Firefox Explorer (Or: Mozilla is Here)

by MichaelF on October 04, 2006 09:47am

So, as people are finding out, we at OSSL are doing things a little differently. One of those things Sam Ramji’s invite to the Mozilla guys to come up and help them making their products work on Vista better.

This was met with great criticism (Slashdot for example had people make all kinds of wild assumptions that started with suggestions all Mozilla folks flying on different planes to MS offering everybody jobs. And everything in between) and surprise.

Well, I am glad to report that the Mozilla guys are here. I have spent a really cool day in all kinds of meetings with the following guys from Mozilla; Robert Strong, Mike Schroepfer, Doug Turner, Vladimir Vukicevic, Scott Macgregor. (If I slaughtered anybody’s name I apologize for it in advance!!)

They are meeting with all kinds of people here, and it seems that both sides are learning greatly from each other. One thing that I noticed right away is that both the MS side and the Firefox side just love the technology and are hitting it off nicely.

The things we talked about today for example have been;

Cardspace; Mike Jones and Garrett Serack gave an overview of cardspace. Cardspace is a carrier of identity tokens. But you can read about it here as a nice starting point https://blogs.msdn.com/garretts/ . We spend some time talking about what it is providing, and that it is an effort from the industry to provide a way to provide identity management. Vista will include it out of the box, and .Net 3.0 will include the cardspace technology. Which will make it run on XP and 2003.

And we are currently looking to writing a plugin to make cardspace work inside of Firefox. (Like I said, we do things differently here at OSSL )

IE Lower Integrity Marked: IE will be running in a Low Integrity Marked setting, resulting in a greater security environment IE will run in. But it limits a whole bunch of places it can write to. (which is good) We talked with the IE people to the benefits and pitfalls of doing this, Mozilla is interested in checking into doing this for Firefox as well.

MS WPFE: the developers from the plugin had a conversation to make it work inside Firefox better. (I am not an expert on this, but this should give a better understanding of what it is; https://msdn.microsoft.com/winfx/reference/presentation/default.aspx )

MSI: MSI developers talked about the changes in and advantages of using the new MSI way of installing software in Vista. One of the things that came up was that some vendor have problems with their plugins (xpi files) such as Adobe. (Problem relating to global plugins) XPI can only be installed per user in Vista. I will talk more about this in a later blog

Windows Vista Shell: we went through a high level overview of the Windows shell in Vista.

If you want to know what the Mozilla folks thought of yesterday’s meeting, check out Vladimir’s blog https://blog.vlad1.com/

Well, I wanted to keep this short. But still let you all know what is going on. There is another day with them coming up tomorrow.

Btw, the chips have been implemented into the brains of all the Mozilla folks that have shown up here. And it looks like from Firefox 2.0 on it will be released on Windows exclusively.

Hank.