On 6/19/06, Jesse Kuhnert <jkuhnert@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
XULRunner requires installing a seemingly duplicate codebase of the same mozilla shared objects/dll's/etc I ~thought~ my existing firefox/seamonkey/whatever might already have.
JavaXPCOM uses XULRunner since that is the embedding framework for Mozilla. It provides several methods and facilities that make embedding easier when compared to the old way of embedding Mozilla
1.7 (Seamonkey). Firefox and Thunderbird are not embeddable since they are built statically (all DLLs compiled into one large executable).
Now, in the future, the plan is for both Firefox and Thunderbird to be built on top of XULRunner. The hope is that you will only need to install one XULRunner, but have several different products that use it (FF, TBird, JavaXPCOM, etc).
IE has an advantage in that you know it is going to be on the system (no extra installation required), and it has a stable API. Mozilla's API is mostly stable, although some essential interfaces are still not frozen. The XULRunner work is a step in the right direction, but there's still some ways to go....
Javier Pedemonte
ATF Developer
