Firefox: Where it came from, and where it's heading
Published: 14 Oct 2004 10:55 BST
How does XUL facilitate the production of browsers?
XUL is a way of describing user interfaces in XML. In the same way you make Web pages by writing HTML tags, you can write applications based on Mozilla by writing XUL tags for things like menus, toolbars, buttons, etc. ...So you end up, for the most part, writing a XUL file once and having it look the same everywhere.
So the idea was that perhaps these Web markup languages would wind up supplanting the heavy-duty computer programming languages when it came to writing applications. To what degree has that come to pass?
In general, the idea seems like a good one.
Microsoft clearly thinks so -- it is making XAML one of the core pieces of Longhorn. XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language) resembles XUL in that it is an XML markup for generating chrome, though the methods by which it does so are somewhat different.
How does Mozilla compete in a Longhorn world -- assuming that it ever gets here?
At this point, we have better GNOME OS integration. Firefox fits better in with the GNOME (GNU Network Object Model Environment) desktop now than ever. We have native look-and-feel menus, default browser integration, and more.
But is there now a concerted collaboration between GNOME and Mozilla?
There's no concerted collaboration between GNOME and Mozilla, at this point. There is a collaboration at the level of embedding the Gecko layout engine itself, and our maintaining our embedding APIs (application program interfaces) to allow them to do that.
Is that going to be enough to compete against Longhorn, with its grand plans for operating system-browser integration?
We think we'll be able to hold our own. We're redeveloping our graphics systems, for example, to better take advantage of hardware acceleration and newer features.
You seem pretty casual about Longhorn. Is that because Microsoft is so far behind on its deadlines, or because you think the standalone browser is going to prevail, even in a Longhorn world?
Longhorn is going to be a difficult thing for Microsoft to sell. It (will) not run well on older hardware -- which companies have lots of. It's going to be expensive to tell companies that they need to update to the newest version of Windows for X amount of dollars, and upgrade their hardware as well, just to run applications they already have older versions of.
Still, before too many years, Longhorn should still be making an impact. Even now, companies are producing XAML applications.
There aren't nearly as many companies producing XAML applications as there are building Web applications. In the words of Mozilla founding engineer Brendan Eich, "The browser is back -- Longhorn is irrelevant in a Web application world."
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