[Techtalk] Mozilla v. Firefox

[Akkana Peck]

Carla Schroder writes:
> a particular platform? Obviously Aieee is the king of lockin, and migrating 
> away from it is going to cause pain and expense. Suppose you wake up one fine 
> day, decide Firefox sucks, and want to move your Web apps to something else- 
> how painful would it be? Can you really design complex Web applications to be 
> browser-agnostic? 

I'm not clear what you mean by "web applications" when you ask this
question.

If you mean "pages served from a server, which have some UI and
gather data and do stuff with it", then if you write standard html
and ecmascript and fairly simple css, it will probably work
anywhere, and will continue to work on lots of browsers for
a long time.  Of course, you do have to test on multiple browsers
because you never know when they might have a bug in their
implementation even of a standard technology.

If you mean "Local apps which use browser technologies, like
IE libraries, or mozilla libraries and XUL, to implement a
UI which is more complex or faster than what can be done in
a browser window", that's another question entirely.  Using MS
technologies will obviously lock you in.  Using XUL will lock you in
just as much, and the only difference is that with XUL, if you
decide you hate mozilla and firefox, or if Mozilla.org decides to
change the XUL spec in a way that creates problems for you, you do
have the option of taking the source and forking your own app that
does just what you want.  (But then you have to maintain it.)

> For example, if I had a sufficiently turbo-charged magic wand, I would 
> instantly make all online financial transactions not be possible with IE. 
> Mozilla, Firefox, Opera- nice cross-platform browsers. Lynx, Konqueror, 
> Galeon and other specialty browsers. Is it really possible to support all of 
> these, or does real life force you to specialize?

Basic HTML and forms would be enough for most financial
transactions, perhaps with a little javascript thrown in to validate
form fields before submitting (save the user a little time there).
Why does a financial site need complex UI that's specific to a
particular browser?

Caitlyn Martin writes:
> The problem here is that, from what I've read, the
> good folks at Mozilla plan on phasing out their
> signature project and moving entirely to
> Firefox/Thunderbird.  Do I have this wrong?

No, you have that right.  There's a discussion of that going
on right now on the mozilla-seamonkey group, but it's not a
discussion of whether to do it; it's a lot of people saying
how disappointed they are by the Mozilla Foundation's direction.
Though I haven't posted in that thread, I still use mozilla,
not firefox, because I use functionality in mozilla that was
removed in firefox; and I'm frustrated by all the regressions
in mozilla 1.8a6 which no one seems to care about.
I fear that mozilla has already been orphaned.

	...Akkana