The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

Post by JumpCrisscross » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 5:53 AM UTC

catalogia wrote: post #179

zapzupnz wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 d…

Post by skunkpocalypse » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 6:06 AM UTC

twgrp wrote: post #123

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.

Qt exists.

Post by skunkpocalypse » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 6:08 AM UTC

the8472 wrote: post #138

jasonlaster11 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, Firefox DevTools Debugger engineer here. We've focused on performance and quality over the past six months and believe it should be much better. If you're still seeing issues, feel free to record a performance profile and send it to us: - https://profiler.firefox.com/ - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=DevTools&... I'd be happy to fix it!

I find it mildly amusing that there's a profiler in the devtools. And yet there is another profiler that is at times more powerful than it. I have used the gecko profiler from time to time to identify which feature the page was using that slowed down the entire browser. Multi-process means just debugging a single tab doesn't give you the whole picture.

Post by ticktockten » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 6:29 AM UTC

Lukas_Skywalker wrote: post #77

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…

A bit of nostalgia: I created an application based on XULRunner at the end of high school. The project started out as a Firefox Extension, and since I wanted to create a standalone application, XULRunner was the obvious choice. I didn't know much programming, but it was, coupled with the excellent documentation on MDN, enough to get me started. What I remember best are the following few things: - XULRunner had an inc…

Post by mixmastamyk » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 6:37 AM UTC

asveikau wrote: post #176

mixmastamyk wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.