Thoughts on XULRunner, Part One: Why XULRunner?

The “Firefox Plus Summit” last week was a wonderful event, bringing together 400 odd members of the Mozilla community, from core Mozilla developers to localizers from around the globe. For me, the key lesson of the summit was the continued high level of interest in Mozilla as a platform. This is a subject that is [...]

SproutCore and Standards-Based Rich Internet Applications

It’s not often that I get to repudiate completely my most recent blog post a few days after publishing it. But anyone who is not yet convinced that the answer to the question of whether web apps are an endangered species is an emphatic “no” should run, not walk, to the excellent article about SproutCore [...]

Deconstructing Rich Internet Applications

A post by my Prism partner in crime Mark Finkle sent me spiraling back in time along an interlocking blogathon of attempts to nail down the term Rich Internet Application. Intense speed-reading of so many mammoth posts can scar the psyche, so let me paraphrase them and save you the trouble. James Ward, What is [...]

Apple Ramps Up Its iPhone RIA Platform

While industry observers focus on AIR and Silverlight, efforts by Adobe and Microsoft respectively to implement their vision of a more compelling web experience, Apple is slowly slipping in through the backdoor. The other day I hypothesized that Apple’s aggressive tactics for pushing Safari on Windows users were all about plans to turn WebKit into [...]

Apple's Safari Push is Not About the Money

Apple has been causing a stir with its heavy-handed tactics for pushing Safari onto Windows users. Those who have iTunes, whether or not they have ever installed Safari, are apparently getting an automatic update dialog proposing to “upgrade” to the latest versions of both products. Reactions range from that of Mozilla CEO John Lilly, who [...]

Opera Employee Hints at Secret Dragonfly Project

Opera’s David Storey, who lists his job title as “Chief Web Opener”, posted an intriguing entry on his blog where he hints at a supersecret project in the works, codenamed Dragonfly: So what exactly is Opera Dragonfly? I won’t say quite yet, but I do think that, in my opinion, it is the most important [...]

Apple Edges Towards RIA Viability

MacRumors is reporting that Apple has shipped a new Safari beta to developers with a number of HTML5 features: audio/video tags, SQL storage, downloadable fonts, CSS transforms/animations and a new DOM function (getElementsByClassName). This puts Apple in pole position among browser vendors with respect to HTML5 support, although Mozilla is hot on its heels with [...]

The Runtime Wars (Aka XULRunner's Exaggerated Demise)

“I keep telling people that Firefox is just a measly stub built on XULRunner, but they don’t believe me. They claim that Mozilla stopped supporting XULRunner and I’m telling lies.” This comment was made to me by Benjamin Smedberg, who is the driving force behind XULRunner, Mozilla’s platform for building portable, web-enabled applications. Obviously the [...]