Microsoft's Firefox surprise
Submitted by srlinuxx on Wed, 12/03/2008 - 15:13.
Microsoft's announcement of an OOXML plug-in for Firefox is one of those intriguing moments when a tiny piece of the future sprouts through the winter soil.
The plug-in wasn't written by Microsoft — it provided 'architectural guidance, technical support and project management', according to the project page — but by a Bangalore company called MindTree. Yet as the code is released on Microsoft's CodePlex pages under the GPL 3.0-compatible Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL), it's as good a piece of official Microsoft open source as you'll find.
Perhaps the least charitable interpretation of this move is that it provides, effectively for the first time, a decent OOXML viewer (one hopes — it's still incomplete, with things such as pagination missing) that removes the need for non-Microsoft Office users to install OpenOffice to read documents using that format. But competition is no bad thing, right?
Browsers and layout or rendering engines ? Substitute for xml ?
Browsers are the operating systems of the netbooks.
But many browsers still need Adobe flash to have universal display capability of video media. Opera still can not display partial foobar layout. And html webpages are the shameful substitute forced on us.
The obvious thing for browser people to do is to use gadgets to substitute any or all layout engines and rendering engines into the browser work space, thus any desktop gui can also run on browsers. OOXML is but one of the media content, if only it is also popular?
Simple system to substitute layout and rendering engines into a browser work space needs to be thought thru as soon as possible. Dillo people do not have to reinvent the wheels to use different reusable files if many window manager layout and rendering engines are in the distro library.