted with a slow browser with no features, tons of pop-ups, lack of tabbed browsing, lack of middle click, etc. Sure, you can add these extensions, but that's not the point.

      The Gnome project seems to be interested in keeping things as simple as possible without taking too many features away. There are some things about Galeon/Firefox that I never used. There are some things about Epiphany that I would love to have. Any choice is better than IE for most browsing. I guess that is the point.

      What is really odd about Gnome's usability though, is that it is really inconsistent between apps. Even more annoying is that there are such major changes between different versions of Gnome, that really negate the "ease of use" concept that they seem to promote. For example, what in the hell is up with the new spatial Nautilus? Sure, it's fast. Sure, it works well in some respects. Sure, I'm getting used to it. Sure, I can enable "classic mode" and browse that way. But it seem to be *unfinished*. That's the big deal. Someone above mentioned that Gnome feels half-finished in many respects, and I tend to agree (in spite of it being my desktop of choice). Perhaps if they would stick to keeping major UI standards for major versions (between 2.x and 3.x, for instance), maybe someone could finish implementing a product or feature and make things consistent for once. Though I kinda like the new Nautilus spatial file manager, there are a lot of things that are missing that really make it difficult to use for certain things.

      So, back to Epiphany... While I feel that it feels a lot like Galeon or Firefox in most respects, some design decisions are just weird! For example, the way that it manages tab organization, or the slim feature-set that give you the ability to customize it. I like the browser, but I feel that Marco is going way too far in some respects. I really appreciate his work; Don't get me wrong. It's just something that I'm seeing from many Gnome-centric projects as well.

      It's just weird. You have an app like Evolution, which is kick-ass as far as mail apps are concerned, but other things seem to be broken or incomplete; Epiphany, Totem, (the new and improved) Nautilus in spatial mode, G-Streamer, etc. To the guy that posted that really long response of above; I feel your pain. I love Gnome, but I can't help but think that the head developers are a little lost at times. There really isn't a very good sense of group direction and planning... At least compared to KDE, in my opinion.

      • Re:I find it odd indeed... (slightly OT) (Score:5, Informative)

        by Jameth ( 664111 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @01:50PM (#8974267)
        "I feel your pain. I love Gnome, but I can't help but think that the head developers are a little lost at times. There really isn't a very good sense of group direction and planning... At least compared to KDE, in my opinion."

        What's really amazing is that KDE is the one with nothing even resembling central leadership, and GNOME is the one which is generally run by a group of core developers and decision makers. How did that happen?

        By the way, you're completely right.
      • The thing that REALLY gets me about Epiphany is the idiotic bookmark system. They threw away the baby with the bath water.

        That "feature" alone lost me as a user(of Epiphany, not GNOME). Epiphany's bookmark system is slowly starting to resemble a "normal" bookmark system again(because most people hate it the way it is), while Galeon has been slowly adding incremental improvements to their bookmark system. Simply being able to have bookmark aliases in Galeon makes Epiphany's new bookmark system redundant

    • Re:I find it odd indeed... (slightly OT) (Score:5, Informative)

      by akeru ( 15942 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @01:41PM (#8974175)
      "better" is a very subjective term, especially as far as Galeon and Epiphany are concerned. The reasons GNOME went with Epi over Galeon are essentially the same as why Marco (lead developer) left Galeon and started Epiphany: the (other) Galeon developers wanted to duplicate a lot of things that were already present in GNOME. The short list of duplication in Galeon/GNOME is MIME, Proxy and Mouse settings. The outcome of this is that there are (at present) 4 choices for a GNOME webbrowser, none of which are ideal.
      • Ah, that makes a bit of sense. I was wondering what the deal was. Though it seems to me it would have made more sense to just take the Galeon source, make it respect GNOME prefs, and label it Epiphany.

        Epiphany at this point is at the "good enough" phase, I suppose. And if someone were to actually write good plugins for it, it'd be great. In fact, once there are plugins, Epiphany will likely leave Galeon in the dust, since Galeon's not similarly extensible AFAIK. But for now I miss my gestures and a f
    • Ephiphany was the right choice at the time. The idea was to have a lightweight, Mozilla-based browsing engine that could be turned into a component, not just to have a stand-alone browser.

      As such I think it was a fine choice. Distribution vendors should, of course, include a full-featured browser like Galeon or Mozilla as the default user-accessible browser, but Ephiphany makes a fine component-browser.
    • It is really odd that Gnome opted for Epiphany as a default browser in 2.x, when Galeon is a better and more featureful choice.

      "better" is subjective.

      "more featureful"... if any features are really valuable, they can be added to Epiphany. Features were not the reason Epiphany was given the nod.

      I've read that the reasons were that Galeon did not follow some UI guidelines (this could surely be worked out?), and that Epiphany is simpler to use.

      The GNOME guys chose Epiphany because Epiphany was better a

  • Is OSS going the Microsoft route? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by alen ( 225700 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @01:15PM (#8973900)
    Does this mean that Mozilla will be integrated into GNOME? If yes, then isn't this doing the same thing as IE into Windows which everyone on /. says is evil?
    • No.

      IE is evil because it's buggy, non-standards compliant, and when it crashes, it crashes your "shell."

      Gecko in Linux wouldn't be any of that.

    • Re:Is OSS going the Microsoft route? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by dAzED1 ( 33635 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @01:31PM (#8974081) Journal
      no one said integrating a web browswer into the desktop was evil.

      one company controlling the browser, the desktop, the OS, the applications, the server apps, and...whatever else...that is what is innappropriate. Not having a choice - that is what is wrong.

      Don't want your browswer to be integrated? Use KDE, or the gnome fork that won't be integrated. Take the source and do it yourself, if you'd like. Not that you're making a serious question...

    • im not going to fault you for asking that question, first of all. on the surface, they seem similar. however, i dont have to install gnome at all. nor do i have to install X, for that matter. the point is that you cant have windows without IE. i can still have gnu/linux in a nearly-infinite number of other combinations with or without gnome if i dont like mozilla being integrated. not only that, but IMO, mozilla is much better software than IE.
      • however, i dont have to install gnome at all. nor do i have to install X, for that matter.

        From a philosophical point of view, I fail to see why "you don't have to install gnome" is any different than "you don't have to install windows." Besides which, it's just as easy to use a different browser with Windows as it is with Gnome or other common desktop environments.
    • It was considered "evil" because it was Microsoft's attempt to leverage its proprietary desktop monopoly into a proprietary internet access monopoly. With IE at 90+ %, they've succeeded.

      Integrating the browser into the DE is not a bad idea per se, provided you can solve stability and security problems. MS has actually shown that you can solve the stability problem (with Win2k/XP) and I hope Linux would be less vulnerable to security issues by design.

      So integrating an open source browser based on open st
    • Others have replied, but let me be very specific: Microsoft was not wrong FROM A TECHNICAL STANDPOINT. Tight integration between the browser and the desktop is TECNICALLY sound. The problems were that a) they did not publish the API for tying a browser into the desktop, so only IE could implement the API and thus IE was essentially part of the OS b) they had competition in the market that they were attempting to squash by making their product useless... such a melding of GNOME and Mozilla would not render O
    • isn't this doing the same thing as IE into Windows which everyone on /. says is evil?

      I have always thought that having a web browser built in is a good thing; you can use it to view help, for example (why have a redudant help system when help can just be local web pages?).

      I think that the major complaint people have about the way Microsoft handled the integration was that Microsoft was using monopoly power to crush their competition. Building IE into Windows allowed MS to take most of the market share o
  • Does anyone else find it funny that A Dragon type creature, and that a gnome can end up being friends? This just keeps reminding me of shrek, and I hope that gnome never becomes an annoying jack-ass. I will leave that title for SCO.

  • Progress, but someone needs to lead (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ars-Fartsica ( 166957 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @01:37PM (#8974136)
    One inherent advantage Microsoft has over collaborative projects is that they don't need to persuade their own developers - they just point the boat and say "go here if you want to get paid". In the open source world, the consensus approach of feeding/starving projects based on their relative merits, and the unwillingness to leave anyone out in the cold definitely hampers major moves.

    Such is the case here. The need to more closely integrate the web rendering model and the desktop model is clear, and Microsoft is probably on to something compelling with Avalon/XAML. ActiveX was a disastrous first brush with integration but its clear they see a need and there is a need. Safe local applications integrated with the network do make sense.

    On the open source side someone will have to lead to get this done - and not be afraid to leave some groups out. Epiphany should be an early victim - a "default" app no one uses.

  • "Brendan spoke about the need for innovation, and not just clinging to web standards."

    This is heading towards proprietary extensions territory, a la Netscape/IE. Even if the implementations are 100% free software, this might lock out other apps and projects. It would take a major undertaking for them to comply with the new 'standards'.

  • Oh christ. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by karmaflux ( 148909 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @01:58PM (#8974360)
    Please, please, please let this fail. The last thing I want is my favorite browser family tied to freaking GTK or Gnome.

    • Re:Oh christ. (Score:5, Informative)

      by evilviper ( 135110 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @04:15PM (#8975878) Journal
      The last thing I want is my favorite browser family tied to freaking GTK or Gnome.

      Ironically, it already is... Mozilla has always required GTK, and (very few) GNOME libraries.

      The fact that you don't realize this suggests that you've probably never compiled Mozilla, and just download the binaries. In which case, you won't be affected in the slightest, anyhow.

  • Suggested innovation (Score:3, Informative)

    by claes ( 25551 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @02:03PM (#8974415)
    The meeting suggested innovation - what about this:

    Tie XForms together with email. The purpose is to allow forms to be sent with email, as alternative to HTTP POST. Integrate it with mail clients so that clicking a link opens the compose window, which will load the form, show it, ready to fill in. When clicking send, the form is evaluated and sent. This is much nicer than filling in an order form in a browser, since you get to keep a copy in the outbox. Actually, I am surprised I don't see this already. Of course, it needs to be standardized, but you have to start somewhere. Is there perhaps already an RFC in progress?

    • Re:Suggested innovation (Score:3, Interesting)

      by iabervon ( 1971 )
      What's the big idea about email? Why not just save HTTP POST form responses in the equivalent of an outbox? The ability to save things is unrelated to the protocol used to send them (and HTTP is a much better protocol for this application than SMTP).

      I think that the ability to save forms and form responses would be a major advantage, however.
  • Mozilla is already technically better than IE. Evolution is already technically better than Outlook. So why isn't the majority of the market using these products? The problem is not a technical problem, and all the new programming languages and acronyms are not going to make the average joe want to use them.

    here's an idea, lets all pitch in and try to make a commercial for one of the OSS project. Lets take OpenOffice for example. We all see the MS Office commercials constantly throughout the day. Imagine

  • good idea that.... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by zogger ( 617870 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @02:08PM (#8974485) Homepage Journal
    ...mozilla wants to collaborate closer with GNOME and that they asked for it first, according to the release of the minutes of the meeting. Cool Beans. Something that I like, more focused direction on unification for a polished product. *Choice* is good,but it's subjective without some sort of rational goal, choice by itself is mostly used as a buzzword, there must be a *goal* in making the choice and having multiple choices, not just that there *are* multiple choices extant.

    And my choice and I bet millions of others would be a "linux thing" that worked cohesively together, and that just won't happen very quickly with thousands of directions taken, many of them just parallel trails with each other.

    I most certainly would *chose* an operating system/distribution that worked all well together. A choice of a chaotic mish mash of thousands of incompatable apps and a so-so functionality is not much of a choice if you want quality over quantity.

  • Not a compelling strategy (Score:4, Interesting)

    by kollivier ( 449524 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @02:19PM (#8974603)
    OSS developers tend to push the rather silly 'it's cheaper so they'll switch if we offer a similar solution' battle plan. No thanks. I'm still using Windows (actually, Mac primarily) although Linux is cheaper because Windows and Mac provide me with a whole lot of ease of use that Linux lacks, for what is relatively a small amount of money. (When you consider I work on these things 8 hours a day!) When Linux provides ease of use at more than a superficial level (no, having a GUI doesn't automatically mean "easy to use") then I'll think about switching.

    Apple was smart when they took an attitude of "we don't *CARE* what Microsoft is doing, we'll just carve our own markets and create compelling value". This strategy works, because Apple isn't constantly trying to catch up with Microsoft. Instead, they're working on the best possible solution for *their* customers, not Microsoft's. They have a very good understanding of who their customers are, and which customers they're likely to switch over. They've done research on this.

    What Mozilla should have learned by now is that the browser just isn't that important anymore. "Our browser is better than yours" will hardly cause end users to switch in boatloads. Developers, however, are more open to switching and more keen on using these technologies in their own apps. Yet, despite this, they say that embedding and the GRE are not priorities until FireFox 1.0 is released. So their focus is on making a good browser, which MS already has. (Don't start about the benefits of Mozilla over IE, I know what they are and most users neither know nor care.)

    Their real potential growth market is in embedding, where Windows/Linux/Mac apps can share a similar rendering engine, in tools like Quicken/TurboTax. XUL is an added bonus. But embedding is not a priority nor is it easy to do. So while they could be getting Mozilla/GRE dumped on all sorts of desktops via third-party apps, they've chosen to focus on converting end users, a majority of whom just don't care about which browser they use.

    Another great growth area would be Composer, which is already a decent contender to FrontPage, but which most people don't even know exists. Again, a compelling selling point for Mozilla (and embeddable!) but it basically gets ignored. In fact, I think editor embedding is actually a killer app for Mozilla - how many apps work with HTML these days? And unlike with the browser, Mozilla has very little competition here. FrontPage and Dreamweaver are expensive, and they don't offer a real, compelling benefit over Composer.

    Instead of pursuing these opportunities, now it sounds like they're going to dump bunches of resources integrating with GNOME and trying to beat Microsoft at its own game (good luck, you're not the first to try!). Also, sounds like they're going to try reinventing portions of wxWidgets/wxWindows internally to provide a "native" XUL, like OpenOffice is now in the process of doing with their own toolkit. Talk about collaboration! It's a wonder we haven't tore Microsoft a new one yet...
    • You say, first, that Linux is hard to use because it's tools are superficial. Then you say that Apple did it right because they chose to carve their own market.

      Linux has already done this. It's current market is full of geeks who don't think that Linux is hard to use. I think Windows is hard to maintain, and that's why I use Linux. The Linux community is now trying to expand their market to people like you, who don't see the elegance of how things are handled in a unix-ish OS.

      Is my response elitist? A

      • Re:Maybe you're right. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by kollivier ( 449524 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @03:21PM (#8975245)
        Linux has already done this. It's current market is full of geeks who don't think that Linux is hard to use. I think Windows is hard to maintain, and that's why I use Linux.

        But I was talking about GNOME and, more importantly, Mozilla. Are Mozilla and GNOME just targetting geeks? From what they've said in the past and in the meeting notes, I don't think this is the case. My issues were with how they intend to gain marketshare in the other markets, those who are using other OSes or other products.

        The Linux community is now trying to expand their market to people like you, who don't see the elegance of how things are handled in a unix-ish OS.

        Then, no disrespect, but it is failing miserably, and statements like "who don't see the elegance.." are indeed elitist and makes it sound like this target market is too dumb for Linux anyways. I use Linux-based distros (Mandrake currently, though not as my primary desktop), I've learned quite a bit about UNIX/Linux, the command line, etc., and while I see its benefits, it was (actually is) a painful and steep learning curve. It's orders of magnitude harder than learning Mac and Windows for someone who didn't start off on UNIX. How can something so elegant be so painful? I just don't see it, right? Well, if I hadn't been stubborn enough to learn how Linux works (and actually it's thanks to Mac that I got more of a sense of the command line), I would have given up on it long ago.

        Is my response elitist? A little bit, but it's true. I think you're original post was ignorant. I've been tossing the idea around in my head that maybe it would be better if Linux -wasn't- the most used OS. It'll end up like Windows.

        Actually, Linux is just a kernel. This is an important point. There are probably 100s of Linux-based OSes. So why can't you have your uber-geek distribution (Gentoo? Debian?) while I have my easy to use distribution? In fact, I think everyone talking like there is one "Linux" confuses the issue considerably.

        Also, it doesn't *have* to end up like Windows, but if it does, it will be because the open source community made it that way. My concern is that this is actually where projects like Mozilla are trying to push things. Windows != easy to use. Windows = "one way to implement an easy to use desktop, although far from the best way to do it". Anyone who uses Windows as the gold standard for ease of use will never create a compelling reason to switch from Windows. In fact, as the saying goes, "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery". OSS software will thus be seen as the "cheap knock-off" of high-quality Windows software. And that's the last way I'd like OSS to be perceived.

        • How can something so elegant be so painful?

          It's quite simple. You are so adjusted to the Windows/Mac way of doing things, that doing things the Unix way is unthinkable. It's not that Unix is any harder, it's just that it's totally different.

          I started with Windows (and some Mac expercience) and went through the same pangs you are. Now that I've gone through all that, and know Unix as well as anything else, I wouldn't switch back unless my life depended on it. The Unix way is more elegant, more flexible

  • ... then we would have KNOMzilla.

    On a more serious note, imagine if KDE/GNOME/Mozilla all joined forces and worked under common leadership towards a common goal. That's an environment I would like to see someday! Throw in the WINE project and we're talking some major software muscle.

  • Mozilla's greatest success is libification. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 26, 2004 @03:26PM (#8975299)
    The current problem with Mozilla is that it is a monolith suite. Where Mozilla succeeds is where they allow Mozilla functionallity to be imported into other applications.

    One of Gnome's greatest strength is that developers can pick and choose which libraries to include to build their applications.

    The Mozilla people need to extract from their code useable libraries that anyone can use. This alone will lead to integration with Gnome, as has been the case with the HTML rendering.

  • YES! We need to sort out the damn GUI bindings. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mpcooke3 ( 306161 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @03:28PM (#8975316) Homepage
    1. IBM's SWT requires C++ interfaces and it needs gnome in addition to current GTK bindings. SWT is the fastest best API supporting most common platforms it runs 10 times faster than mozilla because it uses native widgets.

    2. XUL needs to be mapped to SWT bindings so it has faster native cross platform support. This would be the quickest way to get mozilla to run and look like a native app on most platforms.

    With these two changes people can develop cross platform apps with native GUI's either directly in C, Java or using XUL for layout.

    3. Once that is done you can clone XAML/Avalon.

    If I have any spare time this weekend I will put togethor the neccessary patches ;)

    Matt.

  • Feh. (Score:2, Informative)

    by alehmann ( 50545 )
    There are so many things wrong with this that it's difficult to start. The first is Jeff Waugh's proposal that Epiphany replace Firefox as a the de-facto Linux browser. Jeff Waugh is GNOME's most extreme evangelist and from my communications with him I get the impression that he would like nothing more than for GNOME to become integral to every Linux system. In reality, all that users would gain from Epiphany is that things might be a little more consistent *if* they happened to use GNOME. If not, too bad:

  • I will believe it when I see it (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mrcparker ( 469158 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @03:42PM (#8975478)
    This is GNOME we are talking about.

    This is the same GNOME that starts a whole lot of really cool things but never finishes them.

    - GNOME vfs - great idea, but none of the modules really work like they should. The ssh, smb, and ftp method are all sketchy at best.

    - CORBA-like Object system - another great idea with some great code behind it but hardly implemented in any applications. I should be able to use a web browser object, a emailer object, etc.

    The two issues above take the "OBJECT" and "NETWORK" right out of GNOME. I really like GNOME - libxml, atk, bonobo, and gtk are excellent.

    I would believe that this is going somewhere if the KDE group announced it, but I have a feeling that this will be yet another great idea that will never really pan out.

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