[ Thanks to Les Brunswick
for this link. ]
“Still, there’s no getting around the fact that the impoverished
HTML widget set is due for an overhaul. The browser needs pluggable
microcomponents that can interact in richer and more flexible ways
with remote macrocomponents. Web culture has, so far, proved
surprisingly resistant to the two dominant solutions proposed thus
far: Java, and ActiveX.”
“This situation cannot, and will not, continue for much longer.
But the non-Windows camps don’t seem to have convincing solutions
yet. Netscape’s browser share is rapidly eroding. Mozilla is
desperately late precisely because it has heroically tackled the
microcomponent problem, while refusing to sacrifice
OS-independence. At this point the future of Mozilla, and its XPCOM
technology, is unclear. Linux, on another front, is pursuing a
CORBA-oriented microcomponent strategy — but the KDE and GNOME
desktop environments mean different things by this. And whether
Linux in any form will capture significant desktop share is, also,
unclear. Finally, Java has its own version of microcomponents
(beans) and macrocomponents (enterprise beans), the relevance of
which — on the desktop machines where the vast majority of
computing actually occurs — is again unclear.”
“So what’s in store? Are we headed for a one-browser world,
in which the MSIE microcomponent architecture dominates the desktop
just as Win32 and COM did? Will Mozilla reassert itself as a
contervailing influence? Will client-side Java emerge from its long
gestation and play a larger role on the desktop? I’d give a lot,
right now, to know the answers to these crucial
questions.“