Firefox - The Platform 589
Strudelkugel writes "Business 2.0 reports Firefox is becoming a problem for Microsoft. But FF is not just a problem as a browser; its potential as a platform is significant. From the article: 'It all adds up to a business opportunity for startups, established software companies, and Web giants alike. Though Ross and the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation don't stand to make money, Firefox's open platform gives it enormous potential to hatch a new class of applications that live on the desktop but do business on the Web.'"
no, the cat HASN'T got my tongue. (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe Firefox is like the third-party candidate of browsers. Sure, it may not ever hold a dominant market share, but it will guide those who DO towards the right issues...
Re:no, the cat HASN'T got my tongue. (Score:5, Insightful)
Good Show, Mozilla! (Score:5, Insightful)
Just goes to show, when you take out competition, you get stale, passionless software. Thank you Mozilla.
let it be just a browser (Score:5, Insightful)
What about security? (Score:4, Insightful)
That isn't good. Sure, the FF crew may fix them faster, but ATEOTD it's getting hard to advocate FF over IE when effectively it's no more secure at present. I've already suffered this; a couple of people to whom I recommended FF have come back at me pointing out the recently discovered holes.
Being a 0.x release doesn't really count, as the Moz Foundation is pushing this to the masses - even looking for a NYT ad. It'd just be interesting to hear some thoughts on this. I'll be using it for years no doubt, but how do others promote it considering it has had more vulns than IE?
Worries me.. (Score:1, Insightful)
This wouldn't be the first times organisations have gone over board on something and ruined what they already had. Look at all the long term really successful products (WinAmp, Google.com, etc) they do so by keeping it simple. Not trying to re-write the wheel and do things like this.
FireFox is already extremely bloated (on Windows) compared to other Windows applications and the source code is hundreds of meg in size, the reason - it has an entire platform.
Re:let it be just a browser (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Google? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, we can. And so can the article -- In the paragraph immediatly above what you quoted.
Re:no, the cat HASN'T got my tongue. (Score:5, Insightful)
There is the rub. Active X is a nasty locking that should be avoided at all costs. It locks you in to not just an OS but also an ISA.
Mozilla? (Score:4, Insightful)
Must everything become an operating system? How about quitting trying to become a brand and just make a simple quality browser?
catch-up has slowed down in my opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
However XP Service Pack 2 has taken a big bite out of many security, spyware, etc types of issues that formerly plagued Microsoft's IE browser. That said, users on other versions of Windows do not benefit from these new features.
Going forward, I would say that Firefox has more of a fight on its hands, now that Microsoft is starting to listen to the browser crowds.
I went strictly Firefox about seven months ago, and for the last few months have not even had the IE icon available on my desktop or in my menus. However since XP SP2, I've started moving back to using IE sometimes, because it blocks pop-ups, ActiveX controls, etc. Of course Firefox still has many extensions available which I (not the average user, but a developer user) have fallen in love with. However from the average Windows XP user's point of view, why would they switch to Firefox when Microsoft just made IE more secure for them and blocked annoying popups for them? It's definitely going to be harder to market those Mozilla features now that they doen't represent the edge over IE (XP SP2) anymore.
2004? 1996 calling... (Score:3, Insightful)
Deja Vu... (Score:5, Insightful)
This sounds a lot like late 90's,
I am using firefox to type up this comment, and yes it is a great browser, but it's not going to change the way the world does business.
Nearly every business application that has been developed for the last 10 years does business on the web.
I hereby petition for a change to this article text so that it reads 'do business in a tab'. Now that's innovation!
Too much visibility, too early (Score:0, Insightful)
Hmmm log in as admin and run firefox... nah, I don't wanna surf as admin. Download as regular user and install as admin? Ok... but wait, that means that the automagical update is only useful if you are willing to surf with admin permissions! So there is a feature in Firefox that assumes that you are going to connect to some site using admin permissions. No you don't have to use it, but they are promoting that behaviour. I don't like it.
How to fix it? When a regular user downloads a patch/update it should ask for root/admin pass before trying to install. But it simply fails.
This is just an example that illustrates really dumb things about firefox now. I whish it would become more mature before becoming mainstream.
Memory leaks. (Score:4, Insightful)
They could start with W3C validation (Score:5, Insightful)
I noticed that today: Firefox page and "spread firefox" page are both invalid html code. Is it just be or they are supposed to be the ones caring about standards?
great browser, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
But I have my doubts whether it's a good applications development platform as it is. Out of the box, you get, what, XUL and JavaScript? I'm sorry, but that doesn't strike me as a good platform for application development. In particular, JavaScript is just far too flaky to develop anything significant or complicated in it, and a lot of libraries just don't exist for JavaScript at all. And, like it or not, even if you put part of the application on the server, things still get complicated if you want a high quality GUI.
Maybe if Firefox shipped with a small, efficient JVM or CLR runtime and JIT that tie into the DOM, XUL, HTML, SVG, and event handlers (but without most of the bloated class libraries that Sun or Microsoft want to force on you), it could become a full platform. It would be even better if it included a small IDE out of the box.
As it is, I think it will remain limited to simple web apps created by rather dedicated Firefox hackers (and thank you for it, it is a great browser).
Re:What about security? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why are they doing this? Simple really. Find the holes now and lock firefox down pretty good. Better that the holes are found and fixed ASAP than found but not fixed at all... say.. like internet explorer. they're simply trying to make it more secure and this is a pretty good way of doing it.
Look at it this way, if you develop software you look at the same code all the time and once you see it so many times you don't potentially see the security holes that you might otherwise see because you've looked at it so much that you kind of become numb to the fact that something could be wrong there. by having new eyes looking at the code you are having new eyes put on that older code and they're finding the problems, $500 is just an incentive to get people to look at the code.
The developers will make out fine (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone using Mozilla code as a basis for a product will pay out to people with a commit history.
A few really good Apps could make the difference.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Does anyone know if someone is writing a webmail client in XUL? If not, someone really needs to (I've even started looking at trying to do it myself, and I'm no coder). Compared to current webmail interfaces a XUL interface would be almost indistinguishable from a local mail client. All you need to do is have browser detection send users to the old style webmail client if they aren't using a browser that supports XUL.
Now, imagine if GMail started doing that... IE users of GMail get the standard webmail interface, but Firefox users get a full fast XUL interface. Have a look at that demo site [faser.net] again, and do some clicking around
Jedidiah.
Re:Security of Online Apps a Hurdle? (Score:4, Insightful)
As someone who has a reasonable understanding of "modern security measures", I don't do any online financial stuff.
I do have a reasonable trust in the security of the data in transit. What I don't trust (yet) is the security of the transaction information once it's stored on someone else's server.
I've lost count of how many times there have been news reports of credit card info (among other things) "leaking" off some supposedly secure system. Or of some worm taking out a bank's system, or some other breach of data storage.
Nope, I'll keep moving my money around the old fasioned way for a while longer.
Cute (Score:5, Insightful)
Reminds me of a teacher at college. Well, not exactly a teacher, mind you. Teachers teach stuff, this guy just stood in front of the class and told us all to go learn ASP.NET from w3schools.com. If the guy was even at college to start with. But I digress. I recently argued with him as to why the hell we were learning ASP.NET while the course read "advanced programming". The moron gave me the following reasons why ASP.NET was to be the "entlösung" to all problems, including war, famine and dropbears*:
That's pretty much when I stopped listening and just started to stare in sheer amazement. The guy seems to be a bit right after all though, considering the possibilities that are now available for XUL regarding web-based applications. But hey, let's be fair; .NET isn't all that bad but riding the .NET car with ASP.NET is like driving a Ferrari with wooden wheels. C# would have been nice enough, instead. But this whole "everything will be web-based" idea was utterly shit and I KNEW there was a better solution than ASP.NET to web-based solutions. Then I saw a site with XUL elements plastered all over it and I was impressed. No more silly tricks with HTML forms and parsing it all through CGI scripts. It seemed like a clean enough solution for lots of things. Think of a small company; Items need to be tracked, clients need to be contacted and managed, rosters needs to be kept up to date and plenty more. Now all that can be done by HTTP with a standard webserver and a Mozilla platform.
The compant where I worked as intern could have used that. Instead they adopted a win2k3 server with office 2k-something premium, using it as a terminal server to log in to single Access database using remote desktop, which would function as a POS system with the aid of heavy VBA scripting. Not exactly an elegant solution, though it sure is a creative way to make an Access database centralized. Now imagine the same trick with a cheapo webserver running Apache 1.3.something, serving XUL documents that read/write data from an MySQL database... ( It WAS a rather small shop, after all... )
Mozilla?-Luddites on parade. (Score:4, Insightful)
What do you mean "tried once"? It's still there, and has been used. Just because every new use doesn't come with a press release, doesn't mean people aren't using it.
As far as why? Rich-clients [slashdot.org] are the future, even if all the luddites rally against them.
"Must everything become an operating system? How about quitting trying to become a brand and just make a simple quality browser?"
Must every bit of FOSS have a scripting capability? I'm browsing with Mozilla now. I'd say it reached "quality" when the majority of the "were's my browser?" posts dropped severely about two years ago. And YES brand is important. Quick! What is LINUX? Quick! What is Apache? Much better than "a browser" or "an operating system".
Re:let it be just a browser (Score:1, Insightful)
BZZT, you are already digital (Score:4, Insightful)
Now let me guess you will tell me you keep it all under your mattress and don't deal with banks at all.
Re:Security of Online Apps a Hurdle? (Score:5, Insightful)
Most companies now use at least one IE (sadly, almost all are heavily locked into ActiveX atm) based app.
I'd guess that most of new big backoffice apps are being developed for the web now. The benefits are so big.
Firefox is what we should be focusing our attention on. Not Linux. Linux is at this stage a pipe dream on the desktop, at least for now. All Firefox needs to get is killer installs in the office, which I don't see too hard especially with the status of IE patching, and those tricky ActiveX issues can be got round with the use of an icon that opens IE only for that certain site and for the rest of the things, Firefox is the default.
But, I've thought this for a long time that Linux is harping up the wrong tree. Look how quickly FF has got hold - this is the sort of real changes OSS can do. However, I'm not undermining Linux's achievements in the server room. I think that is where it will get hold next.
Anyway, this is what I think we as an OSS 'people' should evangelize:
1) Use of Linux in the server room. Mail servers, web servers. Anywhere that it works.
2) Use of XUL in Firefox/Mozilla. Get Safari to support it.
3) Get BigVendor (tm) cooperation. Show them how XUL is really a lot better than using ActiveX, especially as Microsoft is really not a great partner to work with.
4) Watch as the books, tutorials etc for XUL gathers up. Watch the small developer presence increase.
Basically what we want is XUL/PHP/mySQL (a very strong combination) is to become the new VB. Once we have this, it's going to be a cakewalk to get Linux on the desktop everywhere. Then the hardware support jumps up, and boom, desktop too.
apt metaphor (Score:3, Insightful)
A lot more applications should have moved to the web over the last decade. Microsoft prevented that because they were not ready for it yet, even though the industry was. Instead, we got nearly another decade of poorly written VB, Office, and Access applications.
The usual ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Java was supposed to be a new platform
Even Flash was supposed to be a new platform
Now Firefox is supposed to be a new platform
Did they kill MS? Nope.
XUL is cool, but so far I haven't seen MANY great applications done with it.
Re:What about security? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why is this news? Anyone remeber.... (Score:3, Insightful)
The download has DECREASED in size (Score:3, Insightful)
What can the platform do? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:BZZT, you are already digital (Score:4, Insightful)
What I intended, and apparently should have explicitly said, was that I don't (yet) trust the security of systems that are directly connected to the public internet. At least I don't trust them enough to bet my own money.
Re:no, the cat HASN'T got my tongue. (Score:5, Insightful)
ActiveX:
Microsoft OS (98/ME/2000/XP/2003) 250MB - 3GB
Internet Explorer No additional - included in above
Firefox:
Your choice of OS (so no additional needed - it works with whatever you're running)
Mozilla Firefox itself: 10-20MB (16MB for me, on XP Pro, with some extensions installed)
Plus...one's open source, so if it doesn't have functionality that should be added at the api layer (or any layer for that matter) you can easily do it yourself.
Security aside, XPI/Plugins would beat ActiveX in a logical comparision.
Re:What about security? (Score:4, Insightful)
I use Firefox, it gets better on each release.
I expect more bugs will be found, but I also expect they'll be fixed much, much quicker!
FF front end on Mozilla platform (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyway, Firefox is more user-friendly than MSIE, without becoming a lecturing tedious drone(clippy). It's installation size (1.7.3) is roughly 9MB, compared to my MSIE at 14MB. It blocks most popups and allows me to configure/repeal this and other user-level-tweaks with intuitive ease.
The open source aspect DOES have a positive impact on it's development as well. As another poster accurately stated - the more eyes on the code, the more better. Microsoft can't compete in that way. I think they should continue extending the platform - do they do firewalls as and end-product? (ok, I'll go find out later)
We're discussing a free product that most of us feel is superior to the market leader. That itself is reason to celebrate. Way to go F^2!
Re:let it be just a browser (Score:1, Insightful)
Leave Firefox the fuck alone; I say keep anything that's not related to *web browsing*, and that alone AWAY from Firefox. The entire purpose of its inception, afterall, was to make a standalone browser. Keep it that way.
That's what makes firefox cool, and useful. It's relatively small, dosen't take up gobs of RAM with stuff you're not using, or even have no intention of ever using, and aside from that it works and acts (and can even look) JUST like Mozilla. What's hard to grasp about this?
Let whatever Mozilla branch handle your calendars and PIM crap, or $random gewgaw of the week, and eventually grow to be a meta-OS (ala emacs)--if the developers chose to take it that way. Firefox doesn't deserve to be expected to fill every niche that some random jackass dreams up... Unless, of course, they develop an extension to do it, and don't bother the rest of us.
Re:A few really good Apps could make the differenc (Score:5, Insightful)
I realize that part of the problem with Javascript has been different browsers with slightly different interpretations of DHTML and DOM stuff, and that has given Javascript a worse rap than it deserves.
But that rap isn't completely undeserved. And trying to convince programmers that they should be building the key functional blocks of their applications in Javascript just isn't going to fly any time soon. At least call it something else. Like "XULscript", fix the marketing problem that Javascript has.
Re:catch-up has slowed down in my opinion (Score:3, Insightful)
"Going forward" is corp-rat speak. People who speak English prefer the phrases "in the future" or "from now on". The first of those two has become quite unfashionable; I'm not sure why.
You may begin your speculation here. (Or not; lord knows I've missed the moderation and conversation window already.)
I'll start. The word "future" was tarred by association with a set of know-nothings who oversold their products. Unfortunately, "going forward" has now been tarred by association with a different set of etc etc etc
Re:apt metaphor (Score:4, Insightful)
I suggest you go back and review your history. The people who founded Netscape were as much hardasses as Gates and everyone else at Microsoft. These are the people who claimed they had "invented" the Internet (even before Gore) and took all the glory away from Berners-Lee and his team. It's just that they were not as good at the game as Microsoft were. They released a buggy unstable 3-4.x product that couldn't possibly compete with IE4 and then when they got reamed (Navigator was free, just like IE, remember?) they went to court to claim that Netscape engineers were not "weenies".
poorly written VB, Office, and Access applications
Yes, because I'm sure that the same people who wrote those applications would have done wonders with C, Python and Perl. After all, we all know it's the language, not the developer.
Re:A few really good Apps could make the differenc (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure. I don't think web applications are ever going to take over as many people claim. I don't expect to see web based word processors of any note, nor web versions of any terribly complicated program - but XUL for webmail, for apps like the demo, for online tax calculation apps, for simple bespoke database frontend apps at companies etc. there is plenty of room (and value) in a fully cross platform web application. The utility of having the whole thing be cross platform and remote can be sufficient to justify any extra coding complexity if we're talking about relatively simple applications here.
Jedidiah.
this was thought of long ago (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:great browser, but... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Good Show, Mozilla! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Security of Online Apps a Hurdle? (Score:4, Insightful)
I disagree. We should focus on whatever tool is right for the job. That may end up being Firefox, or that may not. Focussing on the tool first is ass-backward.
Re:bloat is a non problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Because of bloat my Pentium II 366 Celeron laptop running a tweaked Slackware 8.0 (!) install seems to run faster that the Pentium IV Dell with Windows XP I have to use at work. The perceived speed (what the user sees as speed) difference between the two is nil. That is the downside of excessive bloat.
Axiomatic: Bloat attracts bloat! My bet is that after 30 days of running MS XP on the net your son's new emachine will have the perceived speed of a Commodore 64.
Have fun and be happy!
Re:The usual ... (Score:1, Insightful)
Netscape fucked it up and Microsoft beat them down with a superior product.
Java was supposed to be a new platform
Java was way too slow at first, and only started to get really good after the initial hype had died down, which slowed its adoption. Now, years later, Microsoft is introducing a roughly equal product, all things considered. We'll see. (keeping in mind that IE really, really sucked at first.)
Did they kill MS? Nope.
Is that the goal? I don't think so... I think most of the developers of this stuff are happy to let Microsoft survive, they just want to take a big slice of their pie.
In general, it's better to take a position that benefits you rather than one that hurts someone else.
Re:bloat is a non problem (Score:2, Insightful)
Firefox works far better than IE in most cases. If banks want to ignore standards and test only under IE, that's not Firefox's problem.
Uh oh, "Platform" again (Score:4, Insightful)
Browsers, as a "platform", suck.
You really don't want browsers downloading and executing code. It's just too insecure. That way lies the hell of Active-X. The great thing about HTML is that it's basically descriptive, not executable. Downloading code in some interpretive language is only slightly less insecure, and much slower. (Or, when there's a page with a dumb ad on screen, CPU usage goes to 100%)
Asking the user for permission to run code doesn't work. Not only will users answer "yes" for hostile code, they'll implicitly agree to EULAs your business's lawyers would never agree to.
Most free "plugins" are in some sense hostile code. They phone home. They look around the host machine. They burn CPU time when not doing anything for the user. Even the "good ones", like Google's toolbar, overreach. Others are much worse.
What we really need are good extensions to HTML for forms. Better validation and help are all things that can be done descriptively, rather than by running executable code on the user's machine. HTML forms are lame; they can't even set up a field that must, say, have five numeric digits and must be filled in. You could do that on IBM green-screen terminals thirty years ago.
Re:Worries me.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Expand it.
Re:no, the cat HASN'T got my tongue. (Score:2, Insightful)
To be honest, the more I use Firefox, the more I dislike it. It really isn't that great. It has the potential to be great, but we need to get past all this "add more features" and fix security programs. The browser is the most dangerous program you use (it goes out and ASKS for malicious input); let's fix that.
(As an aside, Konqueror is looking good, but I'm sure I'll get the 10 exploits I need for the class.)
Loads faster then IE? (Score:3, Insightful)
I keep reading comments like this from time to time. I like FireFox and I find that it is pretty fast once it is loaded, but on every box I have tried it typically takes 8 to 10 seconds to load the first time I use it. IE always loads in under 2 seconds, usually less than 1 second. Is there some trick I am unaware of? Does anyone know why folks keep claiming that it loads faster than IE?
Re:Memory leaks. (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xpcom/MemoryToo
http://www.mozilla.org/performance/leak-bro
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?i
Or e-mail David Baron and say "I'd like to help find memory leaks in Firefox. How can I help?".
If you're not interested in helping, and you're just trying to get people already volunteering to shift their priorities, that's ok too.
Re:Security of Online Apps a Hurdle? (Score:2, Insightful)
Really, how many of you would willingly use X11 if it was not free?
Not fair. If X11 was not free, it would have the possibility of being a better/different product. It is open source, and therefore it discloses all kinds of information to the general public, including video hardware details. If X11 was not-free they could enter into all kinds of NDAs with hardware vendors, and provide both better support for video cards and a more rapid development cycle.Re:BZZT, you are already digital (Score:3, Insightful)
Walking cross the street involves risk. I try to not spend all day playing in the street.
The same for my finances. I do use banking services now and then, but most of the time it's cash and carry. The fewer debit registers I use, the fewer of them that have my information. If one is compromised (Open Wireless registers at Home Depot for example) the fewer chances my data will be compromised.
It's about reducing risk, not elimination of risk for the truly paranoid.
In most places you can't rent a car or hotel room without a credit card. For most everyting else, cash works.
Re:IE7 (Score:3, Insightful)
By doing so, they get the added benefit[sic] of pre-empting future DOJ inquiries because it's a "different" product entirely.
Re:great browser, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless one of your criteria for a nice language for big and complex projects is static type checking (or static anything checking, I guess), you might be surprised how far JavaScript has come along. It actually has a coherent OO model (though it's different than the class/instance model used by most mainstream languages these days), it's got closures, exception handling... many programmers have written complex things in languages that gave them much less.
AcitveX XUL? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:great browser, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Just curious if you've actually tried XUL + JavaScript. I've done some Swing work, a ton of C#/Winforms work, and about a month and counting of XUL/JS work, and so far the XUL/JS experience has actually been pretty good. You might be surprised how much you can get done in the XUL without dropping into JS at all; in Winforms and (especially) Swing, the general purpose programming language (C# or Java) is responsible for declaring the UI, which most Swing developers will tell you is just incredibly painful. (Winforms isn't as bad because of RAD tools, otherwise it would be.)
So for many applications, the amount of JavaScript you have to write is pretty small compared to the amount of C#/Java. And anyway, JavaScript isn't a half bad language anymore; C# and Java could learn a couple of tricks from it (closures in particular are invaluable for GUI programming, and neither C# nor Java have them yet).
Re:Loads faster then IE? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Security of Online Apps a Hurdle? (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, in that case, what we need is an IDE as good as Microsofts Visual Studio. And no, I don't want at emacs/VI war here
Has Microsoft ever faced this kind of competition? (Score:4, Insightful)
A free software and open source web browser with an audience (increasing numbers of people getting the browser, the press talking about it, and lots of third-party add-ons)? I don't think Microsoft has ever faced that kind of web browser before.
Re:no, the cat HASN'T got my tongue. (Score:2, Insightful)
To be honest, the more I use Firefox, the more I dislike it. It really isn't that great.
And instead of actually telling what's wrong with it or maybe a reason for disliking it. You whine about security problems that were discovered less than a week ago?? Christ man give us some time to fix it. I don't see you slamming any code out to fix the problem. It's always easier to be a critic. And anybody who uses xanga is a fuckin idiot by association alone.
Re:no, the cat HASN'T got my tongue. (Score:2, Insightful)
That doesn't really pose a real problem for using Mozilla as a development platform. The HTML parsing engine is a tiny part of the platform. Besides, crashes are simple to fix. Please remove your tinfoil hat now.
To be honest
You mean you were lying before?
the more I use Firefox, the more I dislike it. It really isn't that great
That's lovely, thanks for your opinon. Do you have any expanded points or references to back that up, or are we to take your opinion as the gospel truth?
Where is the -1 fuckwit mod option?
There is a difference (Score:3, Insightful)
1. First and foremost, GCC's bytecode isn't Sun's or MS's proprietary stuff.
2. It _is_ more efficient. Java on the desktop is still by and large a fscking disaster. It uses more RAM, its GC doesn't play nice with the swapping, and it _still_ runs at about half the speed of native C++ code in real apps. (As opposed to Sun's cleverly crafted micro-benchmarketting.)
(Virtualizing everything and emulating fictional machines instead of dealing with the _real_ machine, is every Computer Scientist's wet dream. When you live in a theoretical world, it's easy to forget about the concerns of the _real_ world. Such as performance. Or memory footprint. Or the fact that computers have finite memory and a swap file, so an idiotic GC will cause thrashing when the machine is overloaded.)
3. A Swing app tends to look-and-feel nothing like a native app.
(And it's not just about the "look", but about users being able to just use their existing skills on a new app. E.g., not having to learn yet another file chooser dialog. What's wrong with the existing Windows one? Coding yet another set of personalized widgets is every geek's wet dream, which is why every idiot just has to do that. Using yet another new widget set is, however, something every non-geek would rather avoid if he/she had half a choice.)
Now the last two points _are_ slowly getting better. JIT compiling has come a long way, for example. We're no longer in the days of Java 1.0 running 20 times slower than even the worst written C++ program. And IBM's SWT sure is what Swing and AWT _could_ have been, if Sun's engineers didn't have their heads firmly up their arse.
Still, you know... can't help wondering why we keep waiting for Sun's proprietary thing to eventually get fixed, instead of using the open alternative that already exists and which already works better. Are we _that_ addicted to Sun's marketting and lies, or?
Please don't go there Firefox (Score:3, Insightful)
It is precisely because Firefox lacks those "features" that I use it.
How does it compare to other platforms? (Score:2, Insightful)
Take Java, for example. You can write a Java Web Start [javaworld.com] application that launches like a locally-installed application. It's got a reasonable set of GUI components. It runs on most of the platforms I care, it has probably got a bigger installation base than Firefox is.
And then there's a difference in productivity. Java is way more productive than Firefox as a platform. Go to a book store, you see a whole bunch of books on Java. There are countless FAQs, articles, mailing list archives, communities, and local user groups that covers every aspect of Java. A whole range of IDEs and debuggers to make you even more productive. Hundreds of commercial/free libraries you can use.
All of these things help you get the job done quickly.
So what does the Firefox platform bring to the table? Why a developer like me should be intereste in it?