Salon on Mozilla as a PlatformTuesday September 10th, 2002Emmet and tim both wrote in to say that Salon has an article about Mozilla as a platform. Noting that Mozilla's cross-platform framework makes it relatively easy to create add-ons for Mozilla, the report discusses the possibility of Mozilla becoming a platform that could threaten Windows — which is exactly what Microsoft feared Netscape might do in the 1990s. This poetic justice isn't lost on Salon. Earlier this year, work began on two projects that could help the adoption of Mozilla as a platform. The Mozilla Runtime Environment (MRE) aims to provide an execution environment for applications that embed Gecko, eliminating the need for every Mozilla-based application to include its own Mozilla distribution. More recently, development started on the XUL Runtime Environment (XRE), a superset of the MRE that is intended to provide an execution environment for stand-alone XUL applications. UPDATE! According to bug 167795, the Mozilla Runtime Environment is soon to be renamed to the Gecko Runtime Environment. Can Mozilla modules be protected from each other without loading the Mozilla environment several times into memory? There is always a lot of talk about Mozilla on various platforms and devices. Will Mozilla ever have a release for the PalmOS? I read the salon article and it made me very interested in xul technology. So I typed out the hello world sample and saved it as a xul file. When I loaded the file the screen just comes up blank. However, when I view source I can see the code. <?xml version="1.0"?> <window xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.onl.xut"> <box align="center"> <button label="hello xFly" onclick="alert('Hello World');" /> </box> </window> ignoring the munging, it looks like you got the XML namespace wrong. You typed ".../there.is.onl.xut" when the namespace is supposed to be ".../there.is.only.xul". The xmlns attribute defines the vocabulary for the XML file. If you mispell the namespace, mozilla will treat it as a different (unknown) vocabulary, and not process it as a XUL interface. Sorry the post messed up the source code. If two MRE applications are running simultaneously, will each load their own Gecko libraries into memory or can they share them? Will sharing decrease startup time of the second application started? I can't answer about MRE but with mozilla if you have one instance running and then open a XUL app it will load considerably faster. I can't answer about MRE but with mozilla if you have one instance running and then open a XUL app it will load considerably faster. I can't answer about MRE but with mozilla if you have one instance running and then open a XUL app it will load considerably faster. I can't answer about MRE but with mozilla if you have one instance running and then open a XUL app it will load considerably faster. I can't answer about MRE but with mozilla if you have one instance running and then open a XUL app it will load considerably faster. I can't answer about MRE but with mozilla if you have one instance running and then open a XUL app it will load considerably faster. This is definitally a key aspecy to the growth of Mozilla. Right now, there is a relativly large base of mozilla users, but for moz to become mainstream it must be embeded/used by other applications. For this to happen, MRE is a key feature, can't wait to get my hands on it one day I'm out of my depth in matters of coding, but I think Mozilla excels at presenting information. I saw that intertwingularity is mentioned now in long-range plans... Isn't the principal purpose of the computer to grab, manage and share information? ... and consider all the bloggery! Even in the noise there is information -- things akin to Yahoo's buzz index, what flavor is phat, etc... #15 intertwingularity? submitted by ckjnigel re: intertwingularity?by GAThrawn Thursday September 12th, 2002 8:54 AM I assume you're talking about http://www.mozilla.org/blue-sky/misc/199805/intertwingle.html Intertwingularity does sound like a good idea in theory, but I wouldn't have thought that there are any current plans to attempt a serious implementation of this in Mozilla at the moment. Note that the document was a bit of "blue sky" thinking by Jamie Zawinsky (JWZ). He was one of Netscape's early coders who almost single-handedly got Netscape 1.0 for Unix out, and one of the originators of the Mozilla.org project and one of the leading forces behind open-sourcing Netscape's browser code. However he split with Netscape/AOL over various differences and AFAIK doesn't actually contribute any code to Mozilla these days. (note that he wrote the above document in 1998). So he's unlike;y to be working on it himself. |