Rants

Yes, there has been a lot of talk about the Mozilla platform lately. This is to be expected considering the hype generated around Sliverlight and Apollo platforms. Most of the discussion is coming from well meaning developers, using (or trying to use) the Mozilla platform to build products. Developers who want to see the open Mozilla platform flourish in the face of closed competitors. I have a special interest in the platform too, its how I ended up working at Mozilla, so I also want to see it succeed.

From Mike Shaver (back after a *cough* hiatus):

From Dare Obasanjo:

I just read Jeff Atwood’s Are Web Interfaces “Good Enough”? post. He explores why web (RIA) versions of desktop applications are “less satisfying” than the desktop versions. He makes some good points and I’d like to build on his post. I see it the other way around: Web versions have less bloat than desktop versions. Let’s state the obvious right up front: I am talking about good desktop and good web applications. You’ll find crappy versions of both.

A few months ago, I posted about a concept called Site Specific Browsers (SSB). I didn’t invent the name or the concept, but I thought it was a great idea. An SSB is an application with an embedded browser designed to work exclusively with a single web application. It’s doesn’t have the menus, toolbars and accoutrement’s of a normal web browser. Some people have called it a “distraction free browser” because none of the typical browser chrome is used.

Rich Internet Applications (RIA)! It’s still a hot topic. Last time, the hype was for Microsoft’s WPF/E platform. This time it’s Adobe’s Apollo platform. Due to be released sometime before mid 2007, Apollo is a neat platform built on Flash, Flex and Webkit. Adobe recently had an invite-only event, Engage, to show off the platform and demo some applications. It created quite a bit of blogbuzz.

I was a little surprised how “popular” my XUL/E post became. The demo viewer page alone has over double the hits of the second place page. In that post, I demonstrated how Mozilla’s rendering engine (Gecko) could be embedded in Internet Explorer and used to display rich XUL applications and advanced SVG and canvas graphics. Of course, XUL/E is a play on Microsoft’s brand-new-fantastic-sliced-bread WPF/E technology and Mozilla is not mounting a XUL/E initiative (but I can dare to dream).