Salon writes about Mozilla becoming an platform:
Scores of developers are now talking about using Mozilla as a “platform” — that is, using Mozilla’s underlying code to build non-browser applications, like calendar programs and e-mail programs and even Linux desktops. You don’t need to download Mozilla to use these apps, as some are distributed with their own stripped-down version of Mozilla’s engine.
Jakob Nielsen’s dream browser would “use the network” in its core processes, so that, for example, if you misspelled an URL it would auto-correct it to what you probably meant (the way Google does with search terms). Your browser could tell your search engine every page you’ve been to before, so that you could restrict your search to the sites you’ve seen in the past. Or, instead, he’d get rid of the browser altogether and come up with a “digital control panel,” something integrated with e-mail and other network applications, that updates you when things change on the Web, tells you when someone comes online, and follows your favorite listservs and alerts you when you need to pay attention.
The article quotes Mike Potter of OEone: “What I think is going to happen is that all these people who’ve been making Web sites for all this time are going to get bored with it. The guys who are running advanced sites — they don’t know Java. They know Javascript and style sheets, and that’s all you need for Mozilla. So they’re going to start programming in Mozilla, because it’s simple. They’ll be writing little programs for Mozilla and you’re going to go to somebody’s page and download this program. It will just be part of the Web page…Eventually, [webmasters] will integrate their content into these programs, so you won’t visit the golf Web site, you’ll start up the golf program…The browser’s not even going to matter.”
Salon’s article also talks on OEone’s HomeBase Desktop, a new GUI for Linux.
