Archive for the ‘mozilla’ Category

Browser war over

Wednesday, April 18th, 2007

I am skeptical about the consensus from a panel of internet browser developers (including Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera) at the Web 2.0 Expo:

vendors plan to focus on positioning the browser as a development platform.

This just a day after SilverLight was announced which has no firm plans for anything but Mac OS X and Windows support.

I simply think that there will be critical disagreement and interference from corporate requirements. I’m not sure I can imagine Microsoft pushing an Internet Explorer that adheres to a platform standard that allows an app. to run on any operating system the browser can run on. I can see Mozilla and Opera doing that because they have little vested interest in the underlying OS. I can’t see Mozilla or Opera adopting XAML though or Mozilla ditching XUL. They have trouble adopting one Microsoft invented attribute on a minor element.

I also don’t see Adobe in this discussion and they own Flash as well as the upcoming Apollo platform. Flash is not dead and it is widely distributed. Sadly Adobe is not known for playing well with others either.

It is a nice idea but for the foreseeable future there is going to be forking, different platforms and all the joy that goes into developing for different and continually shifting browsers.

Posted in Internet, Microsoft, Post, Web, browsers, mozilla, opera, platform, web 2.0 expo | Comments

The Three

Wednesday, January 24th, 2007

Over at O’Reilly Nat Torkington asked what the three most important open source projects were.

I (and many others) listed:

  • Linux
  • Apache
  • Mozilla

I said those because with them you have an end-to-end solution that can do pretty much anything. You have the OS, you have the internet server and you have the client that can talk to the internet server. Missing, possibly, is a programming language and environment but I see less of a threat of death against programming languages than I do against the operating system, server and client.

Naturally the OS covers quite a range of sub-projects including all the bits that make TCP/IP, routing etc. go on the internet. Within Apache too you can argue what is integral to it and what are sub-projects or add-on modules. I also listed Mozilla and not just Firefox because an email client, Thunderbird, is quite important and Mozilla also covers XUL and other supporting frameworks that can be used to create new and existing client applications.

I would have liked to have included Ruby on Rails and Java in the list because they are why I am employed. But I am just one person and the other three projects have broader scope.

Though one could say if you just listed an operating system and a programming language and environment you would have everything covered as together they could create the server, clients and everything else. But that is a bit too high-level and so much has been already done in Apache and Mozilla that to loose them and start again would be a severe blow to computing technology.

What are your three?

Posted in AAA, Linux, List, O\'Reilly, apache, mozilla, open source, three | Comments