Mozilla Chromeless 0.2

http://mozillalabs.com/chromeless/2011/04/29/chromeless-0-2/

by abraham • 15 years ago

207 70 15 years ago

mozillalabs.com

yan• 15 years ago

Seeing so much awesome stuff out of the Mozilla team yet again makes me thankful for such an active browser ecosystem.

ignifero• 15 years ago

So is this like PhoneGap for desktops? it was about time

IanDrake3• 15 years ago

Actually, check out Adobe Air (for ajax developers). Basically it's webkit as a desktop app and pretty mature.

I've used it in the past, but I think Mozilla has a big opportunity here as Adobe has pretty much abandoned the web desktop aspect of AIR to focus on flash/flex for mobile.

Also, Adobe removes some of the best parts of webkit like web workers and I recently found a giant performance bug in their javascript engine that only exists in AIR.

mambodog• 15 years ago

Appcelerator Titanium is another option in this category, and is focused on building applications using JS/web standards.

bni2• 15 years ago

Does Air still require a shared runtime component to be installed beforehand? We all know how well that worked with Java.

rubergly2• 15 years ago

Am I the only one who thought this was some attack on Chrome? Whenever I hear talk about browser chrome I always think that Google's name choice was a little confusing. Probably best in the end, though, since it's a catchy name.

makmanalp• 15 years ago

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/chrome

^ I think Mozilla called their thing Chrome for a long while.

rubergly2• 15 years ago

In case I wasn't clear, I meant that _Google's_ choice of browser name was confusing, given that it was an already-existing term.

tvon• 15 years ago

I believe "chrome" has meant "the GUI of an application" for a very long time. I think it predates mozilla, but I could be mistaken.

code_duck• 15 years ago

Google seems to be making a habit of that... Closure and Noop are two other examples that come to mind.

Hovertruck• 15 years ago

Dont' forget "Go"

joejohnson• 15 years ago

I don't think Google is intentionally taking already-used names. There are only so many good project names.

jamesbritt2• 15 years ago

Doctype is another. And has nothing to do with mark-up validation or schema.

wildmXranat• 15 years ago

I remember rummaging through Mozilla projects source code and seen this name there quite a long time ago.

cookiecaper2• 15 years ago

Yeah, I was annoyed with Google when they announced Chrome because I thought it would cause some confusing collisions for the technical crowd down the road. I really would have liked to see them choose a different name for their browser. The interface and trappings of the browser has long been called "chrome" by Mozilla, so if you see chrome given in a non-proper-noun context then it probably refers to that, not Google's competing browser.

dasil003• 15 years ago

Their attack on Google can always be titled Less Chrome.

euroclydon• 15 years ago

I can't tell if this is an alternative to something like QtWebKit. There doesn't seem to be any emphases on native code integration.

leoc4• 15 years ago

> There doesn't seem to be any emphases on native code integration.

Mozilla's actively opposed to any form of JS/native code integration, undoubtedly because that would dilute the effective proprietary control over the Web platform that it shares with a small group of fellow browser vendors. (And maybe because it would wound the personal vanity of its senior developers.) It's already briefing friendly journalists against Google NaCl http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/25/mozilla_on_jaegermon... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/18/google_releases_firs... , using comically disingenuous arguments: oh, it's just too bad that NaCl hasn't been blessed by the web standards process that we ourselves control! Opera is behaving similarly: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/01/opera_on_google_nati... .

Of course, it's another thing to extend this attitude to the desktop, where developers have plenty of alternatives to drinking the JS kool-aid. But presumably Mozilla is hoping that the accelerated-Javascript/"contemporary HTML" juggernaut will be powerful enough to sweep a good number of desktop developers along anyhow. Next Big Language and all that, after all.

quanticle2• 15 years ago

How is Mozilla's control over the W3C HTML standards process proprietary in any way? Mozilla is only one of a number of vendors on the W3C, and is certainly not the most powerful of those vendors.

lloydhilaiel4• 15 years ago

one way you can do native code integration with chromeless is using JSCtypes: https://wiki.mozilla.org/JSctypes

I hacked up a trivial proof of concept on this branch: https://github.com/mozilla/chromeless/tree/jsctypes_play

parbo• 15 years ago

Does JSCtypes allow for js functions to be used as C callbacks, like Python's ctypes does?

johkra2• 15 years ago

Looks like the decision to stop development of Mozilla Prism was not a bad one. "appify" looks very interesting.

kleiba• 15 years ago

Why was Prism stopped? Does anyone know?

johkra2• 15 years ago

You can read the announcement here: https://mozillalabs.com/blog/2011/02/prism-is-now-chromeless...

Basically: Both can solve the same problem, but Chromeless is more powerful.

latortuga• 15 years ago

How is this different from xulrunner? In reading the description it sounds like a way to make a webapp behave like a desktop app but it's a little unclear.

cschneid• 15 years ago

I'm not too familiar with what xulrunner does, but this looks like it is very close to Air. Define a desktop application with html & js, but then have lots of additional hooks to make it a desktop app, playing nice w/ the environment.

Qz2• 15 years ago

Chromeless 'apps' or whatever are written in 'HTML5', which developers can be assumed to already know, rather than XUL/XBL which they can't.

quanticle2• 15 years ago

Chromeless requires you to write your apps in HTML5/Javascript, whereas XULRunner requires you to write your apps in XUL/Javascript. Given that HTML5 is a much more widely known standard than XUL, I'm glad that Mozilla is pushing forward with Chromeless and relegating XULRunner.

Ideally, Chromeless would allow you to take your webapp and (with minor modifications) turn it into a desktop app or vice versa.

ww5202• 15 years ago

This looks promising. Are there supports for native file system access, databases (SQLite?), and network access?

Qz2• 15 years ago

Yes, maybe?, and yes. It's version 0.2 so it's not really the most functional yet.

misuba• 15 years ago

It does support SQLite through Firefox 4's IndexedDB spec (sadly incompatible with the Web SQL Database API spec). And there's localStorage as well.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/IndexedDB

lloydhilaiel4• 15 years ago

file system access, yeah! It should feel like node.js (on purpose): http://mozilla.github.com/chromeless/#guide/filesystem-acces...

databases, IndexedDB should "just work", and thinking exposing SQLlite is worthwhile.

only the most basic network libraries at the moment.

_urga• 15 years ago

Would it be possible to use Chromeless to tell the operating system to have a specific file opened by its default native application? So you could have a collection of links in a Chromeless app, that represent files on the user's computer, and the user could click a link for say an Excel file, and Excel would launch and show the file? Ideally this is what the new FileSystemApi needs, so that a web-based "dropbox" becomes possible. At the moment, any kind of web-based file manager must result in downloads to get most files opened, and re-uploads, whenever the user changes the file.

drivingmenuts2• 15 years ago

The recent Amazon outage, in which actual data was lost, would seem to make a case for NOT using this.

elliottcarlson• 15 years ago

This has nothing to do with "the cloud", hosted content or anything - Chromless is an application launcher allowing applications to launch utilizing the Firefox engine - think of it as an Adobe AIR type product.

drivingmenuts2• 15 years ago

OK, fair enough. And where are those applications hosted? If it's local to the machine, then great. If it's it's out in "the cloud", then the reliability for applications, which may have been purchased, is iffy at best.

StuffMaster2• 15 years ago

I'd still like Prism to live on...it allows the user to turn any website into an application.

asadotzler• 15 years ago

This feature is already beginning in Firefox 4 with App Tabs and will continue grow into the Prism-like platform without the need for a separate product. You should just be able to tell Firefox, "make this site an app" and not have to download Prism to get that.

StuffMaster2• 15 years ago

I want it to run in a separate process and minimize to the system tray though...:(

jamesbritt2• 15 years ago

Nice. Looks like an update on Microsoft's HTA (HTML Applications).

glenjamin• 15 years ago

Their documentation system seems to be pretty cool. Does anyone know if this is spun off as a separate project somewhere? It looks pretty and seems to tie API functions straight to the equivalent github page - sounds like it would be pretty useful in lots of places.

lloydhilaiel4• 15 years ago

it's homegrown. I spun off the docstract project which pulls docs outta .js and outputs them in json. From their you can render the docs however you want. Docstract itself is permissive open source you can use, here:

https://github.com/lloyd/docstract

nrbafna• 15 years ago

any sample applications to showcase?

lloydhilaiel4• 15 years ago

totally. check out webian: https://github.com/webianproject/shell

jimmyjazz142• 15 years ago

I like the idea of being able to do some parts of a desktop application with HTML but would really prefer not to have to use Javascript. Does anyone know of anything similar to this but that can be manipulated with another language.

skymt2• 15 years ago

Microsoft's WPF [0] will probably get you the best results on Windows. It's intended to be an easy transition for web programmers to native GUI programming, so it uses an XML-based markup language called XAML for layout.

If you want real HTML, you'll need to work out how to interact with your page from your non-JavaScript code. Two easy ways to do that: plugins and compilers.

IronPython allows you to embed Python in HTML [1] just like you would JavaScript. (A small Silverlight applet does the real work.) I haven't used this myself, so I can't vouch for how well it works in practice.

You can also write code in a language that compiles to JavaScript. [2] CoffeeScript is a popular choice, but there are quite a few others, including several compilers each for Python and Ruby. Some caveats:

* This can have performance implications if the compiler produces poorly-optimized JavaScript or compiles on the fly in the browser.

* Many of these compilers are toys, so make sure whatever you pick has seen real-world use.

* You still need to deal with JavaScript when you debug.

[0] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa970268.aspx

[1] http://ironpython.net/browser/

[2] https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-lang...

jimmyjazz142• 15 years ago

Yeah I was kinda thinking of HTML applications that are not intended to be used in the browser.

Plugawy• 15 years ago

Wow, it's pretty much the same as Titanium Desktop.

(yes - I remember XULRunner and Adobe AIR - but the first didn't have any usable documentation, and the later is just Flash with webkit web view + AS<->JS bridge)

mgutz• 15 years ago

Where's the tutorial? Github pages for tutorial not doing anything. I'm very interested as this seems to allow more features than a Chrome Packaged Application desktop app.

Mozilla Chromeless 0.2

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