[Techtalk] Mozilla v. Firefox

[Devdas Bhagat]

On 25/01/05 18:34 -0800, Carla Schroder wrote:
> If you were tasked with selecting a cross-platform Web browser to standardize 
> on for developing Web apps, would you choose Mozilla or Firefox? Or something 
> else entirely?  Firefox is all fashionable now, but how do they compare for 
> developers?

This would largely depend on whether you were planning to develop a
"product" for sale to other companies, or for inhouse applications.

Typically, web applications intended for use within a company are coded
for a single browser. Web applications intended to be used by the
general public are coded for different browsers.

If your intended goal is to develop a product for sale, the typical
browser to choose is the one that is installed in corporate offices
already. This is generally IE. Also, a large number of intranet
applications tend to make extensive use of ActiveX to integrate within
various applications (eg, showing excel sheets in IE).

A browser is not really suited to a rich application interface. Browsers
are great at displaying text the way the viewer wants to see it. They
really were not meant to be interfaces for full fledged applications.
Also, the HTTP protocol is stateless, leading to session management woes.

A browser based interface is far more useful when you do all the
processing on the server (you have to do this anyway). Hence, if your
application is moslty report driven, with user input being rare, then
using a standards compliant browser is a good way to go.

Practically speaking, there are four major rendering engines in the
browser world (in terms of userbase): IE, Gecko, KHTML, Opera.
Ob: elinks (which also does javascript now), lynx, w3m.

IE is Windows only. I don't know of a port of KHTML to Win32 yet. So
your basic choices boil down to Gecko and Opera based browsers.

So if you code things right, you would be targetting any Gecko based
rendering engine for use by a web application if your requirement is
cross platform (unless one of the platforms is an embedded applications,
where the probability of Opera beng used is higher).

Note: Browsers SHOULD be designed to defend aginst the highest threat
level they are supposed to face. This implies that browsers should stay
away from things like ActiveX which allow possibly uncontrolled file
access (hostile Internet). However, applications can and do need access
to the filesystem and don't run nicely in sandboxes.

What I am basically saying is that you shouldn't be developing web
applications in the first place.

Devdas Bhagat