Matthew Thomas wrote:
>> ease of
>
>> implementation,
>
>
>
> Not true. A *lot* of time and effort is being spent reimplementing GUI
>
> controls, and the differing details of how they work on each platform.
Certainly, but once that's in place, it simplifies the development of
the UI and any new Mozilla-based applications that come along.
>> and support for non-browser/mail/news applications.
>
>
>
> Not true. Plenty of other software vendors have produced programs in the
>
> past 20 years which aren't browsers or mailers, but which don't use XUL.
>
> There's no law which says that you have to use XUL if you're not making
>
> a browser or a mailer.
No, but it sure does make life simpler. At least, that's how it seemed
when I was working on a Mozilla-based mud client that never got
finished. I certainly didn't intend to say that it's impossible to
develop apps that aren't based on XUL.
> But if you're going to make Mozilla behave like users expect it to
>
> behave, you do have to develop slightly different front ends for each
>
> platform. Mozilla is doing this with an increasing number of
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> platform-specific overlays, and (for non-chrome front end details, such
>
> as text selection behavior) prefs which have different default values on
>
> different platforms.
But compare it to the situation with previous versions and with IE and
Opera. Things have gone far more smoothly.
> Not true. Firstly, Mozilla's GUI is interpreted whereas a native GUI is
>
> compiled. And secondly, Microsoft and Apple have had 15 more years in
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> which to fine-tune the performance of their GUI code than the Mozilla
>
> programmers have had.
It's true that interpreted code tends to be quite a bit slower than
native code, but that doesn't mean app-based UIs are slower than
OS-based ones. And MS and Apple didn't write the UI controls once and do
nothing but optimize them for the next 15 years--they threw them out and
replaced them from time to time. Whistler doesn't use the same UI code
as Windows 1.0.
--
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"If you torture a ballot long enough, eventually it'll confess."
--Alan Simpson
