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.'"
Google? (Score:4, Interesting)
Can you say google?
Security of Online Apps a Hurdle? (Score:5, Interesting)
Online applications clearly have many benefits, especially with the recent surge in broadband, but adoption and support has been slow in coming. Why is this?
Well, I think many companies are hesitant to move to online platforms, though, because they feel that it's a security risk. Putting sensitive data on a closed intranet seems safer in many ways, especially to those unfamiliar with encrpytion and other modern security measures.
November 9 lauch day (Score:5, Interesting)
Firefox as a platform... (Score:4, Interesting)
No this would not be a beowulf cluster.
The maximum amount of processing power available to any one process would be limited to the fastest machine in the group, but it could be useful for anyone who can give thier computer difficult tasks faster than the computer can complete those tasks.
Every new task would be automatically given to whichever node has the lightest load.
sshh (Score:5, Interesting)
"The tactic drove Redmond into a rage. The day after Andreessen's quote appeared in the press, John Doerr, the prominent venture capitalist and Netscape board member, received a chilling email from Jon Lazarus, one of Gates' key advisers. In its entirety, it read: "Boy waves large red flag in front of herd of charging bulls and is then surprised to wake up gored."
from Wired [wired.com]
Re:let it be just a browser (Score:4, Interesting)
Because in the corporate environment, system administrators are completely fed up of the constant battle with spyware, adware, trojans, email spam, viruses and popups that users inadvertently download while using web based applications (E-mail, web browsing). Since at least one of these applications is web-based, having a secure browser is manna from heaven. And as the other applications (calendar/diary, group conferencing/whiteboard, voicemail) need network access anyway, there is no reason why these shouldn't be accessed through the same browser. If all of this is possible, then it eliminates the need for all the applications to be stored/run on a PC, thereby eliminating the need to buy licenses for the "professional" release of a certain OS whose vendor maintained a web browser is a basic part of the OS.
Believe it when I see donations (Score:3, Interesting)
But - until I see some significant donations to The Mozilla Foundations, including some substantial in lieu payments from corps that are using Mozilla or Mozilla technology, I will have serious doubts that Mozilla will last in the long run. Serious cash is needed to fund a serious development effort.
sPh
Huh? Who isn't online yet? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Mozilla? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What about security? (Score:5, Interesting)
Most/all large customers have internal-only applications that have been client-server or n-tier with a custom front end. These apps tend to be brutal to deploy, particularly the front-end, as they are prone to DLL hell and various interdependency issues with other applications (it'd be nice if a customer's IT was mandated to only ever use version X of app Y to develop all apps, but that never is the case). In many cases, customers have resorted to deployment "hacks" such as deploying these front-ends to a small number of servers, then using e.g. Citrix terminal services to expose them to their users.
Enter Firefox and other Mozilla browsers. Now it's practical to build your front-end GUI using XUL and related stuff, and have it talk to the backend over sockets, XML-RPC, SOAP, etc. The only thing that gets deployed to the end user is the Firefox/Mozilla/etc. browser (plus possibly a few addons, typically JavaScript), which is self contained and very easy to deploy.
This is a potentially huge market, which is why MS is keen to grab it with Avalon. Unfortunately for MS, Mozilla is here now and Avalon is over a year away; Mozilla is easy to deploy, and Avalon will presumably be bundled with Longhorn and all the installation/testing issues that go with it.
Finally, I suspect that it will be relatively easy to develop an XUL-based app solution and later retrofit it to Avalon using XSLT and not a huge amount of extra effort - an investment in Mozilla app development now *won't* be lost if a later decision is made to jump to Avalon.
Not firefox. Try google (Score:2, Interesting)
Google on the otherhand seems to not only integrate with the web but also the desktop. They are developing api's and may even challenge the database market soon.
Html on the desktop freaked out microsoft because it was something they did not control. Besides some XML its mostly html formatted documents. Big deal.
Google will began to act as an interface to data locally as well as on the corporate lan and internet and will open a huge wave of innovative software using google's api's and protocals.
Its still in its infancy but if I were Bill Gates my eyes would be aimed at google for the time being.
Re:November 9 lauch day (Score:1, Interesting)
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=www.blakeross
What a wonderful training environment Netscape must have been. Who won that war again?
Re:Memory leaks. (Score:1, Interesting)
IE7 (Score:5, Interesting)
Because IE7 was the biggest threat to microsoft. They nearly built open standards which would have let their users to everything as webapps. The only problem is they didnt have any lock-in.
Thats why IE7 team was stomped into the ground and we havent seen or heard a major release since Win2000.
Someone dig up some of those random facts i once had on this subject please? IE7 was a strong active dev team doing neat stuff. Then they were axed.
Re:great browser, but... (Score:1, Interesting)
Out of the box you get, standards compliant HTML rendering, Client side scripting, Secure connections via https and access to every service that Mozilla provides from socket management to XSLT transformations. There are things that are missing, but you can fill in the gap by writing your own XPCOM component.
There is (was?) a project, blackwood I believe, which tried to integrate Java and Mozilla by making Java classes callable as XPCOM components. If that works well, there will be no stopping Mozilla and Java as a platform.
The beauty of Mozilla is that except for the core and a few necessary libraries, it can be as much or as little as you want it to be. You can create a complete, rich, client side, skinnable via css, localizable application or you can write a small extension that just takes advantage of some RAD UI stuff, it's your call. You aren't limited by the types of apps you can create by the interfaces because Mozilla also ships with SOAP and XML-RPC libraries. In fact I'm using an updated XML-RPC client in Firefox for my latest project that calls Nariva; a Java XML-RPC service that exposes Apache Lucene functionality.
It's the potential that has them scared.
Re:Worries me.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Firefox is not a 20 meg download, it is a 6 meg download, which is lean enough for my tastes. And for all intents and purposes, it already is the platform they want it to be, with the browser merely yet another app running on top of the platform, written in javascript, xul and css. So it is not going to bloat. In fact, it has been steadily shrinking/speeding up, and will continue to do so.
On a wider level though, the paradigm shift is inevitable. Historically the market has always demanded richer web apps in waves, and the browser maker which responded best won out marketsharewise. Now we see again the market complaining browsers are too dumb, asking for the ability to deliver desktop-quality apps to the browser. To not become a broader platform at this point is suicide marketsharewise. Even microsoft, who has tried desperately to avoid having the browser become a generic app design platform because it would make the OS less relevant, recognizes this and is launching their XAML initiative partly to focus attention away from the platforms that already exist, and partly to have something in the fray they can push at those wanting richer web apps.
Re:A few really good Apps could make the differenc (Score:2, Interesting)
One thiing that needs pointing out.... (Score:3, Interesting)
But the mere fact that Firefox has "zones" is a pretty solid indicator that at some future point in time, the Mozilla team intends to make use of "zones" in the base products.
If you wish to enable the zones, all you need is this plugin. The plugin does not provide this zones itself, all it does is provide an interface for the builtin zone capabilities that Firefox and Mozilla have.
Re:Mozilla Amazon Browser (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What about security? (Score:5, Interesting)
To say FF is more buggy and less secure than IE because of the number of bugs found is higher is as stupid as it is inaccurate.
I spent 4 HOURS at my inlaws house on Saturday removing OVER 800 different bugs and viruses (750 removed by Ad-Aware, 50+ had to be removed by hand) from their XP machine. I would never have believed it if I didn't see it.
This is an old man and an old woman. ALL they do on that computer is suck in pictures from their camera, read email, and occaisionally surf the web. They never download and install programs.
Firefox is infinitely more secure than IE in real world usage. The vast majority of bugs are only minor issues and do not lead to the entire computer being owned.
Compare that to IE, where the vast majority of bugs ARE doozies and DO lead the machine being compromised. Tying IE so deeply into the OS was the stupidest thing MS could have done. I'd like to send them a bill for my 4 hours, just to see if I get a response.
Re:great browser, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
In particular, JavaScript is just far too flaky to develop anything significant or complicated in it
Flaky? Have you ever actually written anything non-trivial in it? It's actually quite a nice language if you are developing a client application rather than worried about cross-browser issues on the web.
Can you elaborate on your "flaky" accusation?
Re:Not firefox. Try google (Score:1, Interesting)
The old saying, that power corrupts, and that absolute power corrupts absolutely, I think is self-evident.
Google is not a democracy. They are a really cool company at the moment, and they have built their success on providing a useful service. And right now, someone could still displace them if they start to suck just as they displaced those who came before. But they will be a lot harder to replace when they have become the os, the filesystem, the database, and everything else.
Google is not free software. It is a company that provides a service, and the terms of that service are subject to change at any time. In fact, i think there are already a lot of restrictions on what you can do with their apis. They use a lot of free software, they give a lot back to the community (i think), but if you use their apis, and you get tired of the way they're running things, it's not like you can just fork the way you can with free software.
To bring this back on-topic a little, how can we provide something like google that nobody owns in the sense that nobody owns free software (i know that the author still retains copyright, that it's built on copyright, but you are free to fork)? Is the browser as a platform a step in the right direction? Maybe a free google replacement can be built on top of something like firefox.
Re:Platform != OS (Score:1, Interesting)
They have their own threading model, network stacks, gui components, etc. Sun admitted they hoped to make Java into a full fledged operating system with just a kernel underneath it.
Google is aiming for the filesystem and some user space on top of that. I imagine in a few years we will have our own gui, filesystem access, and database from the google system. Longhorn of course will be Microsoft's answer to it.
Mozilla is just part of it and is another layer.
Re:Security of Online Apps a Hurdle? (Score:2, Interesting)
I've recently started in on a XUL app (though not PHP and MySql -- JSP, LDAP and PostgreSql since we had that architecture). I think if the XUL interface designer gets some more polish and support for IDE functionality, this platform could be huge. Firefox is just getting started, but as it becomes popular this could be the next popular wave of free software usage.
Where I think you're wrong, though, is the amount of ActiveX/DNA apps companies are still locked into. They're shrinking rapidly. We've seen a large number of them get converted into webservices. At least in Banking, the software vendors seem to have realized we mostly all have our own internal apps anyway, and we don't want to admin yet another client install. I'd wager that's the same thing happening in other industries, albeit a bit slower. Banking is often among the first to implement new tech.
The main point is that admins are less likely to buy and implement anything that's not web-based since it means more work for them, so many apps are being rewritten. So far, that hasn't meant increased ActiveX usage, since banks are pretty hard-core about security and like to keep it turned off.
There's only one app that I can think of where there's not much of an alternative: ACT. I hate that program, but the sales people are addicted to it.
Totally out of curiosity (Score:1, Interesting)
Does Microsoft have a bugzilla type of thing where you can report memory leaks in IE, Office, etc?
Re:no, the cat HASN'T got my tongue. (Score:4, Interesting)
Speaking of which....would be nice to see a Firefox extension which can embed
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not firefox. Try google (Score:2, Interesting)
If you dont like google dont use it. Or better yet write your own alternative in teh spirit of free software.
Google makes their money from ads and from businesses. So far its free as in beer and the api's are not proprietary with restrictions the last time I looked.
Re:They could start with W3C validation (Score:1, Interesting)
SlashHack (Score:4, Interesting)
SlashHack is a cool example of an app written on top of the Mozilla platform.
The article is correct Firefox (really Moz as others pointed out) is a fantastic development platform.
The technology is especially cool for me: I wrote a system in 2000 for a client that positions Java Swing widgets using XML, in order that the app could support pluggable skins. I view XUL as the ultimate application of that architecture. A fantastic decoupling of logic and presentation.
Re:A few really good Apps could make the differenc (Score:4, Interesting)
We've got to get this stuff out there and widely used before Microsoft does. The very future of computing is probably at stake.
Re:Security of Online Apps a Hurdle? (Score:5, Interesting)
Other than the security issues, and that it only runs on Windows and within IE, I understand it's generally a pain to work with and debug. But it does allow you to run programs on the client and use normal Windows widgets in your design. Painfulness is measured differently by me than somebody who programs for Windows. I imagine they would disagree.
Somebody will correct me if I'm wrong on the ActiveX details here, I'm sure.
XUL is meant for addressing the same problem -- bad interfaces on the web, but it takes a drastically different approach. The dialogs are described by lightweight XML files that are pretty painless to develop. The client programming is done in Javascript, which is not as bad as it sounds. The main problem Javascript faces is cross-browser support, which is negated by only using gecko. There's also a decent Javascript console which make it a lot easier to fix script errors in Mozilla than in IE.
The main advantage is everything is still done on the server, only a little user interface junk is left to the client to handle in Javascript, which is arguably where it belongs. You'd do the same in a normal webapp, write html and use Javascript to manipulate objects for a better user experience.
Also, I've seen far too many ActiveX programs that do database access from the client, for example. Typically, there's no security or verification of who's doing what at that level, a difficult thing to get right in any client. Often times you can take the ActiveX object and use it's own objects to access the database and change whatever you like. XUL leaves all of that up to the server which makes it easier to manage and more difficult for bad programmers to leave gaping security holes.
Anyway, there's no 'trusted' environment. All companies should prevent internal users from abusing the system.
SlashHack-Oeone XUL. (Score:1, Interesting)
Same Threat - Different Date (Score:4, Interesting)
This was the Netscape threat of 5 years ago. That Java enabled apps running under Netscape would destroy Microsoft/Windows because any platform that that could support Netscape would run everything else as well.
Didn't happen then. Don't hold your breath yet now.
works for us (Score:5, Interesting)
XUL is here, and it works. Having all of the advantages of web-based deployment, while being able to use proper user interface elements is a godsend.
Not unti l XUL is beyond just mozilla (Score:5, Interesting)
I want to have the freedom that web based apps give me and my customers not remove that freedom. Tieing myself to one browser engine does remove that freedom. Right now if I do regular html, css etcthe stuff works pretty much everywhere under almost any kind of device. With XUL I would lose that freedom and it is important.
Re:no, the cat HASN'T got my tongue. (Score:2, Interesting)
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)
This is true under the assumption that you compile your plugins and extensions for each and every OS separately (unless it's a pure XUL). Not every developer has the ability to support all the available platforms (the company where are work - don't). Of course even then it's a huge plus for Firefox 'cause there is no XP ActiveX.
Re:Uh oh, "Platform" again (Score:3, Interesting)
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%)
One alternative is to go with VMs and enforce security that way. For example, it's possible to run a .NET application with restricted permissions that say it can't read/write files and the registry, but it can only display UI. I'm sure something similar is possible with Java. You might wonder how security like this could possibly work, but you simply prevent applications from using System.IO.*, for example, and since .NET code is verified so that buffer overflows and "unsafe" code is impossible, it becomes highly unlikely that .NET code will be able to break out of the security boundaries it runs in.
Sure, you might get security holes that might allow a program to call System.IO.* stuff after all, but that can be patched, unlike ActiveX, which as a whole is simply a flawed concept.
I'm guessing in the future we'll be executing code from the web once more on our machines, but this time within the confines of a VM. Now that I think about it, why hasn't Java taken off more on web pages? The general slowness of applets loading is what bothered me before; is UI and applet performance still annoying? Or maybe it needs a XAML/XUL-like language?
Re:no, the cat HASN'T got my tongue. (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is that Mozilla was designed as a platform to develop a browser (unsurprisingly), not a platform to develop applications. I believe they were wrong in this decision as they could have finished the project sooner if the platform had been powerful enough to bootstrap itself. Unfortunately the rush to finish the browser lead to a mish-mash of api's which treat HTML, XUL, XML and now probably XHTML documents entirely differently. For example, some api's had a large number of unimplemented functions. Embedding HTML documents in XUL or visa-versa led to bizarre problems. Also the parsers did not have a round-trip mode in which DTD, entities, comments, CDATA etc. were preserved. Writing an XML editor was an exercise in frustration.
Application development in Mozilla/Firefox is possible. However, I believe that the current technologies seem to have been designed for excessive hand crafting - lots of exceptions and hard to comprehend mechanisms for overlaying functionality. Robert Ginda's excellent Javascript debugger was a labor of love and a triumph over adversity. It shouldn't be that hard.
Unless Mozilla.org has had a change of heart, MS has nothing to worry about.
Re:Loads faster then IE? (Score:3, Interesting)
Did you read my post? Did you read the article? I know that IE is faster and I fully understand why. And it makes sense that FF would be slower since it has to load everything the first time. But I have read many times by various Firefox advocates (including this article
Re:let it be just a browser (Score:3, Interesting)
A browser is one of those things that strictly follows the 80/20 rule - it's 80% of what we need to provide a decent application framework, and decent, centrally managed software.
Many, many MANY developers would LOVE to have the browser be that extra 10-20% that would make the difference between a "web-based widget" and a "widget".
One thing that a web client simply can't do well is populate a form with data based on a selection. Yes, javascript can be made to do it, but javascript is retarded as an application.
Java allows for alot of control, but has its own problems. If a PHP or Perl app could be emebedded into a browser, I'd have to change my pants.
A light, rich-UI interface that's portable across O/S boundaries, is stable, and reasonably secure?
Where do I sign? Alas, Java is a boondoggle, Active-X is riddled with vendor lock-in, and javascript is a horrible hack thought up by some drunk, off-duty engineer on toilet paper one day while reading the graphiti over the urinal at work.
It's lousy, and not advancing. XUL had my interest, until I learned that javascript was the back end for it.
Gimme some smarts, dammit! Why can't a java VM be modularized so that language modules (javascript, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, etc) can be ported to the VM and let us use our language(s) of choice?
Not until... (Score:3, Interesting)
The law has to realize that a (monopolist) operating system must not be allowed to bundle a file browser, a web browser, a multimedia player, a firewall, an instant messenger, and any other kind of software which someone else may want to sell. Otherwise that dominant position of that monopolist will be self-reinforcing.
We are spectators to the same phenomenon that happened on the earth, where a completely unregulated natural selection took place: humans have come to such a dominant position that other animals simply cannot compete with them anymore and have no way to invert the dominance. They are only free to adapt to niches that are of no interest to humans. (like MacOSX and Linux are doing)
There is a degree X of dominance that, when crossed by a species S, allows S to stay dominant, if no regulation happens. This has happened on the planet earth but must not happen in the market.
So we can only prevent monopolists to include products by default. Of course some users like to buy a product that does all those things out of the box, but 1. that desire is not necessarily to be fulfilled, because there may be more pressing matters, 2. the installation of products could be made embarassingly easy if you really want to. One click.
Modularity is the key.
Some maybe Most are getting confused... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been noticing more here than anywhere else that some are confusing Firefox with the Mozilla Suite(Someone even mentioned being a user of FireFox 1.7.3). Firefox is not bloated and will never be bloated. Extensions are optional and if you are like me, you would only be installing about 5 small features to the default installation. The option is there to bloat to your wishes though ;).
Now the potential as a platform isn't really going to be Firefox. It's starting with firefox, and will become popular because of firefox, but the platform is under development as the XUL Runtime Environment (XRE) [mozilla.org]. This is where the magic starts.
One will be able to develop executable applications seperate from Firefox that automatically run on Windows/Linux/Mac. Right now, noone wants to tie their developments to a browser although a few like to tinker with it on their own. When the XRE is released, people will then actively develop XUL/Javascript applications with an optional backend of their choice. You will be able to create .exe applications. You can make those one-click installations someone mentioned somewhere here. No need for the browser although the browser can be used if you want to. Bad news is the XRE isn't being actively developed as Firefox is. So, who knows when they'll release it. But when they do, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc will be complete XUL/Javascript Applications that run using the XRE and GRE. I don't know much about GRE, but that's most likely going to stay browser-specific, although I'm probably wrong.
I'm one of the people who has starting learning XUL and such, and although I have big plans for it. I do not plan on coding for a browser ;) XRE all the way!
Re:let it be just a browser (Score:3, Interesting)
Someone missed the point. The point isn't to build all these things into Firefox that everyone downloads.
The point is Firefox is an environment you can run these things on in XUL. Firefox already does this.
God knows how you managed to get marked as insightful.
a quick trip down OS theory lane (Score:4, Interesting)
That's why, for example, we used to let 20+ students at terminals at a mainframe or mini, in universities for example. They could run whatever programs they wanted on that machine, including their own code and including stuff they found on a hacker BBS. And in fact in all CS universities they're _supposed_ to program on those machines. Yet none of them came anywhere _near_ owning the machine.
The concept that a program once running on a machine automatically can retrieve or overwrite _all_ data, format the drive, or generally even blow an alien mothership up, is (A) Hollywood idiocy, and (B) never true except for the simplest single-user OS's like Win'95.
Or to put it otherwise: what do you tell Unix users? "Don't run as root except to install programs or other admin tasks. Especially don't go online as roo." Then they ask: why? "Because if someone takes control of the program via an exploit, they can't do as much harm if it doesn't run as root."
For all practical purposes, a modern OS is (or could be) just as virtualized as any Java sandbox. Programs no longer run directly on the bare metal, like in the days of DOS. (Which was barely a program loader.) They have to go through the OS to do _anything_. Including, but not limited to, reading or writing files, opening TCP/IP sockets, installing stuff.
Heck, even directly accessing RAM from other apps or directly poking machine ports can be blocked when running on a 386 or above (and _is_ blocked when you don't have kernel access).
Basically when running an app on a 32 bit CPU it can be as sandboxed as you want it to be.
E.g. don't want them accessing files? That's trivial. Just run them as a different user that can only access its temporary directory.
So ActiveX _could_ work, and it _could_ be extremely secure. Maybe not on Windows, and maybe not implemented by MS. I'll concede that point. But at least theoretically it can be at least as safe as Java, and without needing users to download 100 MB plugins that get wantonly changed by Sun.
Re:Has Microsoft ever faced this kind of competiti (Score:2, Interesting)
No, MS has never faced such a dynamic browser before, and by dynamic, I mean "...responds to user's wants". Compared to IE, Firefox does very a good job at closing up security holes in a timely manner and providing a platform where a user can select a rich variety of add-ons (like "Bug-me-not", "Dictionary Search", "Zoom", "Cookie Manager" etc..). Also, Firefox blocks the snot out of Pop-ups, and I am eternally gratetful to it's developers for that! Also, the tabbed browsing is a god-send, too. Really...ever since I've been using Firefox, my web-surfing experience has become significantly more enjoyable and, I'll say it again, I am forever grateful to it's developers.
Now, given Firefox's superiority, it would seem that things should easily go thier way and IE would soon be history, but...unfortunately, those guys in Redmond still have a desktop monopoly and a lot of money - and it all begins and ends with that fact. At one time, Netscape's Navigator was everything - THE browser - and Microsoft's IE was nowhere, and then it all changed: Microsoft rolled over Netscape in a few short years despite the fact that politicians, courts and many of the computing public cried "foul" at MS's tactics; nevertheless, MS won. See, as long as IE was packaged with Windows as the default browser and was "Good enough, it put Netscape in a losing position from which it could never recover.
Anyways, we shall see. In the meanime, I will continue to use Firefox.
Re:works for us (Score:3, Interesting)
well, not exactly our experience here. We have been trying to develop a system using XUL and JavaScript but we ran in multiple problems, that required almost always some kind of work around.
Don't get me wrong, I do think there's a LOT of potential in XUL. Specially, XBL has been wonderful to develop some data binded components that saved us a lot of time in the long run, and they were quite easy to develop.
However, theres a lack of maturity in some of it features that make them look as it they were an after thought, or just not really well designed. Templates have a lot of limitations, remote XUL just doesnt work right (or at least the docs that explain how to sign components are just too outdated), many errors result in segfaults (agree, the problem was in how we were using some components, but you shouldn't segfault in any case!!), theres no clear separation between components and services (I really don't understand why they don't share a common interface!), XBL lacks of obvious things (like a script tag, please). And honestly, javascript sucks to structure your code... we had to implement an include () directive to import other .js, there should be a way to do that in the language. And, there should be support for other datasources besides RDF.
And the worst part is that there are not many apps developed in XUL, so documentation (specially about XPCOM components) is really scarce. The reference is OK (most of the time), but you dont have a single example for most of the XPCOM components. A search in google usually returns C/IDL headers from the mozilla implementation or the reference at xulplanet [xulplanet.com] ;).
I really hope XUL development speeds up. Its really a good platform, and the separation between presentation/data/logic really shows up. But as it is, its darn difficult, and slow, to develop for it (at least till you know most of the work arounds).
By the way, has anyone developed both in Luxor [sourceforge.net] and mozilla XUL and have some insights in their pros and cons? (besides what the luxor page says, which of course I wont believe until I try it :P).
Re:There is a difference (Score:3, Interesting)
The Mono folk seem pretty sure they can implement the
"It _is_ more efficient."
Do you have any evidence of that? When working on an assessment several months back, I wrote a Java implementation of an algorythm whereas my mate wrote his in C. My implementation was at least as fast as his despite using lots of high-level concepts and never marking my methods as final, whereas my housemate used things like small structs and memcpy.
"A Swing app tends to look-and-feel nothing like a native app."
So? That has nothing to do with bytecode.
"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?"
Yes, we're so addicted to Java that virtually nobody in the open source world uses it for desktop applications. Look, do you have *any* evidence that GCC's IL would be useful in the general case, or are you just blowing hot air?
Re:a quick trip down OS theory lane (Score:3, Interesting)
Computer security only starts with a well designed OS. Every OS is vulnerable, at the very minimum, to a co-opted high level user.