Firefox, XULRunner and Crystal Balls
Mozilla head Mitchell Baker published a very thoughtful and thought-provoking post today about the focus of the Mozilla Foundation with respect to Firefox and other Mozilla-based apps.
And that’s not all. Adobe just announced that it is open sourcing Flex, which is notionally a XUL competitor, tempering significantly one of XUL’s biggest advantages: its openness. Brendan Eich commented on this, going as far as to moot some sort of harmonization of XUL and MXML (the markup that underlies Flex). Funnily enough, I remembered inquiring about this during the IRC chat set up by Brendan and Kevin Lynch, Adobe’s Chief Architect, to discuss the announcement of Tamarin, Adobe’s open source JavaScript implementation (on November 7th, 2006):
<gavin_> *plasticmillion* is there any potential for harmonization of XUL and MXML?
<brendan> plasticmillion: that’s a great question — is neil deakin here?
<shaver> nope
<kevinlynch> there is always potential for harmonization
<brendan> many XUL folks saw similarity in MXML, at widget and layout model levels
<brendan> which matter more than superficial XML vocab
<brendan> i think we could harmonize XUL and MXML so that either vocab could map onto either runtime (XULRunner or Flash Player)
<brendan> if anyone is interested in this, please mail me
The volume of new information appearing on this topic from influential folks, along with some very interesting public and private discussions that I’ve had today on IRC, have my head spinning, so I’m planning to write a longer piece on the topic to try to set my ideas straight. Stay tuned.
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Nice idea! If only Mozilla and Adobe had the synergy with Apollo. Especially with the selection of the HTML rendering engine, which they selected WebKit for. - http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Apollo:developerfaq#Why_did_Adobe_choose_WebKit
Comment by enefekt — 4/27/2007 @ 1:51 pm