
No XBL Components Left in Firefox - mmastrac
https://twitter.com/justinfagnani/status/1187860260477734912
======
codr7
That's a non-trivial amount of hard work going down the drain right there.

I'm not saying it was the right thing to do, but XUL and the component
architecture were major reasons Mozilla took forever to be released, and then
forever again to become usable.

And then a major reason why Firefox extensions became a thing long before
using web tech was an option.

I tried to find uses for it back in the days, read a book and played around
with it. What killed it for me was hooking into C meant dealing with Mozilla's
internals a lot more than I would have preferred. These days serverless is
common, but back then it was practically unheard of.

I did use Songbird [0] for a while, but it was always slow and buggy for me.
And it never really went anywhere, not for a lack of trying from the looks of
it.

ActiveX, Corba, Bonobo; they always seem to get so complex and bloated that no
one wants anything to do with them when there are other options.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_\(software\))

~~~
pjmlp
They only get so complex when people insist into plugging a square into a
round pet, like using said technologies from C, writing everything by hand.

Using ActiveX, nowadays COM/UWP, is never an issue from Delphi, C++ Builder,
.NET, Visual C++ via MFC, C++/CX, C++/WinRT, Eiffel.

~~~
codr7
It's mostly a thick layer of lip stick though, as soon as something doesn't
work you start paying for building on top an epic tower of crufty
abstractions.

I once did some Java EE in Eclipse. They both look mostly the same to me. A
mountain of crufty crap covered with as much lip stick as it took to make it
sort of flop along.

I'm sorry if I'm stepping on toes here, this is just my experience. May I ask
what you're using component frameworks for these days? I spent 13 years
professionally writing reservation and accounting client/server apps in Delphi
but never even came close.

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tomc1985
XUL was amazing, and they abandoned it.

This obsession with making everything "web" friendly is backsliding desktop
into horrible, non-native UI.

~~~
ainar-g
What is the closest thing we have left that is close to “mostly declarative
GUI”? QML? Tk? Please don't say Electron.

~~~
zerkten
XAML, but it Microsoft-specific. While not completely uniform its use does
extend across desktop and mobile. I wouldn't make the argument that it's
intuitive or simple, but it is powerful.

~~~
pjmlp
JavaFX and QML are pretty much based on XAML.

~~~
zaphirplane
Xaml and Javafx where released within 6 months of each other I kinda expect
parallel implementation rather than copying. Just form the dates in Wikipedia

~~~
pjmlp
JavaFX was initially J3, and then it was rebooted into XAML like.

Also you're forgetting Longhorn SDK was available as preview before the
project was canned.

But yeah just conspiracy theories from my side.

------
johnchristopher
Will
[https://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.x...](https://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul)
be updated :-) ?

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pram
Back in the early 00s I was actually shocked that no one attempted to make a
desktop environment, or at least applications, using XUL and Gecko. Sure there
was Chatzilla but I never saw like a file browser, or an mp3 player.

Now we have Electron and all my wildest dreams came true.

~~~
xahrepap
There was Songbird:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_\(software\))
But that's the only other thing outside of Mozilla's umbrella that I can think
of.

~~~
pram
Wow I actually used songbird too. Totally forgot that existed!

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Endy
Just gonna share a link here, and I imagine that you'll be able to figure out
all of my comments on the whole situation by the fact that it's on top of my
bookmarks - and that I use three of the Allied programs listed.

[http://thereisonlyxul.org/](http://thereisonlyxul.org/)

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vsskanth
If I understand this correctly, do they mean Firefox desktop GUI is rendered
using HTML elements? I understand chrome UI controls are based on skia.

If yes, is this available as some kind of framework that can be used to
develop custom desktop applications (like Qt)?

~~~
roca
Getting rid of XBL is a big and good step, but XUL is still being used.
They're working on getting rid of that too. It's not all HTML yet.

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anonymousiam
Everything old is new again. Anybody remember HotJava (from over 20 years
ago)?

~~~
coribuci
And windows 10 which has the same look and feel like windows 1.0 ?

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ahbyb
>And now a major browser's UI is built with web components!

Proud that you need to use your HTML/JS engine to render your UI instead of
using faster native code? I mean you have the opportunity of getting rid of
XUL and instead you change it... for something similar?

~~~
dralley
The browser UI was already rendered by Gecko, that's how XUL and XBL work.
It's just that it's rendered by parts of Gecko that aren't used by anything
else on the web, and so in honesty those paths probably had less optimization,
not more.

~~~
stefan_
That sounds like a great thing, because the Web is where we applaud people if
their site renders in a second, enough time for a modern processor to render a
full fricking playthrough of the original Doom.

