>>>XAML is just a XML wrapper over object libraries making it (potentially) easy for newbies to design applications. <<<

Correct. However, the object model here is that of c#'s. It might make it easier for people who would otherwise write the apps in c#....have nothing to do with people who want to write their apps in standard web technologies and for a bounch of platforms. XUL might not be a standard yet, but it is not controlled by a company with such a bad reputation. And you can extend it using html, javascript, and even svg.

With XUL+XBL+XHTML+JS+SVG, I don't see what we will be terribly missing from avalon...if we can just get mozilla deployed more widely. Let's not get distracted. Let's focus on getting firefox the best platform on which people can build rich internet application TODAY.

I think you're missing the point. The person who wrote that title knows there's no reason to be shocked if Scoble recommends Microsoft technologies, but he thinks that is exactly what happened: Scoble recommended microsoft (and mentioned Mozilla...) and people were shocked.

Its ironic

That makes little sense, considering that MS is probably only second to Apple in terms of Mac software development. You'd expect them to have caches of Mac hardware.

Actually, he was let go for publishing a photograph and description of the Microsoft building. The Macs in the picture were coincidental; he probably would have been let go even if they were other types of systems.

One thing I think every web browser should adopt is the Smart Bookmarks feature in Galeon. Mozilla variants already have a box where you can type in something to look up in google, but Galeon offers a toolbar where you can set up the same feature for any site (as long as it uses a url that includes a string you submitted). Now it's just as easy to look up a word in the dictionary, a bible passage, or anything else I use regularly.

I hear ya man. I did the same a year ago due to financial problems. Linux has saved me a bundle. One in a while a yahoo sends me a windows media file to play and I just tell them I can't play it; send me an mpeg or realmedia file. That is really the only problem I ever run into.

1. See the title of the site. We're here to both report news, and advocate Mozilla and it's technologies. We readily admit that in the title of our site. If you honestly think slashdot, or even C|Net with Festa's coverage is unbiased, I feel sorry for you, as you clearly live in some sort of fantasy world. Why can Scoble editorialize, but we can't?

2. Last I checked we're a community driven news site. Alex and I both work full time jobs, have real lives away from the site, and still find lots of time to dedicate to it. However, we are of course not going to find every news item out there, which is why we rely on our readers to report them. If you're so good at finding news, why don't you submit it? Or are we just supposed to serve you? As far as Scoble's little turd-drop, it wasn't worthy enough to carry until people started making a big stink over it.

As far as your three things are concerned, if you hate Microsoft, and use Linux, you should understand advocacy. Second, if you don't have your own site, then you don't know the work that goes into it, do you. Third if we're missing so much news, why bother coming here? It's one thing to post suggestions, it's another to just flame those of us who work hard on the site, so I hope you didn't expect anything more back than what you contributed, which was very little.

jason

You seem to be suffering from the common delusion that there is such a thing as unbiased media. This is simply not the case.

All media is biased, one way or another. Sites like MozillaZine, which are open about their bias, are inherently more trustworthy than sites which claim to be unbiased, impartial, or "fair and balanced", because either these sites are too inept or arrogant to see their own biases, or they know their biases all too well and are trying to manipulate you.

If you want to get more diverse views, then I suggest you find a site with a strong IE/Windows bias (preferably one which is open about its bias) and draw information from BOTH places. A camera can only see in the direction it's pointed, so if you want multiple angles, use multiple cameras. Take in all of the information, knowing the biases of each piece, and then -horror of horrors- decide for yourself what to believe.

"This article has really broken my camel's back, and perfectly illustrates why I have been unhappy with MozillaZine's reporting for the last year or two."

I joined the site two years ago (almost to the day). Nice to know I've been responsible for the decline in reporting standards.

"MozillaZine is 100% biased towards Mozilla. Yes, I realize the site is about Mozilla and its products, but I prefer uneditorialized reporting (otherwise known as unbiased)."

Of course, the site's biased. With a subject area this small, the only people who are willing to to run a site devoted to it are either going to be passionately for or passionately against Mozilla. In any case, I think this particular article was an exception: most of our reports are not particularly editorialised. And while we may be biased, I think it's rare that we are unfair. You won't find us deliberately misrepresenting events and statements to fit our pro-Mozilla worldview.

"If one wishes to know what non-mozilla people think of an issue, you have to go read C|Net or slashdot (or, heaven forbid, microsoft.com)..."

We linked to a Microsoft employee's comments in this very article.

"MozillaZine misses a LOT of mozilla news. This interview with Mr. Scobel is ANCIENT news in the news world, and MozillaZine just barely decided to post something about it."

Ancient? The interview was published on Friday, three days before this article (or one working day if you prefer). Ancient generally refers to things that happened over a millennia ago.

"And when they did post, so much of the article is saying 'This is not news' that its insulting to the rest of the computing world. Are you just trying to cover up your lateness with lame excuses?"

No, just rather surprised that there's such a fuss about a Microsoft evangelist doing his job of evangelising Microsoft.

"Have you ever heard of Google News alerts? I was running a news alert with the term 'mozilla' for a few months, and I saw a lot of what you report days before you reported it, and I saw about 75% more than you EVER report!"

While I don't have an alert set up, I regularly search Google News for "mozilla". I'm not surprised you see stuff before we do - we can't report on stuff we don't know about. Also, most of the time when I search Google News, at least half the news comes from MozillaZine anyway (though I will admit this is not the case now). A lot of the Mozilla stories Google News just happen to mention Mozilla and we're not going to report on Ximian Connector for Microsoft Exchange Server being GPL'd just because Mitchell Baker is quoted in the press release.

"Three, I still look at MozillaZine often, because let's face it, this site is the only place to go for a large portion of the mozilla news out there compiled into one place."

So despite the bad job we're doing, our coverage is still better than anyone else's?

"I just hope that one of the admins of this site reads my comments and tries to improve this service to the Mozilla community"

Thanks, we're always trying to improve.

I don't disagree that things have slipped recently: there's a backlog of news to post, I have hundreds of emails to respond to and I can't remember when I last went into the forums. I'm working on it.

Happily, I will no longer be employed in mid-August, so maybe I'll get some more time to work on the site then.

Alex

Yeah, good point. Here is an example of a Microsoft developer praising a Mozilla technology, XUL. If I were a MozillaZine admin, I'd have a sizable list of google news alerts setup, and every day I'd scour these alerts for little tidbits like this. Blog posts like this are good news to Mozilla, but at the same time, they prove that Microsoft is paying attention to Mozilla and that they are mimicking a lot of our technology (or at least, trying to). We should be doing the same thing to them.

Answer me this: Why is it ok to make FireFox propriteary on the Linux platform (we switched from XUL to GTK), but its a huge evil to even think about leveraging some of the Windows code? I for one don't get it. And remember from my previous posts in this thread...I AM NOT A MICROSOFT APPOLOGIST. Please don't flame me and treat me like a Microsoftite. I am a die-hard Linux/Mozilla user (see my blog for proof, http://www.techfeed.net/). I just care enough about Mozilla that I want to try to improve it.

> Correct me if I am wrong.

You're wrong :)

Here's my take on how things actually work. This is off the top of my head and will be slightly inaccurate. Later bz or someone will come along and correct me and make me feel silly.

XUL is a language for defining interfaces. In the XUL file, you specify which widgets go where and how they behave. It gets parsed into a DOM tree in memory, the scripts get interpreted and so on. From the DOM tree, (some part of) Mozilla decides which widgets need to be rendered and where they need to go. It then uses the platform-specific APIs to provde the actual rendering (see http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/gfx/ which I think is the relevant code). There's also nsITheme which asks the native toolkit to draw bits of widgets so that we have a nativeish look (e.g. the scrollbars look like the scrollbars in your OS theme). There's a bit more infrmation (out of date of course) here: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xul/theme.html

Anyway ignorng the fact that the above isn't quite right, XUL and GTK are /both/ needed on Linux because they do different things. XUL specifes the structure and behavior of the UI and GTK provides the rendering. You need GTK equivalents on other platforms, but they're not listed because they can't be uninsalled like GTK can.

As for Longhorn, I imagine that Avalon (if that's the graphics layer) support wll be integrated quite quickly. The more interesting question is whether the /other/ suggestions that Scoble made will be taken up. The only concrete thing I remember him saying is that WinFS would allow a better history. I have more difficulty believing that Mozilla would take advantage of that because it would mean frkng a fairly major chunk of code and of UI that is currently (more or less) cross platform.

> notice how the Linux requirements include GTK+

They include them as far back as, oh... at least M17, which was the first time I compiled Mozilla.

> it is different from all the other platforms Mozilla is on

Er... the Win32 requirements include the Win32 apis and toolkit and the Mac requirements include Carbon, etc. The only difference is that that there are no Windows/Mac systems without the relevant toolkits installed (since the operating system vendors make that impossible), whereas there _are_ Linux systems without GTK installed. Hence the explicit listing of GTK as a requirement -- because it may not be met.

> it is different from all the other platforms Mozilla is on.

It is not, insofar as we end up using some underlying widget set that knows something about actual "windows" on every single platform we run on. See the widget/ directory in the Mozilla tree at http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/widget/src/ (I count 9 different toolkits, of which three can all be used on Linux, so GTK is not the only option on Linux... though the xlib version is not as polished as the GTK one).

> From here on out, all changes that are made in XUL on Windows/Mac/whatever will have to be recreated > in Linux

Wrong. The whole point is that XUL is implemented completely inside and on top of Gecko. Gecko makes API calls to the platform widget impls, but it does not depend on their innards (for the most part). So changes to Gecko can be made once and just work on all platforms that have a valid widget implementation.

> because it is not using XUL anymore. Correct me if I am wrong.

You're wrong. It's using XUL.

I'm not going to bother addressing the rest of your post, since it is based on completely false premises.

I'll also note that you carefully ignored my first post which pointed out these same errorrs... I have to wonder why.

"what is wrong about the "XUL to GTK switch" comment? Is it not true? Please refer to http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/system-requirements.html and notice how the Linux requirements include GTK+."

GTK has been a Mozilla requirement on Linux forever. Except before the rewrite, when I think Motif was required. It's no different to requiring the Windows or Mac OS X widget sets.

"However, all that said, I have to say that I don't think that the move to GTK+ is a bad move. When I installed 0.8 in linux, I immediately noticed a huge speed increase over older Mozilla/Firebird. I think the decision was made because GTK in Linux is much faster than XUL in Linux."

Well, nothing changed. Which only makes the speed increases seem more impressive. I think the confusion about GTK came about because GTK 2 binaries started to be built, which made some people think that XUL had been dropped altogether in favour of native widgets. Though if you can mistake XUL for native GTK, the developers must be doing a good job with nsITheme and its ilk.

Alex

I think I agree with 99% of what you are saying lynn. I have noticed this 'hysteria' all over the open source movement. Microsoft calls it religion. What ever it is called, its a fact that a lot of people in the mozilla/linux/<fill in the blank> community hate the idea of working with a Microsoft product. However, you can't throw out the baby with the bathwater here. If you read other parts of the comments to this posting, you will see proof that Mozilla has done a LOT of coding that is specific to Windows/Mac/Linux. Why? Because they realize that you can't expect all users of your product to just be happy with what you give them. Users expect things to look and work the same as their other apps.

As far as your Favorites extension idea...I agree with you. That would be a great extension. But as elsewhere in the open source world, people here are going to say "Where's the patch?" In other words, do it yourself. I am not a mozilla developer, not at any level. But I do know Mozilla has put a LOT of effort into making documentation available that will help new developers get involved. Is there a fully integrated development environment like VS? Not that I know of. I do know that in the Windows world, the developers use VC++ (at least, that's what I've heard. Correct me if I'm wrong). But to make an extension, you don't need C++. Its just a matter of XUL/JS/CSS. Poke around on mozilla.org, xulplanet.com, and mozdev.org and I'll bet you can throw an extension together fairly quick. You may also be interested in Nigel McFarlane's book on moz development, located here http://www.informit.com/promotion/1041 (free download)

Before I begin, I would just like to say I hate the name "Favorites." I find it condescending, like so much of what Microsoft does. Let's look past the name for a moment.

First, you're a Windows programmer. Thank you for your interest in Mozilla! We need people like you. As for you being yelled at, every site on the net has creeps. Just ignore them.

Second, if you have a patch for Mozilla or Firefox that enables use of IE Favorites, just go to bugzilla.mozilla.org, create a bug, and post the patch to it, seek reviews, and chances are it will be checked in. The people snarling at Mozillazine don't make the call as to whether the patch gets in. The people who make the call are all very intelligent people.

Third, even if you do find a roadblock on Bugzilla, just make your patch into an extension, go over to Mozdev.org and put it up there for the world to see and use.

Foruth, I agree with you 100% on IE Favorites. As a long-term die-hard Mozillian, I must sadly admit that IE Favorites are light years ahead of Mozilla bookmarks. Let me tell you why. Not only do they just work better, they are less prone to data loss. Our bookmarks.html file has a number of open bugs concerning files that have been totally blown away by bugs in Mozilla. Those bugs still exist.

For that reason, I have switched over to 3rd party bookmark managers for all my Mozilla bookmarks. I have found them lacking. Now I'm just using IE Favoties. When I need to get a bookmark, I just drag it over to Mozilla. It works okay. At least my data is safe.

A couple of benefits to the IE Favorites implementation.

* What you really want in a bookmarks manager is the ability to organize entries into subdirectories and the ability to search. In short, you want a file manager. Our current bookmarks.html makes a rather poor file manager. IE Favorites leverages the system's file manager (NTFS or whatever). Hard drive space is not really the biggest consideration in the era of 80GB drives.

* Searching through IE Favorites is easy. You go to the Start menu, Find, Files or Folders, search in c:\windows\favorites , and look for the filename. If you want to search by URL, use "Containing text." This is not rocket science. UNIX had grep eons ago. Our bookmarks.html search function works, too. On this account, we're even.

* Organizing IE Favorites is incredibly easy. It's far easier than dealing with the clunky Bookmarks Manager. You can either use IE's interface, or you can just use any file manager, such as Windows Explorer.

I would prefer for us to just scrap our bookmarks.html implementation and clone IE Favorites. In fact, I wish somebody would open a bug to do that in Bugzilla. (Post the bug # here!) Just getting Mozilla to use IE's Favorites, though, would be huge.

> Windows programmers are a part of your audience.

You do realize that most of the people who are making the comments you object to aren't actually developing the projects in question, hence have no audience, right?

This whole thread, including the original blog, is a tempest in a teacup....