[Techtalk] Mozilla v. Firefox

[Carla Schroder]

On Tuesday 25 January 2005 6:43 pm, Kai MacTane wrote:
> At 1/25/05 06:34 PM , 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?
> 
> My first thought: Mozilla is likely to be a more "uniform" platform. Sure 
> people can install extensions on either one, but I get the impression that 
> it's more common in the Firefox world. Certainly there are more extensions 
> that work only on Firefox than there ones that only work on Mozilla. 
> (Though I *think* that over 50% of them will work on either browser.)
> 
> Of course, if your app isn't too complicated, and if it doesn't rely too 
> carefully on some nit-picky behavior of the underlying platform, then it'll 
> probably work just fine on both the fox and the lizard.
> 

Thanks Kai. Excuse me if I'm being dense, but I'm trying to make a comparison 
between developing apps for IE with other browsers.

So another way of asking the question is how do you avoid getting locked-in to 
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? 

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?

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Carla Schroder
http://www.tuxcomputing.com
check out my new book, the "Linux Cookbook", the ultimate Linux user's 
and sysadmin's guide! http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/linuxckbk/
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