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No XBL Components Left in Firefox

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Re: No XBL Components Left in Firefox

#11

Post by adrian17 »

ahbyb wrote: post #2

>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?

As for XBL: as far as I understand, it was closer to Custom Elements - defined at XML/JS layer instead of with native code. In fact it was so similar that FF developers made a tool that tried to automatically convert an XBL binding to equivalent Custom Element (similar to Python's 2to3).

Re: No XBL Components Left in Firefox

#12

Post by dvh »

tomc1985 wrote: post #4

XUL was amazing, and they abandoned it. This obsession with making everything "web" friendly is backsliding desktop into horrible, non-native UI.

XUL was pile of garbage riddled with bugs. I've made Todo app in remote XUL and every 30 minutes of development I encountered some major functional bug. Idea was great but implementation was terrible. I've used many UI frameworks over the years but when I see three letters XUL, the first flashback I have are all those bugs.

Re: No XBL Components Left in Firefox

#13

Post by FussyZeus »

ainar-g wrote: post #5
tomc1985 wrote: post #4

XUL was amazing, and they abandoned it. This obsession with making everything "web" friendly is backsliding desktop into horrible, non-native UI.

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

Ugh, Electron. I'm sure there are ways to make it good but sweet Jesus Electron is not it, at all.

Re: No XBL Components Left in Firefox

#14

Post by vbezhenar »

dvh wrote: post #12
tomc1985 wrote: post #4

XUL was amazing, and they abandoned it. This obsession with making everything "web" friendly is backsliding desktop into horrible, non-native UI.

XUL was pile of garbage riddled with bugs. I've made Todo app in remote XUL and every 30 minutes of development I encountered some major functional bug. Idea was great but implementation was terrible. I've used many UI frameworks over the years but when I see three letters XUL, the first flashback I have are all those bugs.

That's surprising. I wrote an extension back in the days, I think it was Firefox 1.5, I used XPCOM to use C code and it worked well. I don't remember stumbling into too many bugs. Actually I liked XUL and I thought that it has great future, because it was so much better for UI than HTML.

Re: No XBL Components Left in Firefox

#15

Post by sroussey »

dvh wrote: post #12
tomc1985 wrote: post #4

XUL was amazing, and they abandoned it. This obsession with making everything "web" friendly is backsliding desktop into horrible, non-native UI.

XUL was pile of garbage riddled with bugs. I've made Todo app in remote XUL and every 30 minutes of development I encountered some major functional bug. Idea was great but implementation was terrible. I've used many UI frameworks over the years but when I see three letters XUL, the first flashback I have are all those bugs.

We had a special version of firebug used to debug firebug itself and also XUL. It was never stable enough to deploy for general use, so I get it. But it did help quite a bit to see what was happening.

Re: No XBL Components Left in Firefox

#16

Post by djsumdog »

tomc1985 wrote: post #10
ainar-g wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

GTK sort-of fits the bill

I recently built something with PyQt bindings and it works really well:

https://gitlab.com/djsumdog/mpvbuddy

Re: No XBL Components Left in Firefox

#18

Post by tomc1985 »

dvh wrote: post #12
tomc1985 wrote: post #4

XUL was amazing, and they abandoned it. This obsession with making everything "web" friendly is backsliding desktop into horrible, non-native UI.

XUL was pile of garbage riddled with bugs. I've made Todo app in remote XUL and every 30 minutes of development I encountered some major functional bug. Idea was great but implementation was terrible. I've used many UI frameworks over the years but when I see three letters XUL, the first flashback I have are all those bugs.

Remote XUL? Never even heard of that. My experience writing regular local client xul with HTTP calls went pretty snoothly

Re: No XBL Components Left in Firefox

#20

Post by atalad »

Causality1 wrote: post #3

Mozilla, proudly celebrating the death of user control, UI customization, and truly useful extensions. Don't forget your custom userChrome.css is next on the chopping block.

The new and updated Firefox Quantum has UI redundancy issues. I can't believe they don't let users customize the main menu!
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