Comparing the Architectural Principles of Microsoft Longhorn and MozillaWednesday December 3rd, 2003DevX has an article by Nigel McFarlane that draws parallels between the architecture of Microsoft Longhorn and the architecture of Mozilla. In addition to comparing XAML to XUL, McFarlane also notes the similarities between Avalon and Gecko as well as Indigo and Necko. Thanks to Ann O. and ummmmm for the news. that page scrolls veeeeeeery slowly for me in Firebird 0.7+/20031202, but in Mozilla 1.5 it scrolls just fine. What's up? I know smooth scrolling escalades this probelm, but even with smoothscroll disabled in Fb, Mozilla 1.5 scrolling is noticebly much faster than Firebird's... strange, changing UA to fake IE produces same scrolling performance as in Mozilla 1.5, but faking 1.5 UA string does not make scrolling fast. this is because of background GIF image 695x579 pixels, should be solved once bug 143046 is fixed: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=143046 The problem on the page looks more like http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=90198 (Fixed background makes scrolling painfully slow). What makes you think that fixing bug 143046 would fix scrolling on that page? So this guy knows windows's new API and, basically, he found you can write GUI code in XML... I don't see what's good about it if it's compiled code (in Longhorn). I'm not sure if this is a good thing for Mozilla. Mozilla's whole problem is that it hasn't focused on the browser and thus it's taken 5+ years and we still haven't seen a decent 1.0 browser yet. > we still haven't seen a decent 1.0 browser yet. This statement is simply not true. Mozilla has been a very useable browser for a long time. I have used it since 0.92 as my main browser on Linux. Every release after 1.2 has just made the browser a tighter product. I could never go back to IE and Windows. Gnome or KDE and Mozilla is an awesome combination. The fact that Microsoft has adopted XAML really is a validation that XUL was the right direction to go. Once again MS takes what is out there, changes it slightly to make it it's own, and then grafts it into Windows in a proprietary way. This behavior pattern is predicatable as clockwork for MS. Possibly the developers of KDE and Gnome should follow suit and make Mozilla's XUL the UI framework for the windowing system. That would be very cool. Imagine if one GRE was always running in the background managing all the XUL client applications. You could always exect it to be there and it would be great to wrap Perl and Python scripts in a cross-platform UI. The one GRE is supposed to be the future direction of Mozilla development but currently all the standalone applications run on their own GRE. I think the runtime cost of dynamically linking is not really a good excuse not to standardize around one system GRE. One of the things mozilla does not have is a full widget set. It sais so somewhere in the docs. They just created a widget set for a web browser and mail client. The even mention that developping a full GUI widget toolkit is huge and that there exists others that do that like swing. If XUL is a UI built using XML and so is XAML does anyone know of the possibilities of generating XSLT that would create a XAML UI out of a XUL UI? Or vice versa I suppose. I would imagine the hardest part would be converting the javascript used by XUL into whatever XAML uses for programming logic. The biggest benefit of this would then be native-like applications on both windows (using XAML) and other platforms (linux, mac, etc.) (using XUL) generated from a single source (the XUL UI). Any thoughts? You could probably write a transform that would convert a subset of XUL documents to XAML, and vice versa. Writing a transformation that could convert any document would probably be difficult/impossible. Just because they are both expressed as XML, doesn't mean that they necessarily encode equivalent information. As another example, how hard do you think it would be to convert an XSchema to RELAX-NG using XSLT? They are both schemas for XML documents expressed in XML, after all ... If it sees something good. MS , ehh... innovates it. Then they patent it. |