[Gllug] rockmelt browser

[Steve Parker]

On 06/01/11 00:28, Tethys wrote:
> [ various very valid complaints about Firefox in particular, and Mozilla products in general, on *nix systems ]
>    
The last time I tried it, which has been a while (as I gave up on UI 
people understanding multi-user, multi-host environments), the same 
class of issues largely apply to GNOME (and presumably KDE etc too).

Whilst it would be awkward to be forced to maintain a 
~/.mozilla/plugins/{x86,i386,sparc,rhel4_32bit,slackware_64bit,debian_32bit,debian_64bit,ubuntu_32bit}/blahblah.so, 
it must be possible for the vast majority of applications to maintain a 
stable file format across versions. A 
~/.mozilla/plugins/{x86_64,i386}/blahblah.so would be manageable, and 
would deal with most peoples' x86-based networks, I suspect.

The Solaris/SPARC transition from 32-bit to 64-bit was handled very 
nicely with a sparcv9/ subdirectory containing 64-bit versions of 
libraries when available; 32-bit binaries were not affected, but 64-bit 
binaries knew to look first in the 64-bit subdirectory. It's not really 
that difficult.

The Apps people seem to inhabit a different world from us OS-level 
people; I am biased but rather inclined to blame the MS Windows 
environment, where it seems to be normal for every app to include its 
own copy of common DLLs, JREs, etc etc. We don't do that in *nix, we 
have defined standards and you should have a bloody good reason 
(possibly Thunderbird v2 to v3) for changing those standards. Otherwise, 
every application should work with a common format (does anybody even 
still have /var/spool/mail/${USER}? With that setup, you could use any 
and every mail application available; the app presents the data in its 
own way, but the data itself is consistent and in a well-defined, 
documented format.

</rant>
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