[rescue] Mozilla Firefox

[Joshua Boyd]

On Mon, Apr 26, 2004 at 03:23:32PM -0500, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> 
> I'm going to go out on a limb and say that they're good when you know
> exactly when to use them, and that those reasons are primarily social
> than technical:
> 
>   1) User needs remote-access to an application from $place that thinks
>      all of "teh Intarweb" runs over port 80.
>   2) User needs access to an application from a kiosk where he can't be
>      guaranteed anything other than a web browser, an reengineering the
>      app to work with mostly-stateless HTTP would be cost-prohibitive.
> 
> In other words, "suit bullshit", but it does happen, and Applets fill
> the role quite well.  Sure you can use servlets, but that usually
> requires quite a bit more retooling.

SSH in an applet has been at times tremendously useful.  Of course, if
an ssh client was standard with every OS, it wouldn't be such an
issue...  Although people putting together web kiosks may still try to
lock off the SSH client if Windows had one.
 
> Their major selling point (in terms of mindshare) on Java is "write
> once, run anywhere".  At least, that's how they see it.  Maybe once
> they've convinced themselves that they've won that battle, they'll
> produce a decent optimizing native-code Java compiler for Solaris.

They could do fat binaries like Next used to (one binary contains
x86/linux code, solaris/sparc code, and java byte code for the other
platforms, etc).