OpenOffice bundles Mozilla

That's even more interesting: "The only objective of the 3.0 will be to make it much more modular and running on tops of frameworks such as Eclipse, Netbeans or Mozilla's XUL."

Comment by Dao at September 25, 2006 11:14 PM | Permalink

Luis Villa, a Gnome developer, had some interesting comments on this news:
http://tieguy.org/blog/2006/09/24/open-office-still-pulling-the-wrong-page-from-the-firefox-playbook/

I wish the Thunderbird and Firefox people would stop calling their product Mozilla. Announcements like these always make me think they've decided to re-open development of the binary which made them famous, instead of just riding the name to oblivion and producing what they are. When one says 'apache', one never means 'tomcat', by comparison.

I also think Mr Villa is out to lunch when he says "plugins aren’t bad, by any stretch".

Plug-in modules *are* bad, unfortunately, and even though it's allowed the FFox team to completely ignore anything like a feature, and trot out the "Just make a plug-in" response form-letter, and thereby save a whole lot of time in development, he's missing a whole other important point beyond the potential savings of just dropping that steamy dogbarf invention known as XUL.

Who tests Plug-in Module A's code? Okay, who tests Plug-in Module B's code? Okay, then, who tests them *together*? If there is a bug which only appears when both are installed, then whose bug is it to fix? Is the increasing frequency with which we seem to have posts asking "I have these plug-ins[sic] and my browser is crashing; any bets as to which one/two it is?" any indication of a problem? How about the number of "I think this combination of plug-ins[sic] works" posts?

There's a serious problem facing Firefox, and no amount of flashy advertising and stepping around the elephant is going to improve the quality while still allowing the common masses to submit more code for them to use. The 'dozens' of engineers they no longer need? I think I know what they used to do.

Actually, the openoffice.org folks will likely bundle a email and calendaring system based on thunderbird(R) and lightening(R). I'm sure they don't want the same problems that debian is having with bundling firefox. (see http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=354622 )

Comment by Maimon Mons at September 26, 2006 05:00 PM | Permalink

re Maimon Mons:
Actually the problems only exist because they (and most distros) don't bundle firefox but instead make their own browser based on the firefox sources (any changes must be aproved if they want to use the trademark).

I suspect the release of Office 12 will be somewhat pivotal in OO.o’s future… at that point they’re either going to have to rewrite a whole lot of stuff anyway to maintain to some sort of look.