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Firefox.html: Rebuilding Firefox UI in HTML

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Re: Firefox.html: Rebuilding Firefox UI in HTML

#31

Post by maxerickson »

bkeroack wrote: post #18

I realize this is a personal project, but this is deeply amusing considering that: 1. Way back when (circa 1998-2001?), the Mozilla project started as a radical redesign of the next gen Netscape browser. One of the core principles of the architecture was that the browser itself would render the UI elements (using an HTML-like tech call XUL). 2. The Firefox browser (then called "Phoenix") was a reaction against the ab…

Phoenix dropped XPFE in favor of lighter XUL that relied more directly on OS widgets. Here's a message talking about it:

http://sourceforge.net/p/xul/mailman/message/1494849/

I think Firefox mostly started out from an urge to make a "Browser product", rather than whatever the hell the suite had become. It shows in the release notes:

http://website-archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_r...

A bunch of stuff about convenience and fast and fixing problems and usability is in there.

Re: Firefox.html: Rebuilding Firefox UI in HTML

#32

Post by Yoric »

hencq wrote: post #20

Way back when wasn't the original plan for Seamonkey to use Gecko to render the UI as well? Maybe they were too far ahead of their time back then.

Yep, and most of the UI in Firefox is either XUL or HTML, both of whom are rendered by Gecko. This is not the case on Android, for technical reasons (libxul is too long to load, so we rely on Java, which is pre-loaded by the OS, to display the UI).

Re: Firefox.html: Rebuilding Firefox UI in HTML

#33

Post by phkahler »

What widgets are used? (I'm not a web dev and only dabbled in that over 15 years ago) If you use native widgets, then you end up with a cross-platform app framework. If you create your own widgets, then you end up with a cross-platform GUI toolkit and app framework. Which is it? Either way, this seems quite interesting. OTOH, can you do apps this way with anything other than js?

Re: Firefox.html: Rebuilding Firefox UI in HTML

#34

Post by Yoric »

kibwen wrote: post #30
Yoric wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are discussions on that topic. However, everybody needs to realize that this is Paul's personal project, not an official Mozilla project, so don't get your hopes too high. That being said, I'm quite excited about that project, I opened a pull request a few hours ago and it was accepted :)

Can you link to the pull request? I'm curious to see it, but can't find it.

https://github.com/paulrouget/firefox.html/pull/17

Re: Firefox.html: Rebuilding Firefox UI in HTML

#35

Post by Yoric »

misuba wrote: post #6

Is there a connection between this and the old Chromeless project? (It doesn't say there is, so I suppose my real question is, why not?)

There have been many attempts at a chromeless app runner for Gecko, including Prism and WebAppRT. If I recall correctly, Paul is using a variant of WebAppRT as a runtime.

Re: Firefox.html: Rebuilding Firefox UI in HTML

#37

Post by nacs »

Reminds me of Breach[1] / Thrust[2] which basically lets you do the UI plus some low level stuff via Node/JS.

There is a 'browser in a gist' [3] using Breach which is a good example of its use.

[1]: http://breach.cc/

[2]: https://github.com/breach/thrust (I believe this is the new core of Breach by the same people)

[3]: https://gist.github.com/morganrallen/f07f59802884bcdcad4a

Re: Firefox.html: Rebuilding Firefox UI in HTML

#39

Post by paulrouget »

espadrine wrote: post #38

Can HTMLRunner be used as the basis of something like node-webkit[1]? What's its strength / weaknesses compared to that? [1]: https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit

weaknesses: I built it in a couple of days. It's ugly. Designed for Firefox.html only. Don't use it :)

Re: Firefox.html: Rebuilding Firefox UI in HTML

#40

Post by pimlottc »

Yoric wrote: post #28
bkeroack wrote: post #18

I realize this is a personal project, but this is deeply amusing considering that: 1. Way back when (circa 1998-2001?), the Mozilla project started as a radical redesign of the next gen Netscape browser. One of the core principles of the architecture was that the browser itself would render the UI elements (using an HTML-like tech call XUL). 2. The Firefox browser (then called "Phoenix") was a reaction against the ab…

Well, XUL was quite ahead of its time. Most of XUL has now been incorporated (and improved, and optimized) in HTML. Also, Phoenix kept using XUL, just a rewrite that didn't attempt to do everything from scratch, but relied upon native components wherever available. Most of the Firefox UI is either XUL or HTML.

XUL also had my favorite namespace URI of all time:

https://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.x...

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