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Firefox.html: Rebuilding Firefox UI in HTML

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Re: Firefox.html: Rebuilding Firefox UI in HTML

#2

Post by icefox »

The browser shipped with Blackberry 10 was written in HTML and was a real joy to develop.

Edit: some more public details

The default browser on the BlackBerry 10 platform was a completely new browser application. The chrome was written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Being able to develop the chrome on your desktop browser or being able to run inspector remotely and using your desktop was very handy. The core was a command line application called webplatform that "launched" a url that was a "webapp". The webapp had API's exposed to it such as creating WebView's in or out of process (yup blackberry has had multi-process tabs for a while now...). One joy was being able to pull up the Javascript console for the browser WebView and dynamically calling exposed c++ API's in any WebView in any process to test out features or diagnose problems.

It started out as a quick little proof of concept I tossed together over a day and the upside was large enough to invest time into. One of the reasons for making the main browser in html was that as a platform we wanted web application to succeed. Eating our own dogfood we made sure webapps could handle the job. The API's that were needed were there, memory usage were low, startup time was fast etc. And if you search for reviews of the blackberry 10 browser you will find that the end result was a success.

Edit 2: Much more in depth information can be found on this video which was a presentation given at Blackberry Jam by several of my colleagues. Skip to the 23 minute mark to see some actual code of what a webapp browser would look like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZ8vxhTezvs

Re: Firefox.html: Rebuilding Firefox UI in HTML

#3

Post by passwordis »

icefox wrote: post #2

The browser shipped with Blackberry 10 was written in HTML and was a real joy to develop. Edit: some more public details The default browser on the BlackBerry 10 platform was a completely new browser application. The chrome was written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Being able to develop the chrome on your desktop browser or being able to run inspector remotely and using your desktop was very handy. The core was a comm…

HTML and joy in the same sentence. Whoa

Re: Firefox.html: Rebuilding Firefox UI in HTML

#4

Post by of »

icefox wrote: post #2

The browser shipped with Blackberry 10 was written in HTML and was a real joy to develop. Edit: some more public details The default browser on the BlackBerry 10 platform was a completely new browser application. The chrome was written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Being able to develop the chrome on your desktop browser or being able to run inspector remotely and using your desktop was very handy. The core was a comm…

What is that browser called?

Re: Firefox.html: Rebuilding Firefox UI in HTML

#5

Post by oatmealsnap »

passwordis wrote: post #3
icefox wrote: post #2

The browser shipped with Blackberry 10 was written in HTML and was a real joy to develop. Edit: some more public details The default browser on the BlackBerry 10 platform was a completely new browser application. The chrome was written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Being able to develop the chrome on your desktop browser or being able to run inspector remotely and using your desktop was very handy. The core was a comm…

HTML and joy in the same sentence. Whoa

Why?

Re: Firefox.html: Rebuilding Firefox UI in HTML

#7

Post by Morgawr »

Color me surprised, but when we get to the point where we run HTML to build a browser that is supposed to be the tool used to render and display such HTML... haven't we gone too far? Is a browser necessary? What is rendering that HTML if not a browser?

I mean, I get it, a browser is used to browse (duh) the internet, not necessarily to render HTML, but at this point we really need to ask ourselves "why are we doing this, again?".

EDIT: Still impressive though, nice proof of concept!

EDIT 2: As much as I hate the "Why am I getting downvoted?" shenaningans that people usually pull, I want to clarify the intent behind this post. I'm not flaming or hating on the project, it's a cool idea. I was trying to spark some insightful conversation on "where do we want to go from here?" and "do we really need a browser if we have gone this far?". If you want to downvote me, why not just reply to this post and have a nice interesting conversation instead?

Re: Firefox.html: Rebuilding Firefox UI in HTML

#8

Post by kibwen »

I'm very excited at the potential of the browser chrome being implemented entirely via standard web technologies. And given that Servo is never going to implement XUL, it would save a lot of effort that would otherwise be spent implementing a bespoke, minimally-functional UI (which has been tentatively named Crow, if the MST3K reference wasn't already obvious).

See also this other thread linked from the discussion in the OP, "Moratorium on new XUL features": https://lists.mozilla.org/pipermail/dev-platform/2014-Octobe...

Re: Firefox.html: Rebuilding Firefox UI in HTML

#9

Post by paulrouget »

I've built that. Just to be clear: this is a personal project, not a mozilla project (even though I'm a mozilla employee).

Also - many people find it silly to use HTML instead of the operating system toolkit library. But it's not HTML or native. It can be both. In this case, the HTML code define the layout, and we can draw native widgets inside (look at the tag in HTML, it's a native widget). For example, if you run the current build on Mac, you'll see that new tabs use Yosemite "vibrancy" effect. Native look and native performance, can, in theory, be achieved.

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