While perusing the Mozilla Firebird Extensions page, I came across the Mozilla Amazon Browser, a tool designed for browsing their massive catalog of merchandise. I see it as another example of how web content is not necessarily best viewed through a web browser, as also seen in NetNewsWire and Watson. This is one of the first examples I’ve seen of XUL being used to provide a superior user experience to the original web browser interface.

Microsoft seems to understand the advantages of customized interfaces for web content, as evidenced by their XAML efforts, but will XAML lock you into using Longhorn in order to access content? XUL is open and available now, so I hope to see more software like the Mozilla Amazon Browser before Microsoft can lock-in major content providers with XAML. Of course, coexistence is possible.