Re: Awesome new Mozilla roadmap!

[Christopher Blizzard <blizzard mozilla org>]

Jeff Waugh wrote:

> The latest roadmap muddies those waters further by providing a clear path
> for native browser support (GRE), and a set of goals for Mozilla-internal
> browser development (Phoenix) that gel very well with GNOME's perspective of
> and approach to the Free Software desktop. Now it's a far more difficult
> argument! :-)
The GRE is coming along and is probably exactly what the GNOME community 
is looking for.  Via the embedding widget, it should be pretty easy to use.

> One issue that was not raised in the rationale or general goals of the
> roadmap was external integration and interoperability. Whether GNOME chooses
> ship its own browser or not, all of our mail/web/composer/calendaring/etc
> software should work together.
I'm not entirely sure what role we have to plan in the interoperability 
plan we have to play but I can say that we're interested in making it 
pretty easy to embed Mozilla into the application of your choice.  If 
you're interested in web browsing, we're your engine.

I've personally been watching the mime-type discussions pretty closely 
and I'm waiting for you guys to finally settle on something so that we 
can use it for our external app handling code.  There's also the issue 
of plugins which is only partially solved at this time.  I'm hoping that 
in terms of multi-media support that the gnome streamer guys will 
continue to deliver something usable and I'm hoping to get more 
integration done down that road in the future as well.

> Mozilla will have to continue dealing with these issues across platforms, so
> I would strongly encourage the project to get involved with the Free Desktop
> Group <http://www.freedesktop.org/>, and move towards and propose "Free
> Software Desktop" standards, rather than integration with "GNOME", "KDE",
> etc. This will simplify the requirements on Mozilla's end, and fortify the
> benefits of our entire desktop offering - after all, Mozilla is a crucial
> element of the Free Software desktop application suite.
I don't expect that most of the other drivers folks watch the work done 
in that group, but I certainly do.  There's support for the _NET* hints 
in our front end code, for example.  As soon as dbus and the mime-type 
support code start coming together, I'll probably try to start integrating.

--Chris