Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

briangrinstead.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 260 posts

Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#171

Post by Groxx »

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…

>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.

fwiw Chrome does this too. It's effectively standard practice for browsers - OSes routinely have very out-of-date cert stores, and don't regularly remove revoked ones. Browsers ship it separately because it's such a major security concern for browsing.

Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#172

Post by spankalee »

petilon wrote: post #163
spankalee wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This is the VS Code plugin: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=runem.li...

This is the tsc plugin: https://www.npmjs.com/package/ts-lit-plugin

Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#173

Post by weberc2 »

pmoleri wrote: post #160
buboard wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its also slow and bloated. You get what you pay for

Bloated, yes. Slow, no. You start at a not so low binary size and memory footprint, but that's it. VS Code is an awesome IDE built on electron and it's really snappy.

VS Code has not been snappy for me. Especially with large screen sizes and lots of widegets. For example, if I close the left-hand pane and shrink the window, performance improves considerably.

Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#174

Post by weberc2 »

buboard wrote: post #128
sixplusone wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately OS/WM/DE makers didn't provide a common API, so now web browsers are the "Lowest Common Denominator" for cross-platform apps.

There are a ton of cross-platform GUI libraries

As someone who loves the idea of a good cross platform GUI, there simply aren’t any. GTK and Qt are the closest, and GTK is garbage. Qt is awful, but manageable. You get to work in a bastardized dialect of C++ (that no editors understand save Qt Creator) or use a leaky Python binding (that still segfaults), but you can build things that don’t look awful. As far as I know, this is the only cross platform GUI tool for which this can be said (except for the browser-based solutions, of course).

Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#175

Post by interlocutor »

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 :)

Updates offered by lit-html appear to be very limited. If you change value of expressions it updates the DOM. What about larger changes, such as list items changing? What about child elements being replaced with new ones?

Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#176

Post by asveikau »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #161
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.

It's famous that Mozilla and Firefox went through many rewrites and stalled progress. But I don't think you can blame that for IE6. Some amount of that is due to the Windows monopoly and that it was preinstalled.

Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#177

Post by marcthe12 »

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…

Web browser have a massive NIH issues.

Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#178

Post by twobat »

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…

> native MacOS spell check API

Which is great when it works. But Romanian (my language) is not supported by Apple (even tough they sell quite many things here).

In fact this is a good example of a dysfunctional company. Apple managed to translate to Romanian most of their help docs but they can't provide a basic spell checker.

Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#179

Post by catalogia »

zapzupnz wrote: post #162
catalogia wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Not having access to built-in and user-defined (Applescript/Automator) Services is not trivial

It's under the Firefox menu. I use it frequently to trigger an Automator service for TTS, which pipes the text through a sed script to fix common mispronunciations. I use this stuff too.

Should it be in the right click menu? Yes. Is firefox crippled by it's absence? No, because that functionality still exists, just in a different location (and if you have your services bound to keyboard shortcuts it becomes a complete non-issue.)

I stand by what I said. I'm not being unreasonably dismissive. Many mac users on this forum in particular have a habit of blowing the slightest defect completely out of proportion. Maybe they're trying to emulate Steve Jobs' infamously toxic approach to critique. Calling firefox "garbage" because of defects these minor is a prime example.

Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#180

Post by FullyFunctional »

marcthe12 wrote: post #177
tzs wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Web browser have a massive NIH issues.

Hardly surprising for such a massive cross platform project. Catering to the particularities of each platform wastes a lot of effort. I personally really appreciate that Firefox works (mostly) the same on all the platforms I use.
Post reply on HN