Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Mozilla is not a browser

Author:Christopher Blizzard
Posted:4/12/2000; 1:31:04 PM
Topic:Mozilla is not a browser
Msg #:16134 (In response to 16104)
Prev/Next:16133 / 16135

I would like to clarify some of the statements that Cameron has made here since they might mislead some people.

First and foremost, Mozilla is a project, and one of the goals of that project is to build a web browser. In building that browser we have chosen to use a highly componentized architecture. We have also built a UI description language that allows us to express what we want to user interface to look like on all platforms.

The end result of this is that Mozilla-the-browser is built out of a number of components. Because of the flexibility of those components, it's pretty easy to put them together in such a way as to build an entirely different application other than a web browser.

I don't think that it's fair to actually compare it to the Java Virtual Machine since they really are two seperate beasts. Building applications in the two is an entirely different experience. The fact is that building applications with Mozilla isn't very different than building applications with Microsoft COM components. I'd hate to see the phrase "Application Virtual Machine" actually take off since it adds a stigma to the framework that it's going to live up to, at least not yet. I'd rather not see people's expectations raised so high only to be let down. Mozilla can't follow in Java's footsteps in that sense.

Until we get XML-RPC or SOAP into the framework our RPC story is pretty weak. We have RDF but it doesn't fit into the RPC model very well. Until we have something like XML-RPC downloadable packages won't be as useful as they could be since they can't access native components.

There are responses to this message:

This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:54:45 PM.

© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.