On 5/28/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
It's .NET embedding IE, so it would be possible to use the Mozilla ActiveX wrapper. Main trouble is that it uses lots of bits of .NET that aren't in Mono yet.
No, no, no -- I don't know why everyone has this in their heads that the Mozilla ActiveX wrapper can simply be interchanged with IE. The Mozilla component has a horribly, horribly immature DOM interface that allows you to do pretty much nothing. Additionally, it's bug-ridden as all hell, crashing frequently and without provocation. Believe me, *everyone* would rather use Mozilla in their apps, but it's simply not do-able. This is the primary set-back to porting windows-based MediaWiki clients to *nix; it's not that developers think "unix is scary," it's that much of the Linux world is quite rocky and unstable at this point, and much of the functionality offered in the way of development in Windows is completely unavailable in *nix.
Instead of screaming at the Windows developers, it's likely much more productive to scream at the developers of Mono and Wine, although if you really want things to get done, you shouldn't scream but offer a hand ;).
Additionally, Wine is actually a shockingly stable interface, and anyone with enough patience can get just about any Windows application to run under it. I've gotten three of my Windows tools to run under a Wine (all three of which were dependent upon IE, I might add), and I'm currently working on a way to deploy my most recent app for seamless install on Wine--we'll see how that goes. I would personally find development in the way of Windows emulators to be much more prone to success than attempts to port current software. I would also bet there are likely many ways to hack AWB to run under wine, it's just a question of if anyone has the patience to do so.