As part of my day job I try to keep track of what’s happening in the various Mozilla discussion forums. Today I happened an interesting post in the mozilla.jobs forum: “XPCOM/XUL developer needed at eMusic.com (New York, Manhattan).” Based on the information in the post it appears that eMusic is looking to develop future eMusic client software based on Mozilla technologies used in the Firefox browser.
My best guess is that eMusic is planning to develop a Firefox-compatible version of the eMusic toolbar for IE; such a toolbar would be developed as a Firefox extension using the technologies (XUL, XPCOM, etc.) mentioned in the job listing. (Note that an eMusic toolbar for Firefox already is available from a third party, but is not officially supported by eMusic.) A more remote possibility is that eMusic is planning to develop a standalone Mozilla-based application, e.g., a replacement for the current eMusic download manager or an eMusic equivalent to iTunes. A twist on the latter possibility is that eMusic could piggyback on the Mozilla-based Songbird media player currently in development, either adding eMusic-specific extensions to Songbird or doing an eMusic-specific version.
In the end although an eMusic/Songbird combination would be quite interesting, I think a Firefox version of the eMusic toolbar is more likely, both because it’s a natural extension of the current eMusic toolbar concept, and also because it could leverage the large Firefox user base. However whatever is developed it’s clear that it will support all three major platforms: Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. That’s great news for all eMusic users.
Televiper - 2006-08-12 17:41
I seem to remember the Emusic had originally designed it’s own mediea player which embedded the download manager. I don’t remember it’s name, but it was later carried on as an open source player called Zinf. Zinf broke out of the ridiculous concept that the media player should be a tiny cassette deck like image in the corner of the monitor and actually broke the play list out into a column separated spread sheet. It also organized the music into a tree like database along the side, and you would drop stuff from the tree into a play list. I absolutely loved this player, and was dissapointed when the halted windows developement since it was cantanquerously buggy, and the shuffle was horrible. When I heard about Foobar I moved over to that media player. But, when I load up iTunes I think of Zinf.