| "Quite a disappointment, especially because I liked the idea." The idea of building a music player on the Mozilla platform? That's what killed it, because it's actually a terrible idea. Mozilla is responsible for screwing over a lot of developers by making glorious promises about the Mozilla "platform", but in fact to the best of my knowledge nobody has made it into anything "significant" that wasn't already in Netscape 4. And those who did went to great effort to do so (nvu in particular) and it is not at all clear they actually came out ahead vs. the other choices they had. (I know there's a handful of other dinky apps, but I'm not talking about whether someone bodged together a small local app in native XUL. The lofty rhetoric says that not only should Songbird be working better under Mozilla than it would in other places, it should be joined by the same kind of numerous "significant" apps that exist under QT or GTK.) Historically, for the last six or seven years, trying to turn Mozilla into anything other than a browser has had exactly this result; bloated, buggy programs that barely work with a strong tailwind. And I'll tell you why: It's the platform. Mozilla is a browser. They made a lot of terrible platform choices that they managed to power through because it was a platform with basically one app (and Thunderbird off to the side), but it has not been able to get past that. (RDF stores, where the fact that the RDF store is in RDF brings complexity, but no value for the complexity beyond other storage technologies. XPCOM, an abstraction layer with the same problem, nowhere near enough value brought for the complexity. XUL/XBL sort of eventually redeemed itself, but long after it should and I bet if you tried direct development in it for a "real app" it would still break your heart. And it still arguably fails the "not enough value for the complexity" test; lots of other things do what XBL does, much more simply and reliably. Note I know some of these have been supplanted; this is not a catalog of problems of today, but major errors the platform has made over time. And building something like a music app which is fundamentally multithreaded in Mozilla...? And the Mozilla of several years ago no less.) Fortunately, it mostly doesn't matter, because it has done a pretty good job at being that one app. The only cost is all the developer hours sunk into developing on a "platform" where the only thing going for it is the grandiosity of the promises. I say this partially because I was bitten, but not as bad as the Songbird developers. |