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XUL was amazing, and they abandoned it. This obsession with making everything "web" friendly is backsliding desktop into horrible, non-native UI.
Everything old is new again. Anybody remember HotJava (from over 20 years ago)?
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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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.
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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.
Would you care elaborating why it is better than HTML5?
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The new and updated Firefox Quantum has UI redundancy issues. I can't believe they don't let users customize the main menu!
Their strategy is to grind you down over time on whatever their users are doing that doesn't suit their grand vision. A feature will start out on the main menu then it will emigrate to a sub menu then it has to be done with an extension then it has to be done with a custom file then that custom file gets disabled by default but can be turned on and finally the feature gets disabled entirely. It happened first with xu…
It's default-off because it increases startup time.
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Their strategy is to grind you down over time on whatever their users are doing that doesn't suit their grand vision. A feature will start out on the main menu then it will emigrate to a sub menu then it has to be done with an extension then it has to be done with a custom file then that custom file gets disabled by default but can be turned on and finally the feature gets disabled entirely. It happened first with xu…
userChrome.css still works, and if you already had one they automatically flip the pref on for you. It's default-off because it increases startup time.
I bet it's negligible in almost every case.
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.
If Firefox wanted they could have created a new extension system with XUL that would also have the same limitations the web extensions do. For fairly obvious reasons they decided to transition to Web tech based extensions and used that opportunity to tighten up security as well.
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userChrome.css still works, and if you already had one they automatically flip the pref on for you. It's default-off because it increases startup time.
I wonder, what's the 95% worst case latency for a stat on a 5400 RPM laptop drive from 10 years ago? Assuming of course that the drive is already spinning since it's reading a million other things from your profile. I bet it's negligible in almost every case.
Even if the average read time would be just 20ms per file, cutting out ten of these reads saves 0.2 seconds, which is already noticeable to humans. And that's under the unrealistic assumption that Firefox is the only program trying to read from that poor slow HDD.
On a sidenote, laptops with 5,400 RPM drives are still sold.
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Would you care elaborating why it is better than HTML5?
"HTML5" + things like css grid and flexbox that you need to build UI in a sensible manner are pretty new inventions. XUL predates them dramatically, building UI in HTML at the time would have been an absolute nightmare. I know because I had to ship it in multiple applications