Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

No XBL Components Left in Firefox

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 73 posts

Re: No XBL Components Left in Firefox

#21

Post by spankalee »

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?

They get the benefits of cross platform code, but now use something that developers are more familiar with, and the can get rid of a lot of code. Big win, I think.

Re: No XBL Components Left in Firefox

#22

Post by repolfx »

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.

There's JavaFX with FXML.

Re: No XBL Components Left in Firefox

#23

Post by dralley »

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?

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.

Re: No XBL Components Left in Firefox

#24

Post by nine_k »

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 like the early internet: full of amazing possibilities, open, and security-oblivious.

Web extensions are severely limited, mostly because of security considerations, that is, to protect against malicious code.

Web is no more a friendly children's sandbox it was in 1995.

Re: No XBL Components Left in Firefox

#25

Post by zerkten »

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.

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.

Re: No XBL Components Left in Firefox

#26

Post by 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)?

Re: No XBL Components Left in Firefox

#27

Post by kreetx »

atalad wrote: post #20
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!

Which menu? (The row where the address bar is is customizable, no?)

Re: No XBL Components Left in Firefox

#29

Post by pjmlp »

zerkten wrote: post #25
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.

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.

JavaFX and QML are pretty much based on XAML.
Post reply on HN