Mozilla Foundation Meets The GNOME Foundation 380
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."
It'd be nice (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it odd indeed... (slightly OT) (Score:4, Insightful)
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:It'd be nice (Score:5, Insightful)
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, Insightful)
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:GNONE-ME (Score:5, Insightful)
What can you say... most of that isn't even coherent enough to be deemed english.
But KDE had exactly all these things 2 years ago already. There is a development difference of 4 years between both Desktop solutions.
And there's a development difference of 2-4 years in the other direction on other issues. What's surprising about one (very good) desktop system having different priorities than another (very good) desktop system?
Re:I find it odd indeed... (slightly OT) (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Be careful how close you get to Mozilla (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Is OSS going the Microsoft route? (Score:4, Insightful)
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...
Progress, but someone needs to lead (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Overlap in functionality != unproductive effort (Score:3, Insightful)
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 are people to invest the time and energy? Shouldn't that broaden the possibilities of a given piece of software, if each is trying to bring something new to the table?
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.
Re:Progress, but someone needs to lead (Score:1, Insightful)
You gotta be kidding, right? ActiveX was the most successful visual component integration model. In fact, JavaBeans tried to immitate its success in the VB component market world but they failed misrably.
In fact, ActiveX and OLE/2 are based on COM, and DCOM/COM+ are based on COM, and DotNET is based on COM+. All of these technologies were met with great success at their time.
If ActiveX wasn't successful, you wouldn't have ever ASP, and consequently JSP and PHP.
Re:Be careful how close you get to Mozilla (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate to feed the trolls but criminy...
The emphasis is in the original post and it's an utterly ridiculous claim. Trust me, these fantastic features are every bit as useful and functional for downloading and cataloging even low-key, family-friendly porn that has nothing to do with whips, chains, or farm animals in leather pants.
Besides which, your cheap attempt to inject a little extra hype carries a distinct tone of shrill hysteria, which detracts from any attempt at a more reasoned argument. Your attempt to use one narrow aspect of the whole broad, rich spectrum of glorious pornography is misleading enough that it probably has its own latin name.
I guess it also goes without saying that the uses for tabbed browsing are limited only by the imagination and intelligence of the person who browses.
Consequently, your options may be severely limited. Let me help you get started.
To sum up: tabbed browsing is your friend. Whether you are cruising www.hotasiansluts.com or www.jesus.com, tabbed browsing can make your internet experience faster, easier, and better.
The Dalai Llama
...tab for the children...
P.S. - I gather that your tirade against tabbed browsing is a recurring theme. Feel free to bookmark this post and refer to it as needed.
Oh christ. (Score:3, Insightful)
good idea that.... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Preliminary list of agreements (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:[O/T] Defending my post (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It'd be nice (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Maybe you're right. (Score:2, Insightful)
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 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.
Now if only we can get the KDE project involved... (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Is OSS going the Microsoft route? (Score:3, Insightful)
No one in their right minds would claim that tighter integration between the browser and desktop is bad, only that it can be done badly.
Re:It'd be nice (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Maybe you're right. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:What a beautiful strawman you've constructed! (Score:3, Insightful)
From you:
From the Magpie site [bengoodger.com]:
From me:
You can use Magpie to go to a page with nothing but sound clips from the movie "Clerks" [moviesoundscentral.com] and you can download all the quotes. No porn involved.
From you:
From me:
Mozilla is going to support anything that will improve and extend the functionality of their browsers. The more valuable and flexible a tool is, the more widely it will be used and the greater the number of uses to which it will be put.
Much like the word "tool."
The Dalai LLama
...tired of tilting at windmills...
Re:It'd be nice (Score:2, Insightful)
> from scratch rather than integrate Gecko.
Mozilla wasn't really ready for primetime yet when they started working on
Konqueror, and there was some doubt in some circles whether it ever would be.
If they were starting Konqueror from scratch now, they probably would embed
Gecko rather than creating KHTML, which would put Konqueror in the same
category as Galeon and Chimera. On the other hand, if Gnome and Gimp were
starting now they might've used Qt (or, indeed, might not have been started
at all, if KDE already existed), but at the time Qt wasn't Free enough to
suit certain people -- hence, GTK and Gnome. (It would be nice if a theme
selection/creation/application engine existed that themed both of them
together -- preferably it should theme both Gnome1 and Gnome2 applications
as well as KDE ones. And other kinds of integration, like supporting one
another's panel apps and whatnot, is good too.)
Personally, I'm glad we have both Gnome and KDE and that they're different,
because I like having more than one good choice. (Yeah, there are other
choices; some of them are even almost featureful...) A certain amount of
duplication of effort is good, because it creates choice. It is possible
to go too far, though, and if all the browsers you mention were complete
duplication of effort that would be bad. As it happens, though, there are
basically two OSS graphical browser layout engines (that matter): Gecko,
and KHTML. Almost all of the browsers use one or the other, so that cuts
down quite a bit on the duplication of effort. Yeah, there's duplication
in the front-end interface stuff (toolbars and whatnot), but at least they're
not reinventing the whole browser layout engine.
Re:It'd be nice (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:It's genius (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't get me started on taskbars and start menus, two things that don't belong ANYWHERE near a Linux desktop yet somehow got adopted as well "just because."
Better question (Score:4, Insightful)
gently flogging a dead horse with scented bootlace (Score:2, Insightful)
Major premise however, is the question: what's wrong with looking at porn? Honestly. How does looking at pictures of nude (or naked) women (or men) destroy the moral health of a country?
I'm not sure what ``moral health'' is, anyway. But even assuming the US ever had, I think after Wounded Knee, Vietnam, Nisei camps, etc., it's pretty much gone. How does a person looking at porn have a worse effect on a nation's moral character than would killing women and children?
As George Carlin put it: Of all the things you could do to a person, giving someone an orgasm is hardly the worst thing in the world. In the army they give you a medal for spraying napalm on people. Maybe I'm not supposed to understand it!
Re:Not a compelling strategy (Score:2, Insightful)
Embedding is hardly a growth market. There are at most a handful of apps that might embed Gecko on Linux, and Mozilla would get little or no funding or user-agent market share from them. The embedding apps would free-ride on the funding from AOL, and on recurring funding from strategic partners that the Mozilla Foundation has gained through application-based strategies since its founding.
Consider that PTC, maker of ProEngineer, has been embedding Gecko for years in ProE on Linux (on Windows, ProE uses Trident). Good for PTC, we support their embedding -- but it has not benefited Mozilla with either funding or measurable user-agent market share.
This may be heresy to open-source true believers, but maintaining and extending Gecko requires a minimum number of paid, full-time hackers, managers, and QA and release staff, in addition to the wide and deep volunteer community from which those staff were hired. Currently Sun, IBM, Red Hat, and the Mozilla Foundation, at least, employ such people. The need for paid staff comes from the complexity of the web: 5 billion public pages, millions of private intranet pages and web apps, lots of quirks and buggy content, de-facto standards, gaps in de-jure standards.
To fund an effort of this scale, you need a successful business strategy.
You propose a "killer embedded library" strategy, which would be a departure from what works. Let's look at three strategies already in use in Mozilla's area, Internet client software:
Mozilla already has "killer app" strategies in place funding the browser and, more recently, Thunderbird.
MS's "killer apps on OS monopoly" ping-pong strategy is well known. MS also has "killer tools for programmers" and "extensive developer support/documentation" efforts that undergird a "developer mindshare" strategy that builds on and perpetuates the OS monopoly, and that may yield killer apps (which MS then can acquire).
Macromedia made the right moves early with Flash, building great tools and gaining >90% distribution of the FlashPlayer plugin, and they're parlaying that into a "killer rich client app platform" strategy. Good for them, but Mozilla lacks that well-distributed a front end, and lacks the tools (and the need for tools -- the web was and probably will continue to be mostly built by hand).
The striking thing about these examples is the emphasis on end-user or developer applications that make real revenue. No one is just purveying anything like a web content engine library to be embedded in unknown applications, and getting any kind of return on investment. This is not surprising. There is no commerically viable "killer embedded library" business for web content engines, thanks to MS subsidizing Trident to zero cost on Windows, and Apple doing the same for KHTML on Mac OS X.
(Yes, MS and even Apple, for all I know, have tried and are trying to recoup some of the huge costs they've sunk, by for example charging AOL or Intuit for the privilege of embedding a supported version of Trident, or licensing its source. But that does not make a viable business out of the subsidies.)
Those subsidies also made browsers free on those OSes, but browsers are still killer apps, mainly because they are sufficient front ends to web apps, which have displaced fat/proprietary/vertical client/server apps.
There are still people, not all end-users, who will pay for browsers, and not only on Linux. Some customers don't want to be locked into the OS vendor's browser, especially when it is IE. Some customers value cross-platform reach, for migration and coverage. "Customer" here includes anyone helping fund the engine and the killer app that uses it
Re:'Proprietary' extensions (Score:2, Insightful)
Just because the w3c endorses a specification does not mean that spec is a good or necessary standard (which, sorry to disappoint you, I and many others who agree with my point of view do believe exist).
The w3c uses a closed, multi-year process where too many big and small companies pay-to-play and design-by-committee, with too little backward compatibility, and not even consistency among their own specs (e.g., the CSS and DOM deviations in SVG). Specs go to REC status without complete implementation or widespread market testing.
The consequent neglect of HTML, DOM level 0, and other under- or un-specified de-facto standards used by billions of web pages, has aided and abetted MS in cementing its monopoly. And now that monopoly vendor is moving the goal posts on the entire web client game. I do not whine about this (unlike you, who seems content to whine in /. about bad ol' me) -- I'm actually working on ways to combat web monoculture. This focus is about to curtail my time responding on /., but feel free to mail me.
If your idea of fighting the bad effects of IE or Windows Longhorn on the web is "implement XForms in Mozilla", then you need to calm down and explain how that does anything except waste time and bloat Gecko's footprint. Without any browser market share to speak of, even if Mozilla supported XForms, web content authors in a few years are much likelier to use XAML than XForms. Apple, Opera, and IE will never support XForms natively, and XForms plugins are neither well-distributed not transparently integrated with HTML and other supported standards.
So give it a rest -- try fact-based opinions instead of w3c authority trips for a change.
If your "I want a standards compliant browser" demand means anything here, it can only mean that this is all about *you* and *your wants*. "Uncompromising" standards compliance is a goal of Mozilla for standards that actually matter in the real world, like HTML, CSS, and DOM (including the unspecified parts). If on your planet, XForms matters, get busy implementing it in Mozilla. We're accepting patches.
Re:Feh. (Score:2, Insightful)
What everyone wants, what even Microsoft is "reacting" to, is the graphics capabilities of modern PCs, the ease of UI and graphical design inherent in XML declarations and managed code driving a layout and rendering engine, and the current failure of web standards to marry the two. MS can cut through the red tape and make a UI and graphics language that rivals XUL and Macromedia's Flex markup language combined.
Matching MS's every move is stupid, and it wasn't what anyone proposed. Building a competitive graphics and UI toolkit together was on the table, because otherwise the open source alternative to things like XAML (or MXML) is fragmented and weak.
BTW, Active X plugins are supported in Mozilla, conditionally (whitelist empty by default). Too many sites use Windows Media Player, and it requires Active X plugin glue. Last I heard, http://www.gamespot.com/ still showed hot new games' cut-scenes using WMP only.
You should know that mozilla.org does not endorse Active X, but Netscape/AOL funded the WMP plugin work in order to "make sites [like gamespot] work". The complaint that "too many sites don't work" is still hurled at Mozilla and Netscape by PC vendors, when justifying their decisions not to bundle a Mozilla browser alongside IE, just as an alternative.
Re:'Proprietary' extensions (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm tired of repeating myself. I don't "recoil" at reasoned consideration of any spec, and for that reason Mozilla implements many w3c recommendations. But no one should bow down before a standards body blindly, especially not a minority market-share browser vendor that cannot cause content authors to increase the support of standards simply by spending (considerable) scarce resources on implementing the long list of w3c recommendations, out of blind faith in magic standards fairies causing the world to change for the better.
Here's yet another fact: XForms is not new. Four years in the standards process, about a year and a half at CR (Conditional Recommendation, which is a greenlight to implementors). Good luck to it, it needs it.