Brendan Eich Outlines Roadmap Plans for 1.8 and Beyond (MozillaZine)

[Posted June 10, 2005 by ris]

MozillaZine takes a look at plans for Mozilla 1.8 and beyond. "Right now, we're just past the 1.8 Beta 2 milestone, which was delivered as Deer Park Alpha 1 and Mozilla Thunderbird 1.1 Alpha 1. The next stage is 1.8 Beta 3, which will involve another set of developer-oriented previews (1.1 Alpha 2). The first end-user betas of the forthcoming releases (the 1.1 Beta previews) will follow as part of the 1.8 Beta 4 milestone. Current plans call for the 1.8 branch to be cut from the trunk no later than the end of June. This will allow the trunk to open for 1.9 development, paving the way for more major changes to be checked in."

roadmap looks good

Posted Jun 10, 2005 16:31 UTC (Fri) by b7j0c (guest, #27559) [Link] (7 responses)

thanks to the team for all the hard work. wish i had the time to contribute. excited about the cairo integration and incremental updating, as well as all of the security fixes of course. firefox to me is without a doubt the most important app on my system. its the only code i typically have running from the time i sit down at my desk to the time i get up. even many of the "apps" i would have otherwise run locally are being replaced by dynamic sites. if it were not for mozilla/firefox, i would not be able to use the platforms i use.

what would i like to see? the improbable...a real language runtime (python, ruby, etc) as an option to javascript for dynamic pages. javascript is getting a lot of attention again but really i find it deficient compared to "real" languages many of us use, it would be nice if a groundswell of support for embedding these langs happened.

anyway, awesome work.

roadmap looks good

Posted Jun 10, 2005 16:58 UTC (Fri) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link] (6 responses)

JavaScript is every bit as powerful as a language like Python, and in many ways even more powerful. There's no good call to stop using JavaScript. What you may be refering to is the extensive library Python has, which could be provided for JavaScript as well, and would be something I'd personally prefer to see happen rather than switching to a much more complex and rather unstable (in terms of features/syntax/library/etc) platform like Python.

roadmap looks good

Posted Jun 10, 2005 17:29 UTC (Fri) by b7j0c (guest, #27559) [Link] (5 responses)

javascript doesn't even have predictable behavior for declaration of variables...yes it is a powerful language but to tell me it is as powerful as/more powerful than python ruby etc is difficult for me to swallow.

also i find it difficult over time to understand why a distinct language syntax must exist in each problem domain. what you perceive as the unique strengths of javascript are the DOM bindings, which other langs have. dealing with the specific syntactic differences and quirky behavioural differences between lanugages over time has become more annoyance than benefit.

roadmap looks good

Posted Jun 10, 2005 18:47 UTC (Fri) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link] (1 responses)

Internet Explorer has long been able to use languages other than Javascript to manipulate the browser DOM. See Windows Scripting Host. I've previously used Javascript, VBScript, Perl, and even Tcl inside Internet Explorer.

Javascript normally gets the job done, and it has a good terse representation, but I agree that scoping and some other important features are unclear. Perl-in-Moz would be a lot of fun, and Python-in-Moz would draw plenty of adherents as well.

roadmap looks good

Posted Jun 13, 2005 11:25 UTC (Mon) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link]

Given that Python can't be reliably sandboxed in-process, you probably won't ever see it available for use embedded in web pages (that is, unless an alternative implementation like Jython is used).

roadmap looks good

Posted Jun 10, 2005 19:45 UTC (Fri) by TwoTimeGrime (guest, #11688) [Link] (2 responses)

And Javascript doesn't have any official documentation. There's lots of javascript tutorials and stuff around the net but nothing definitive that says "this is the official doc".

roadmap looks good

Posted Jun 10, 2005 20:01 UTC (Fri) by allesfresser (guest, #216) [Link]

Wouldn't the ECMA standard be sort of an official document to provide that sort of foundation? Or is that just a bare-bones "authoritative in theory but next-to-useless in practice" document?

roadmap looks good

Posted Jun 10, 2005 20:03 UTC (Fri) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link]

ECMAScript standard (which JavaScript is a superset of)
http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/...
JavaScript:
http://www.mozilla.org/js