Hi,
Before I invest a significant amount of time in mozilla, I need to know if I
can accomplish what I need to do using it. In a sense, what I need to do is
embed it, or something like it, in an application that takes appropriate
safeguards for copyrighted material while allowing me to extend considerably
what users can do with it by buying the right to use single use applications
from me.
I have need to develop a custom browser. I have virtually no experience
with Netscape, but essentially what I require, at least initially, is
something with the capabilities of Internet Explorer, but without a context
menu or accelerator keys that would compromise the security of copyrighted
materials. I want to allow content developers to use technologies like Java
applets, JAVASCRIPT, dHTML, &c, and not have any way built into the browser
that would allow a user to save the developers' work to disk, view the
source, or print it out ( a user should have no need for doing so since the
material would all be readily accessable on the web from a website I intend
to develop). And I'd like to ensure that any caching done on the client
side is done in RAM rather than on disk, just to make it that much harder to
violate copyrights. Yes, I know any security can be breached, but the
objective here is to make it much harder and much more expensive to violate
my copyrighted materials than it is to get access to them legally.
But I do not want to reinvent, or reimplement, the wheel.
I know I can do most, if not all, of what I want to do using the activex
control from MS that uses the guts of IE. The question is can I do what I
need to do with mozilla?
And what would the implications of it being open source be for my project?
Since I am concerned with copyright security, I do not want to make my
source code available. And while I hope to establish a business involving
Internet publishing, making money selling (inexpensively) access to useful
information, I would NOT be selling my custom browser. Instead, it would be
free to anyone who wanted to use it, or to anyone who wants to access my
website.
Another thing I want to do is make single use statistical analysis and
environmental modelling applications in the form of DLLs, which, once a
suitable fee (of the order of $5 to $20, depending on the analysis it does),
the user would download, and then it could be run once by being loaded
dynamically by the browser, run, unloaded, and then deleted by the browser.
I am thinking of this as an easy way for people who may want to do a simpe
analysis of variance or linear regression for a ridiculously small sum
instead of paying hundreds or thousands of dollars for a power stats package
with tonnes of capabilities the average user likely doesn't even understand
let alone use. I know I can do this using my own custom browser. Would I
be able to do it working with mozilla?
With reference to dhtml, I may wish to extend the document object model, for
use with dhtml pages on my website. Would I be able to handle that using
mozilla?
Finally, is, or will there be, a version of mozilla for Linux? While I have
no plans at present to develop for Linux, I ask in case by some miracle
Linux actually does capture a significant market share among home, small
business and office users, which would then mandate that I look at creating
a version of my custom browser for Linux also.
Cheers,
Ted
R.E. Byers
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
