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Mozilla Chromeless 0.2

mozillalabs.com

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Re: Mozilla Chromeless 0.2

#31

Post by gmurphy »

cookiecaper wrote: post #25
joejohnson wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Google is intentionally taking already-used names. There are only so many good project names.

The confusion caused by naming a browser "Chrome" would have been really obvious to anyone involved in browser hacking.

The lead frontend engineer on Chrome was previously the lead frontend engineer on Firefox, and many other people on the team worked on browsers forever - we all knew what 'chrome' meant in a technical context long before we called it that.

But we still liked 'Chrome' more than the other names, and our motto is "content, not Chrome", which neatly works with either capitalization.

Re: Mozilla Chromeless 0.2

#34

Post by Qz »

ww520 wrote: post #28

This looks promising. Are there supports for native file system access, databases (SQLite?), and network access?

Yes, maybe?, and yes. It's version 0.2 so it's not really the most functional yet.

Re: Mozilla Chromeless 0.2

#35

Post by tiles »

leoc wrote: post #29
quanticle wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Mozilla's control over the W3C HTML standards process proprietary in any way? Mozilla is only one of a number of vendors on the W3C, and is certainly not the most powerful of those vendors.

I didn't suggest that Mozilla has sole control over the HTML (etc.) standards. It's one of the five browser vendors who collectively have de facto control over the Web platform, and it's one of the four non-MS browser vendors who collectively have de facto control over "open Web standards". Thus, for instance, the reason that Google Native Client is not set fair to become an "open Web standard" is because three of th…

> The reason that Google Native Client is not set fair to become an "open Web standard" is because three of the four non-MS vendors oppose it for reasons of self-interest.

As a user, I don't want to see NaCl's compile-once-per-each-architecture model become part of the web. It's true browsers oppose it out of self interest, but NaCl has its own problems that haven't been solved.

PNaCl is a good start and much more in the vein of an open web that isn't tied to a particular platform. And whatever benefits an Open Web, Mozilla will inevitably support, as it sustains their business model. NaCl doesn't do anything for browser makers, but it also doesn't help me as a user.

Re: Mozilla Chromeless 0.2

#36

Post by elliottcarlson »

drivingmenuts wrote: post #32

The recent Amazon outage, in which actual data was lost, would seem to make a case for NOT using this.

This has nothing to do with "the cloud", hosted content or anything - Chromless is an application launcher allowing applications to launch utilizing the Firefox engine - think of it as an Adobe AIR type product.

Re: Mozilla Chromeless 0.2

#37

Post by tvon »

makmanalp wrote: post #10
rubergly wrote: post #4

Am I the only one who thought this was some attack on Chrome? Whenever I hear talk about browser chrome I always think that Google's name choice was a little confusing. Probably best in the end, though, since it's a catchy name.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/chrome ^ I think Mozilla called their thing Chrome for a long while.

I believe "chrome" has meant "the GUI of an application" for a very long time. I think it predates mozilla, but I could be mistaken.

Re: Mozilla Chromeless 0.2

#38

Post by misuba »

Qz wrote: post #34
ww520 wrote: post #28

This looks promising. Are there supports for native file system access, databases (SQLite?), and network access?

Yes, maybe?, and yes. It's version 0.2 so it's not really the most functional yet.

It does support SQLite through Firefox 4's IndexedDB spec (sadly incompatible with the Web SQL Database API spec). And there's localStorage as well.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/IndexedDB

Re: Mozilla Chromeless 0.2

#39

Post by ww520 »

misuba wrote: post #38
Qz wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, maybe?, and yes. It's version 0.2 so it's not really the most functional yet.

It does support SQLite through Firefox 4's IndexedDB spec (sadly incompatible with the Web SQL Database API spec). And there's localStorage as well. https://developer.mozilla.org/en/IndexedDB

Support of SQLite would be awesome. Lots of form-filling CRUD apps can be done.

Re: Mozilla Chromeless 0.2

#40

Post by leoc »

tiles wrote: post #35
leoc wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't suggest that Mozilla has sole control over the HTML (etc.) standards. It's one of the five browser vendors who collectively have de facto control over the Web platform, and it's one of the four non-MS browser vendors who collectively have de facto control over "open Web standards". Thus, for instance, the reason that Google Native Client is not set fair to become an "open Web standard" is because three of th…

> The reason that Google Native Client is not set fair to become an "open Web standard" is because three of the four non-MS vendors oppose it for reasons of self-interest. As a user, I don't want to see NaCl's compile-once-per-each-architecture model become part of the web. It's true browsers oppose it out of self interest, but NaCl has its own problems that haven't been solved. PNaCl is a good start and much more in…

So what remaining problems with NaCl's compile-once-per-each-architecture model do you believe can't be solved by the combination of multi-architecture compilers (llvm, gcc ...) on the developer/server end and PNaCl on the client? Obviously the implementation is incomplete and immature, but Mozilla and Opera aren't even pretending that their opposition to NaCl is based on the immaturity of the implementation.

> And whatever benefits an Open Web, Mozilla will inevitably support, as it sustains their business model.

Mozilla inevitably supports and benefits from an Open Web only to the extent that you accept Mozilla's rather Newspeak definition of the Open Web as "a Web whose client API and runtime is under the shared control of a small group of browser vendors". If you have a less Orwellian kind of openness in mind, then it's clearly not true: Mozilla benefits from its shared control over the Web platform in largely the same way that MS benefits from its control over the Windows platform, and just like MS it has a strong self-interest in not seeing its platform "commoditised". As if that weren't perfectly clear already, then Chromeless underlines it. I assume you accept that Mozilla has a self-interest in seeing Chromeless succeed? The reason that Chromeless has a chance of hitting the big-time on the desktop is almost solely because Javascript and friends are popular on the Web client, and the ultimate reason for that is because JS and friends are bolted in and difficult to avoid on the web client.

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