Firefox, yum?

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Sep. 22nd, 2006 | 11:42 am

I am talking to Marten last night over skype about a couple of ongoing projects to spread MySQL and out of nowhere he says "What about Firefox?".

Now his idea, which I am now forgetting, was a little weird.... it was one of these mashup technology things that make your brain hurt a little bit.

Years ago, something like seven, I was sitting in an interview at a company and they were asking me about modifications that could be made to Apache and I was asked "Think you could write a module for Apache that would be a clone of Word Perfect?"

What do you say to ideas like this?

I politely said that, "no... its not really viable".

Marten's plan had a similar ring to it, but it got my thinking. How could Firefox be used to extend open source? In the open source world, we do not have much of a distribution channel for our software on the Windows platform. If we are lucky, they install Firefox.

Now if someone was to create, and distribute, a Firefox plugin that acted as a package repository you would have a distribution channel. Imagine having Firefox list open source projects that can be installed locally. The user could click on the package and presto, change-o it would be downloaded and installed. Firefox would keep track of updates and signal you when you should update your local software.

This might be a way to spread open source... give Window's users a simple method to see what software is available for download. Present it well, and make it easy for the user to stay up to date.

Sounds like a good plan.

And that Apache module idea as a WorldPerfect replacement?

This morning in the shower it dawned on me how to do it.

If you see Patrick Galbraith tell him I solved the problem, he was the one who asked the question :)

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Comments {9}

BrianFey

(no subject)

from: [info]brianfey
date: Sep. 22nd, 2006 07:29 pm (UTC)
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That seems like a good idea.

I am using firefox now and am pretty happy with it. It is a big memory pig though. Just like any other software which does a lot.
I am using wikimedia too... .though a friend maintains the server so I guess I am just a user.

My main experiences with open source stuff have not been good. Usually it only works for geeks...

Who knows? perhaps I will install open office again sometime and see if it actually works now.

Open source will win in the end... but there are some many years to go. Usually I find open source folks and their criticism of ms to be delusional. I am kinda turned off by their anti-ms talk since ms paved the way for so much progress. And they do have complex software which actually works pretty dang well.

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Brian "Krow" Aker

(no subject)

from: [info]krow
date: Sep. 22nd, 2006 07:43 pm (UTC)
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I would agree in general about Microsoft. There are a couple of projects that they do which I believe are not good for society (and these are DRM related), but otherwise its a software company.

I was on a call the other day and someone said "well they publish such shit" in regards to Microsoft. I don't think people understand what scale of millions of users do to distribution. More people means more bugs, there is no getting around it. People use software in ways you can't imagine and you are responsible for what they do.

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BrianFey

(no subject)

from: [info]brianfey
date: Sep. 22nd, 2006 07:58 pm (UTC)
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yah. All drm will fail.
It seems likely that all intellectual property idea will die.
I think things can adjust and that can be fine.

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Bill Karwin

(no subject)

from: [info]bkarwin
date: Sep. 22nd, 2006 08:01 pm (UTC)
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I agree about Microsoft. They are a business. They can't please everyone all the time. And I think the complaints about their products being too buggy is pretty unfair. Compare MS Office to OpenOffice. Try to share an OpenOffice document between different versions of OpenOffice. Granted, MS Office has a ten-year head start.

Anyway, about automatic downloads for MySQL as a Firefox extension. Bad idea. You don't want the server software to be updatable by anyone running a browser, who can click "OK" when a popup appears. Server software is something that should be upgraded only with great care and adequate testing.

Besides, how typical is it that the browser is running on the same host as the database server?

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Brian "Krow" Aker

(no subject)

from: [info]krow
date: Sep. 23rd, 2006 12:31 am (UTC)
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Hi!

There are plenty of application which are more user specific that use MySQL, plus there is the small businesses who could use this. Say combine it with SugarCRM?

Cheers,

-Brian

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stechert

Sounds like appcasting

from: [info]stechert
date: Sep. 22nd, 2006 07:51 pm (UTC)
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Maybe if there were something like a Sparkle Firefox extension...

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Brian "Krow" Aker

Re: Sounds like appcasting

from: [info]krow
date: Sep. 23rd, 2006 12:32 am (UTC)
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Sorry, I couldn't google a reference to Sparkle that made any sense in this context. Link?

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stechert

Re: Sounds like appcasting

from: [info]stechert
date: Sep. 23rd, 2006 12:37 am (UTC)
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Sparkle is a component you can drop into the Interface Builder in a Mac app that allows you to do auto-updates from an appcast. An appcast is like a podcast except it includes a software update instead of an audio file. Sparkle is great, except it's Mac-only. Would be pretty neat if there was a cross-platform Firefox-pluggable extension that did the same thing. Here's the link to Sparkle: http://andymatuschak.org/pages/sparkle

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candice

(no subject)

from: [info]candice
date: Sep. 23rd, 2006 12:14 am (UTC)
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Integrate cygwin's installer into firefox, maybe? That would be a start, so that I don't have to remember that goddamn setup program whenever I need something else.

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