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The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

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Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#161

Post by mixmastamyk »

prima-facie wrote: post #62

XUL was ahead of its time when it was introduced by Netscape/Mozilla many years ago. It was a capable XML based language used to describe rich graphical user interfaces. Together with XULRunner this was supposed to be a generic framework for creating graphical applications. This was long before HTML became what it is today. Back then people still thought Java would take off on the desktop. I believe that most Mozilla…

And ultimately a huge waste of time. It set back Netscape and Firefox development for several years. Meanwhile IE6 took over, leading to the web dark ages while Mozilla reinvented the world.

For more details there is the famous Spolsky post about things you should never do—rewrite a product from scratch. Mozilla went one further and tried to reinvent GUI programming as well as building a new product.

Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#162

Post by zapzupnz »

catalogia wrote: post #86
Hamuko wrote: post #51

I'm waiting for Firefox to start using a native context menu on macOS instead of the garbage that they are now using and which doesn't behave anything like any other context menu on macOS. It's luckily on Bugzilla, so I can keep monitoring progress daily. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34572

In which ways is the Firefox context menu "garbage"? How does it behave differently? I never even noticed that it's not native until I read your comment, and looking carefully at it now the only difference I can notice is the corners are square (and that is certainly nothing worth complaining about.) Maybe I'm just an oblivious idiot, but it sure seems to me that a lot of MacOS users on HN love to blow trivial matter…

> it sure seems to me that a lot of MacOS users on HN love to blow trivial matters completely out of proportion

Don't be so dismissive. Apart from anything, that breaks one of the HN guidelines for discussion.

Not having access to built-in and user-defined (Applescript/Automator) Services is not trivial; these are a powerful part of what makes macOS unique and a major reason why I continue to use macOS. Their lack of availability is entire down to using faked-up menus rather than proper widgets.

Having widgets behave improperly is also an accessibility issue. There are multiple accessibility APIs built into the system that practically every macOS app built using Cocoa or Carbon hook into automatically; apps that use non-native widgets that don't take enough care to (a) perfectly emulate the behaviour of native widgets or (b) sufficient expose themselves to the built-in accessibility APIs not only make for an unexpectedly unpleasant experience but also potentially are showstopping for people with disabilities.

> But to my eye they look damn close to native and they seem to work perfectly fine

In other words, it's not a problem for you, so it shouldn't be a problem for anybody else.

Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#163

Post by petilon »

spankalee wrote: post #157
petilon wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, so plugins can enhance code editing. But what about compile-time checks? With TSX, if you have a mis-matched tag the TypeScript compiler will give you an error.

Same with lit-html and the TypeScript compiler plugin.

All I am able to find is this "intellisense" (i.e. editing time) plug-in: https://github.com/microsoft/typescript-lit-html-plugin

Where is the plug-in that does compile-time checks of HTML tags and attributes?

Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#164

Post by tomc1985 »

spankalee wrote: post #126
tomc1985 wrote: post #91

Everyone celebrates this, as if it were something worth celebrating. Yet all I see is another stake through the heart of desktop and native UI.

You don't think XBL was more native than HTML do you?

It was. It rendered to GTK which renders to native widgetry

Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#165

Post by tomc1985 »

Yoric wrote: post #113
tomc1985 wrote: post #91

Everyone celebrates this, as if it were something worth celebrating. Yet all I see is another stake through the heart of desktop and native UI.

Personally, I'm not a big fan of native UIs, so fine by me.

Native UI has an austere, functional beauty that graphic-designer-infected web-native UI lacks

Plus I don't need half a dozen chromium processes just to run it

Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#166

Post by [deleted] »

spankalee wrote: post #158
interlocutor wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lit-html needs a 1600 line library where as UIBuilder is a 200-line library: https://github.com/wisercoder/uibuilder/blob/master/UIBuilde... Yes, JSX needs transpilation but that happens at compile-time. Which is better, pre-processing at compile-time, or "transpilation" (i.e., string processing) at run-time?

UIBuilder doesn't do incremental updates at all. You might as well use innerHTML and template literals. That's a 0-line library :)

[deleted]

Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#167

Post by paulie_a »

prima-facie wrote: post #62

XUL was ahead of its time when it was introduced by Netscape/Mozilla many years ago. It was a capable XML based language used to describe rich graphical user interfaces. Together with XULRunner this was supposed to be a generic framework for creating graphical applications. This was long before HTML became what it is today. Back then people still thought Java would take off on the desktop. I believe that most Mozilla…

Sounds like a superior version of anything electron. I used apps built in it extensively and electron doesn't compare.

Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#168

Post by rndgermandude »

laktak wrote: post #93
prima-facie wrote: post #62

XUL was ahead of its time when it was introduced by Netscape/Mozilla many years ago. It was a capable XML based language used to describe rich graphical user interfaces. Together with XULRunner this was supposed to be a generic framework for creating graphical applications. This was long before HTML became what it is today. Back then people still thought Java would take off on the desktop. I believe that most Mozilla…

So is Thunderbird still using XUL or not?

Yes and so is Firefox. So far they only removed XBL not XUL, and while they are slowly migrating things to HTML most of the UI is still XUL.

Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#169

Post by pilif »

tzs wrote: post #156
Hamuko wrote: post #51

I'm waiting for Firefox to start using a native context menu on macOS instead of the garbage that they are now using and which doesn't behave anything like any other context menu on macOS. It's luckily on Bugzilla, so I can keep monitoring progress daily. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34572

There are a couple of other non-native things Firefox does that annoy me. 1. It has its own certificate system. That would be fine if it used that in addition to using the MacOS built in system, but it seems to use it exclusively. 2. It has its own spell checker, which is orders of magnitude worse than the one provided by the native MacOS spell check API. I can't think of any program I've used in the last few years o…

> LibreOffice is open source and its spell checker is fine as far as I've seen

Curious. Both LibreOffice and Firefox use Hunspell

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