Harry Fuecks a rédigé un intéressant billet en anglais qui comprend :

« (…) Meanwhile Microsoft have all the advantages Microsoft always has. XAML promotion has already begun while still being very much « experimental » in status. When XAML finally hit the streets, it's likely to be a well rounded technology complete with support in Visual Studio and endless ads and column inches to market it, as we've already seen with .NET. But it may not all be plain sailing.

We're talking at least another two years before Longhorn is ready to roll and likely longer, perhaps even 2008, based on Microsofts past performance. (…) »

MozillaZine-fr présente la contribution de Brendan Eich (en anglais) :

MàJ du 7 avril : Amis francophones grâce à Pascal Chevrel plus besoin de vous prendre la tête, car il s'est fendu d'une super traduction de la demonstration de Brendan. Merci Pascal, ainsi devenu le premier « ami du lézard » sur MozillaZine-fr.

« (…) Mozilla is not the Army. That's the good news. The bad news is that we have Redmond's army ants arrayed against us. We need strong leadership and external allies, if we are to preserve much of the utility (however subjectively valued) of open standards.

Mozilla can't be a laissez-faire anarchy where staff just resolves conflicts, because we face not only built-in conflicts, but what's more, competition from aggressive monopolies and near-monopolies. Although Mozilla code will be around for many years, it may become increasingly irrelevant without two things :

  1. Browser user agent market share.
  2. Useful, efficiently implementable, easily authored open standards co-evolved with killer applications, such that those standards compete with counterparts in the proprietary systems (Windows Longhorn, Macromedia Flex, etc.).

(…) At the same time, starting now and working closely with other open source hackers, build a new, unified desktop/web application platform from pieces of Mozilla and GNOME code, starting now. Share code and effort ; avoid big rewrites. Use standards where possible, including the parts of XUL that are being specified now. This new platform might even deserve the « Mozilla 2.0 » title.

Another characteristic of this new platform: high-level programming language independence, with a good choice of « managed code » runtimes (Java, Mono C#, JS2, …) for type-safe buffer-overrun-free programming. We must not keep losing fingers and toes to C and C++ ; that approach is a money loser compared to .NET.

A crucial features of this new platform : the GUI toolkit must be able to blend in among native apps, at least on Windows and Linux, ideally on Mac too. There should be a well-specified XML syntax and semantics for creating user interfaces (XUL) and graphics (SVG or something like it, but unified), and for composing tags from DOM trees (XBL). There must be a low-cost migration path from XUL today to this future language. (…) »

XULfr a aussi publié un article (en français) sur le futur de Mozilla.