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.
No XBL Components Left in Firefox
51–60 of 73 posts
Re: No XBL Components Left in Firefox
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
XUL wasn't native.
It rendered GTK I believe? Which used native controls. I used to build a Firefox addon and the things you could do were amazing -- I could render into the status bar and popup a native window fed with data from a remote server. All from an XML file and some javascript! And you could style it with CSS! The hacks and contortions addons have to go through now just to do something like that are insane, and the results ar…
XUL is just themed to look like GTK it's no more native than HTML is.
Re: No XBL Components Left in Firefox
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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
Re: No XBL Components Left in Firefox
#54Back 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.
There was Songbird: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_(software) But that's the only other thing outside of Mozilla's umbrella that I can think of.
Re: No XBL Components Left in Firefox
#55Re: No XBL Components Left in Firefox
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
GTK sort-of fits the bill
I recently built something with PyQt bindings and it works really well: https://gitlab.com/djsumdog/mpvbuddy
In my previous job I wrote a couple of not-too-complicated apps targeting Linux in PyGTK and I found it to be pretty pleasant, except when it came to custom styling.... mainly because the styling language does didn’t seem well documented and i found it to be somewhat arcane. Didn’t stop me though and the project got done. I wouldn’t mind working with it again
Re: No XBL Components Left in Firefox
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
It rendered GTK I believe? Which used native controls. I used to build a Firefox addon and the things you could do were amazing -- I could render into the status bar and popup a native window fed with data from a remote server. All from an XML file and some javascript! And you could style it with CSS! The hacks and contortions addons have to go through now just to do something like that are insane, and the results ar…
XUL is just themed to look like GTK it's no more native than HTML is.
If whatever’s rendering eventually maps to native API calls I’d consider it native, and I’m pretty sure GTK does native calls. If XUL really did mimic GTK (which I’m pretty sure it doesn’t, a lot of other GTk apps had the same feel as Firefox back when most of its UI was native dialogs) then it’s the best damn mimic job I’ve ever seen
Re: No XBL Components Left in Firefox
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Even though there are still bits of XUL in Firefox, the XUL tech itself has not been maintained along with the rest of Gecko. It was probably not in much of a better state in Firefox 56 than it was back when you were working with it.
Re: No XBL Components Left in Firefox
#59Back 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.
There was Songbird: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_(software) But that's the only other thing outside of Mozilla's umbrella that I can think of.
Wow I actually used songbird too. Totally forgot that existed!
Re: No XBL Components Left in Firefox
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Web extensions are not limited because of any inherent limitations in technology but because of policy. 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.
Whenever you have a chance to do something in a declarative way, it's the better way to go IMO. Sad to see XUL removed... newer Firefox extensions are integrated much more poorly and are slower when the browser is busy (due to JS). Probably not noticeable for one tab though.