On Mar 16, 4:24 pm, "Mike Beltzner" <beltz...@mozilla.com> wrote:

I'm not suggesting dealing with any of that pain. That's all handled
by the kernel. I'm only suggesting competing with Gnome and KDE as
graphical desktops, because the Mozilla platform already does almost
all of what they do, and does it better. Currently we use familiar
skinning to match the look n' feel of these desktops so that it
*feels* native. Why shouldn't XUL *be* the native GUI? Furthermore,
because XUL is already so incredibly good at mimicking its would-be
competitors, that will be a huge reason for developers to use this
desktop as their main developing environment (the GTK+ and Qt ports
are dreadful). I think one of the main things stopping developers from
using XUL is because it has a reputation, wrong as it may be, for
being a memory hog, specifically because it [must] replicates a lot of
functionality already present in the native API and already occupying
memory (for good reason; relying on native widgets would be
impractical, and extremely limiting, i.e. wxWidgets). That would not
be an issue if Mozilla were the native API. In other words, one reason
for a Mozilla OS would be to get rid of the needless overhead that
another OS would add for running applications not built with Mozilla.
And because it would simply be a better desktop in general I think.
XUL makes beautiful interfaces.

There's also the advantage of being able to escape the GPL, and
instead use the MPL which I very much prefer.