Weiqi Gao's Observations - mozilla tag

Ten Years Of Big Open Source

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 14:16:25 GMT

Mitchell Baker:
January 22, 1998 -- the Beginning of Mozilla

Anyone remember this?

NETSCAPE ANNOUNCES PLANS TO MAKE NEXT-GENERATION COMMUNICATOR SOURCE CODE AVAILABLE FREE ON THE NET

BOLD MOVE TO HARNESS CREATIVE POWER OF THOUSANDS OF INTERNET DEVELOPERS; COMPANY MAKES NETSCAPE NAVIGATOR AND COMMUNICATOR 4.0 IMMEDIATELY FREE FOR ALL USERS, SEEDING MARKET FOR ENTERPRISE AND NETCENTER BUSINESSES

...

I remember.

And I remember what a shock this was at the time. Prior to this, the software world had been divided into the proprietary software world and the free software world. There was not a whole lot of intermingling between the two. The internet was not as ubiquitous as it is today. And the advertiser paid trade magazines were the main source of information for IT workers.

And Free Software, in the RMS sense, was not even talked about in the respectable magazines. The whole proprietary software world behaved as if Free Software did not exist. When an article on C++ compilers were published, it wouldn't mention GCC. When an article on editors were published, it wouldn't mention Emacs.

IT shops often were built completely on proprietary software systems that were expensive and restrictive. I remember having to put a dongle on the parallel port of my 66MHz Pentium server running NT 3.5 just to use a scanning software package that cost thousands of dollars to license.

Then the term Open Source was coined, and a PR campaign was launched with Eric Raymond and Tim O'Reilly as the leading figures. ESR's The Cathedral & The Bazaar was an eye-opener for a lot of people.

The Netscape announcement was one that made Free Software and Open Source mainstream. I believe prior to this, when a software company gets crashed by Microsoft or anybody else, they just roll over and die.

The ten years since the announcement has seen Free and Open Source Software being adopted in a lot more places, and a lot more bit vendor proprietary software being released as Open Source. And the world is better place.

Here's my prediction for the next ten years: By 2018, most business computers will be running an open source operating system.

Escaping The Browser: Mozilla Prism Loves Your Web Application

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 04:09:55 GMT

One of my complaints about web applications is that they all run in the same instance of the browser process. And consequently, they are all at the mercy of the worst behaving tab. I have reported in the past of web pages that keep on using 100% of the CPU and making the browser unresponsive. I have a suspicion that Adobe Flash is to blame for a majority of these situations, but I don't have concrete evidence such as a URL that I can point you to that will trigger the bad behavior. My only recourse is to kill the browser process and loose all my work in progress (blog entries that I'm composing, the web forms that I'm filling out, etc.)

Then I saw the announcement of Mozilla Prism, downloaded it, installed it, and started using it.

It's really easy to use. Starting the prism executable gives me a dialog box like this:

Clicking on the OK button will create the Desktop Icon or Start Menu item or Quick Launch Bar item as requested. From that point on, I can start the web page by double clicking on the Desktop Icon, just like any other Desktop application. Prism will start the web page in a dedicated process separate from the running Firefox browser, if any, where all of my other tabs are:

Now I can edit my blog entries without fear that some other random links I click will make me lose my work.

Here's some interesting statistics:

The Prism instance that hosts my blog page takes up 20MB of memory on my WinXP Pro SP2 machine.
The User-Agent string is "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a9pre) Gecko/2007110108 prism/0.8"

From about a day's worth usage, I already miss several features that I had learned to depend on:

No tabbed-browsing
No password cache
No /searching

I'll keep this experiment going for a little while. I'll let you know if and when I hit a show stopper that would force me to abandon Prism.

Why Hasn't XUL Taken Off?

Tue, 10 Apr 2007 04:30:04 GMT

There is an interesting write up over there on InfoQ about Mozilla's XUL:

Jonathan Allen: Last week we ran a short piece on the future of rich client frameworks. At the time we over-looked XUL as a proprietary language for Mozilla add-ons. It seems that was a mistake.

XML User Interface Language (XUL) shares many of the features with the other frameworks we covered last week, including an XML based presentation and JavaScript on the back end. But it also has a few key features that set it apart.

With the focus on tools like Adobe Flex 2 and Adobe Apollo, the elite thinkers are exploring ways to go beyond mere Web applications and bring the rest of the developer world into the Rich Internet Applications era.

I think it is very telling that when InfoQ did a round up of Rich Client Frameworks they forgot about XUL. There is virtually no marketing or promotions behind XUL. It's true people who work on the XUL Explorer are talking about it in a few articles here and there, and from time to time the O'Reilly Network would feature an article that mentions XUL. However the impression I'm getting from the rest of the internet is that nobody cared about XUL. And that's just sad.

For XUL is a truly capably GUI toolkit. If you have any doubts about its capabilities, just think about this—the Firefox browser and Thinderbird email client are themselves XUL applications.

But those are GUI client applications, not web applications, you will point out. True. But with the proper permission and packaging, a XUL application can be delivered over the web. As the Amazon thingy demonstrates.

But that demo only runs inside Mozilla and Firefox but not IE, you will point out again. True again. And this time I have no excuses for XUL. XUL is a cross-platform GUI toolkit and application development framework that is capable of being delivered over the web. But it runs only from within two browsers (Mozilla and Firefox).

The XULRunner environment makes XUL runnable as standalone applications. But it does not make it run inside IE. That's where it falls down. If you want a "web" application, XUL is out.

So if XUL is competing as a cross-platform GUI toolkit, that's capable of being delivered over the web, then it ought be compared with other such things, such as Java. And I would develop a Java GUI over a XUL GUI any day. Because XUL development is simply too different.

That practically left XUL nowhere to go.

P.S. A search for XUL on this blog reveals that I first mentioned XUL in this post 1306 days ago as thing to look into. And my finding back then was I liked the idea of writing a web app that has tree controls and table controls. But do Mozilla XUL apps count as web apps?