Joel Spolsky's endorsement of Mozilla Firebird -- he says "it has finally caught up with Internet Explorer" -- has attracted lots of notice. It is, indeed, a sweet piece of work. I love how the extensions work. The first one I picked up was LiveHTTPHeaders which seems to instantly obsolete Proxomitron for purposes of HTTP protocol sniffing and website reverse-engineering. I was also delighted to see that there's a build which includes the DOM Inspector -- and, soon after, an extension that added DOM Inspector to my existing Firebird installation. Also, XSLT is working now (since Mozilla 1.2, in fact). Extremely cool!
What I'm not finding, yet, is the Mozilla equivalent of the MSXML.DOMDocument and MSXML2.XSLTemplate interfaces -- which I am actually using at the moment in MSIE for an interesting project. If these do exist, trust someone will enlighten me. Otherwise, I'll rate Firebird (and Mozilla) as not yet the full equal of MSIE in terms of these advanced features -- but moving quickly now, which is so gratifying to see.
Update: Brendan Eich let no dust gather on that one:
A couple of pointers re: http://jonudell.net/udell/2003-06-02-patterns-of-persistence.html -- Mozilla Firebird (actually, the Gecko engine shared with other Mozilla apps) does support the w3c-standard form of MSXML.DOMDocument, created via document.implementation.createDocument(). See http://www.mozilla.org/newlayout/xml/#load for details -- there's a short example at http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/content/xml/tests/load/load.html.Excellent! This is just what I was looking for. Thanks Brendan!
Mozilla also supports XSLT complete with scriptable interfaces. See http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2003/xslt-js/ for docs that probably cover the cases you handled using MSXML.XSLTemplate. Let me know if something's missing.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2003/06/02.html#a709