September 20th, 2006
OpenOffice to Feature Extensions Soon
By David Johnston
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews
In his coverage of the recent OOoCon 2006 (that’s a lot of o’s…), Charles-H.Schulz mentions that OpenOffice will very soon be getting Firefox-like extension capabilities. I think this could be a great idea for OpenOffice considering how well it’s worked for Firefox. He also mentions that there are plans to integrate Mozilla’s Thunderbird and Sunbird applications into the suite. This will bring OpenOffice’s capabilities even closer to those of its rival, Microsoft Office. You can read Charles’ complete coverage of OOoCon, including pictures and video, here.
Gord says:
This will not work.
OpenOffice is a sloth as it is. Thunderbird is nearly as bad. Add extensions and effectively combine three kinds of slow blob into one. How is this competition for Office? It isn’t. Office integrates better, operates faster, is way slicker, and frankly, just looks better.
I’ve seen what extensions do on Firefox. 3 and up and watch startup time go up. Thunderbird is molasses in Linux and XP. OO, as I said, takes too long to get going. I hear that OO devs have been working to speed it up… but these addon ideas will only set it back again.
Gord
September 20th, 2006 at 9:10 pm
John Corliss says:
Unlike some other people who reply, I’m not a shill for Microsoft.
Thunderbird, Firefox and OpenOffice.org all open slowly IMO because they are all trying to deal with the Microsoft operating system. That is to say, IN MY OPINION Microsoft is most likely, once again, engaging in monopolistic behavior be deliberately coding their OS so that competing programs have loading and other problems. MS might be doing this, again IMO, via their “critical updates”.
Once they’re running though, OOo, FF and TB are definitely superior to MS Boffice, Internet Exploder and Outlook Depressed. Thunderbird is much safer to run than Outlook or Outlook Express (again, IMO) as is Firefox compared to Internet Explorer. I’ve never caught a virus or had any driveby malware installations while using either Firefox or Thunderbird. Certainly can’t say the same about any MS product though.
Every time either OOo, FF or TB are brought up, it always amazes me how quickly somebody steps up to the plate to bash them. In fact, it’s downright suspicious how fast this happens, REDMOND.
September 21st, 2006 at 2:38 am