Upgrade StorageGoals of the Zotero project
This quote was in the Wired Campus:
"The goal is to bring search and organizational tools to humanities scholars who might not have the skill or interest to otherwise use them, by embedding them in the Web-browser software the scholars are already using, says Daniel J. Cohen, an assistant professor of history and director of research projects at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. "
How is this goal going to be reached if Zotero is being developed only as a Firefox add on? What about those scholars that use other browsers?
I prefer Firefox but my campus is a Microsoft oriented campus. The only browser supported is IE. How can I promote such a service if it is only available on one browser platform?
"The goal is to bring search and organizational tools to humanities scholars who might not have the skill or interest to otherwise use them, by embedding them in the Web-browser software the scholars are already using, says Daniel J. Cohen, an assistant professor of history and director of research projects at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. "
How is this goal going to be reached if Zotero is being developed only as a Firefox add on? What about those scholars that use other browsers?
I prefer Firefox but my campus is a Microsoft oriented campus. The only browser supported is IE. How can I promote such a service if it is only available on one browser platform?
This discussion has been closed.
http://stuwww.uvt.nl/~broekman/index.php?itemid=53
http://netapps.muohio.edu/blogs/darcusb/darcusb/archives/2006/10/08/barrier-to-entry
http://netapps.muohio.edu/blogs/darcusb/darcusb/archives/2006/09/24/firefox-the-better-alternative
Perhaps the most simple answer to your question is a pragmatic one. We can't really reproduce the functionality of Zotero in IE or Opera. You can read about Opera's policy on extensions here: http://www.opera.com/press/faq/#tech14 ("Opera does not support third party extensions as a quality assurance measure"). Microsoft does allow extensions, but they can only be of the most rudimentary types: menu items and extra buttons, download managers, basic toolbars. With Firefox, on the other hand, you can do pretty much whatever you like (as the thousands of Firefox extensions and themes attest).
We have been able to build Zotero on top of Firefox because as an open source project all of the code and underlying technologies of Firefox are available to us. For instance, we are using Firefox 2.0's embedded database (SQLite, which is also open source--you may be noticing a trend here) as our storage. Zotero can sense and grab citations in the browser because it can call on many different parts of Firefox's code. Microsoft doesn't allow extension developers to call on more than a tiny fraction of their code.
So in short, those waiting for an IE version of Zotero are in for a long wait--approximately until Microsoft decides to expose all of IE's code to third-party developers.
As noksagt's URLs point out, perhaps another way of looking at this is that the situation may be backwards--rather than clamoring for an IE version of Zotero we should be clamoring for campuses to support more than just a single browser. On many "IE-only" campuses, the students, faculty, and staff are already moving on without the support of their IT departments; Firefox has gone from 0% to 25% market share in only two years on most of the educational sites run by the Center for History and New Media.
Our federal funders (the Institute for Museum and Library Services) were aware of all of this when they gave us the grant. Indeed, I suspect they (like us) realized that the open and extensible platform of Firefox presented a unique opportunity for building educational/research applications like Zotero, and that the barrier to switching from IE to Firefox (or to using two browsers, if users feel uncomfortable giving up the "official" browser) was low.
I suppose this explanation is no solace for inveterate IE users, but I hope that IE users who like the functionality of Zotero will give Firefox a try--and write their IT departments and administration about adding support for non-Microsoft products if they end up really liking the combination.
There are technical reasons to keep development on Firefox & there seems to be no compelling social reasons to migrate to other platforms.
Firefox has unique architecture (such as "MozStorage" (sqllite)) which makes the rapid development of Zotero possible.
Firefox costs nothing and Zotero costs nothing. There are relatively few people who would be able to install a Zotero-like application and not Firefox+Zotero. If people who usually use Opera or IE or some other browser want to use Zotero, there is nothing preventing them from only running Zotero for the purpose of citation management (and there may be fewer barriers to do this then to run proprietary managers like Endnote).
Also, (while this isn't true of other grant work), both Zotero and the platform it runs on (Firefox) are free/open source. I think that your tax dollars are being used appropriately & am surprised that you argue that their funding should encourage some other development model!
EDIT:Guess I was beaten by an even more informative and eloquent reply from Dan :-)
I have found that many that advocate Open Source are guilty of intellectual snobbery and poopoo any problems on bringing a campus to use Open Source. It just is not as simple as putting it out there. It is far more complex both politically and technically.
As a campus IT user, I simply will not accept my IT people telling me what software I must use. You shouldn't either.
Let's focus on that issue of policy, rather than ding the Zotero guys for making the only decision they could to achieve their quite ambitious goals.
The Omni guys might be interested in that; worth a try. Ask them.
I've actually been telling Apple they actually need to provide this; that way any OS X app could have access to it.