Whither Mozpad?
Mike Shaver asked me about Mozpad the other day, and a few hours later Brian King posed the same question on his blog. Clearly it’s high time to take a step back and evaluate where we are and where we’re going.
The short answer is that not much has happened on the Mozpad front recently. To some degree this is just a case of things taking time. There is definitely ongoing interest in a XULRunner IDE, and ActiveState has brought this a whole whack closer to reality with their Open Komodo initiative. But the initial excitement and momentum has largely dissipated.
I was musing months ago that the group lacked a clear raison d’être. The problem isn’t so much a dearth of things to do, but the commitment and time investment that would be necessary to do them right. This isn’t just a case of setting up some discussion forums for technical support (Mozilla already has them) or an IRC chat room (Mozilla has several) or a great, user-editable documentation site (cause, well, you get the point). Turning XULRunner into a real product with branding, packaging, development tools and marketing is perhaps too big a task for a volunteer organization without any full-time participants. Once folks realized how hard it was going to be to achieve anything substantive without jeopardizing their other projects (including the ones that pay the rent), their initial enthusiasm cooled. I can’t claim to be an exception in this regard.
There are other issues as well. First of all, where are all those XULRunner projects we’ve heard so much about? When we started Mozpad, I was expecting a lot of that XUL dark matter to come out of hiding and express interest in what we were up to. This simply didn’t happen. We got a lot of love from Mozilla die hards who find the idea of an open, multiplatform application development framework appealing, but virtually none from companies that are actually using the technology. It has to be said that Robert O’Callahan’s speculation about “hundreds or even thousands” of stealth XUL projects was based on rather scant evidence. Or perhaps the main interest is in developing intranet applications using a web server and XUL, rather than desktop apps on top of XULRunner. Or, equally plausibly, people are using XULRunner but weren’t aware of Mozpad or were waiting to see concrete results before making their interest known.
Moreover, I have to admit that I’ve cooled somewhat on the idea of XULRunner as a general purpose framework because I’m so excited about the potential of Prism. Since I believe rich web apps are the future, I’d rather spend whatever time I have for Mozilla platform work improving Prism rather than documenting XULRunner APIs and the like. And whereas Mozilla has stated unequivocally that a standalone XULRunner product is not a priority, Prism clearly is. I proposed Mozpad to a large degree because I felt that Mozilla had dropped the ball on the whole “future of apps” thing. Now I’ve got crow casserole heating in the oven as they pick up the ball and sprint for the goal line. (And with that let me pledge publicly: no more ball metaphors in 2007.)
(To be absolutely clear: none of this should be construed in any way as diminishing the heroic work that has been put into making XULRunner a viable platform and getting Firefox to run on top of libxul. Apart from anything else, Prism is a natural consequence of this extraordinary vision, which has been gestating for over three years.)
All this to say that a lot has changed since May, and I’m not sure that we need a Mozpad to further our goal of helping Mozilla to play a defining role in the future of applications. ActiveState has expressed interest in helping out with the development of a XULRunner IDE on top of Open Komodo. All the usual mechanisms are available for those who want to contribute ideas, bug reports and code to the Mozilla platform. Personally I’ve been spending a fair amount of time working on Prism. From my perspective, things are going great despite Mozpad’s lackluster second act.
It goes without saying that I’m extremely keen to hear what others have to say about this. While you’re tucking into your Christmas goose, please take a minute to give this some thought. Nothing would make me happier than an impassioned rant or two about why we desperately need Mozpad after all.
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I’m sad that Mozilla seems to have dropped xulrunner altogether. They don’t even seem too fussed about cleaning up obsolete interfaces despite declaring them obsolete (even with a major API change). Whilst it wasn’t an inspiring post, I’m surprised I’ve had no responses from http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.planning/browse_frm/thread/e64e0ea2d6008faa/b0319202871618fc#b0319202871618fc
All the xulrunner/prism stuff means is that apps that *want* to be desktop apps on the mozilla platform, can’t be. Well they can, if they trade off download size/memory usage and the other disadvantages, like working out how the platform works and maintaining the xulrunner capabilities of it.
So maybe Mozilla is focussing on web apps instead of the platform? Perhaps they should have told Thunderbird, SeaMonkey & Sunbird that they all need to be rewritten to be web apps. Oh, SeaMonkey can’t do that.
I’m really starting to think that the Mozilla platform for desktop applications is dead (or if not, dying). For instance whilst we promote open source, the talk of not being able to have binary components means that companies can’t produce bolt-ons/applications which can’t have their source read/fiddled with. Not acceptable for some applications. If I was a company looking for a new platform for my application, I wouldn’t touch Mozilla at the moment because a) I don’t know where exactly they are going (and it seems very hard to work out even a minimum set of things that are going to occur for Moz 2, and even then they may get cut if no-one works on them), b) I’m not confident of Mozilla supporting the platform side of things without me doing all the work to do it.
Maybe then Mozpad has highlighted that there aren’t many apps built on xulrunner, and it isn’t worth carrying on if the core support isn’t really there. I was never sure Mozpad was really what was needed, I think its more a commitment from Mozilla to provide support (and dev) is really what’s needed. Otherwise users, developers and companies aren’t going to commit to using something that hasn’t got a commitment from its supplier.
Comment by Mark Banner — 12/22/2007 @ 3:54 pm
Perhaps it’s not that those dark matter projects don’t exist, but that they’re still dark? They’ve never been visible in Bugzilla, newsgroups and other forums, so maybe they’re not visible in MozPad discussions either.
Comment by Robert O'Callahan — 12/22/2007 @ 8:40 pm
It doesn’t jive with the “Open Web”.
Comment by enefekt — 12/23/2007 @ 4:58 am
It’s all really very simple. Mozilla’s leadership lacks vision wrt anything beyond the web. Even when ActiveState have come to the party with Open Komodo and people like Matt have shown so much enthusiam, Baker and co are not willing to appointment a few full time staff to see how far they can take XULrunner.
Mozilla is not short of a dollar. The lack of commitment from them is the key. Someone needs to fund a few full time positions just like someone funds them for every other open source product. It is a myth that open source works with volunteer labor only.
Comment by pd — 12/23/2007 @ 5:51 am
On the other hand, credit where it’s due.
Prism may be a clone of AIR, a mini-XULrunner that doesn’t really run XUL in a destop UI sense, but it’s really important to have an open version of AIR available. Prism is still more web than desktop (by a long way) but it’s at least open and means XULrunner is being utilised more.
Weave confused me initially but in the end it looks like a brilliant idea if executed well. It seems like OpenID, a Bookmarks Synchronizer and much more, all hosted by an relatively non-profit, open and ethical org in MoFoCo.
The vision of the MoFoCo leadership might not extend to the cross-platform desktop application platform they could have with a better XULrunner, but they do still have vision when it comes anything web-related.
Comment by pd — 12/23/2007 @ 6:36 am
Regarding the applications: I’ve recently been very surprised by seeing something thats obviously Mozilla in two applications that, firstly, didn’t mention it anywhere (not even the about box!), and secondly, were both music-related: Vuze (formerly known as Azureus, a BitTorrent client that has now gone media-portal’ish) and EMusic Remote (the Linux version, at least).
Both of these use it to embed a browser, but their applications is also apparently built in the technology (or at least its pervasive in the GUI). Maybe this is where Mozilla shines: Hybrids. Incidentally, this is also sort-of what Prism is targeted at and, at least, see some sense in giving developers what they want, building the platform that way, ironing out the kinks in a way. If this kind of hybrid takes off, both the browser and other apps benefit.
If that is the reasoning, it would seem a smart strategy to me.
Comment by Ingo — 12/23/2007 @ 1:17 pm
This probably doesn’t make much sense to post here, but what makes Prism much different than XULRunner? Prism IS built on top of XULRunner, correct? So any underlying problems that XULRunner has or had that people are saying Mozilla will neglect to include in the next build, Prism will have in its next build. Right?
I may be one of those potential “dark matter” people you talk about. I don’t have software yet though, but I have a few ideas to use XULRunner as the foundation. I feel I lack of tools or knowledge to utilize XULRunner. Sure XULplanet.com exists, and developer.mozilla.org, but I still feel like the resources and tools needed are unavailable or scattered throughout the web. Is XULRunner a runtime like Flash, or is it more the core files for building software that renders web-based content like a browser or mail app (ie Firefox, Thunderbird)?
Prism seems to be great software in it’s own regard, just like Miro, Songbird, or Joost (just to name a few). But it’s all built around XULRunner, am I right? So where does this software go without advancements in XULRunner?
So, do I go ahead with the current state of XULRunner like those before me like Songbird, Joost, Miro, etc. Or sit and stay quiet and wait for Mozilla, Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, Google, or the next company to release something that will suit my ideas?
Comment by Dan — 12/27/2007 @ 8:08 pm
I’m not sure where this question/comment should go I’m posting it here in hopes that someone gets it. I noticed a lack of support for Firefox 3.0 and it seems like the nightly builds stopped around early December. Is this still an active product? Is there a way I can get involved to get a Firefox 3.0 release out soon?
Thank you.
And PS. I love AllPeers. I just need it to work in my browser again.
Comment by Dean — 12/29/2007 @ 6:29 pm
Firefox 3 is still in beta. That said, we do have a port that we will make available unofficially once we’ve finished testing it.
Btw, I appreciate all the comments on Mozpad and I’m hoping for more! I’ll write a followup when I get back from holiday.
Comment by Matt — 12/30/2007 @ 12:40 am