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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

#211

Post by jve »

Groxx wrote: post #171
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…

>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.

On Windows, Chrome uses actually uses windows certificate store.

As for Firefox (on Windows), there is a setting called "security.enterprise_roots.enabled" in about:Config which you can enable or push via GPO.

From docs it appears it works on Mac too: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/setting-certificate-aut...

Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#212

Post by anoncake »

saagarjha wrote: post #92
anoncake wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the developers of the web pages you use have to care.

Yes, that's what I meant by "you". But if you want to take a more active role in improving the web, you're free to interpret that "you" as actually referring to you.

But ultimately you can't get everyone to care. That's why the web will always be slow.

Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#213

Post by slightwinder »

topspin wrote: post #186
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…

> Back then people still thought Java would take off on the desktop. You know, I find myself using a substantial amount of Java desktop software. I license JetBrains products and earn part of my living using them. DBeaver is another frequently used tool. I've spent no small amount of time in Minecraft (the Java implementation.) Java desktop software even pops up in hobbies; SimSmith is one example. There are others.…

> but then there aren't any C# or Python web browsers either

There are python-webbrowsers, like qutebrowser for example. Unless you mean 100% and purely written just in python.

Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#214

Post by Yoric »

tomc1985 wrote: post #165
Yoric wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Let's just say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder :)

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

Yeah, I'll grant you that. Native UI is mostly likely more memory and cpu efficient.

Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#215

Post by sho »

> There was also a case where a user with over 1500 tabs open (scientifically considered a “tab hoarder”) noticed extreme slowness when opening the “all tabs” dropdown. It turned out that he had tripped on an O(N²) edge case, and the issue was fixed.

Good god.I've seen some ridiculous tab collections but that is next level.

Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#216

Post by eloisant »

marcosdumay wrote: post #100
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…

From my POV, it didn't catch on because: - It had all the problems of Electron in a time where memory was a much more of an issue - Low quality documentation that didn't go into the details (although it had a great overview) - Performance problems due to the high abstraction level and bad JS interpreter - Memory leaking that appeared on several versions and disappeared on other versions, that randomly affected people…

It didn't catch on because Mozilla never gave a shit about XULRunner, and they were clear about it.

In the late 2000's there were many companies who launched products based on XULRunner (Miro, Songbird, Joost, Tom-Tom...), but when they encountered bugs in the platform Mozilla's response was always "bug doesn't affect Firefox, we don't care". Even if you made a PR yourself (actually a patch at the time), good luck to get it merged if Firefox wasn't impacted.

Note that XULRunner was called this way but you didn't have to use XUL, you could use HTML for UI just like in Electron today.

If Mozilla saw the potential in their platform as a development platform for third party, it might still exist and have a bigger market share than Electron today. Maybe GitHub would have used it instead of developing electron, actually.

Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#217

Post by afiori »

sho wrote: post #215

> There was also a case where a user with over 1500 tabs open (scientifically considered a “tab hoarder”) noticed extreme slowness when opening the “all tabs” dropdown. It turned out that he had tripped on an O(N²) edge case, and the issue was fixed. Good god.I've seen some ridiculous tab collections but that is next level.

I essentially use tabs as dynamic bookmarks; as a stack almost.

I never use multiple windows in any browser because they are unreliable with tab reloading.

Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#218

Post by Crinus »

interlocutor wrote: post #120
ng12 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the API is really ugly. I can't see them ever taking off except maybe as an implementation of another library with a cleaner API.

What are you talking about? There is hardly any API. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Web_Components/... It is extremely simple.

First time reading this.

On one hand it looks neat. This is something i expected browsers to be able to do since i noticed that Mozilla (pre-Firefox) implemented (or ?) in JavaScript.

On the other hand it looks like it'll become much harder for JavaScript-less environments to extract data from web-pages as now an article on a news site could be something like and the JavaScript side will do the rest.

But being able to do something like " rel="nofollow">http://google.com/"> that in the background creates all the canvases and such needed will be neat.

Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#219

Post by madmulita »

Crinus wrote: post #218
interlocutor wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about? There is hardly any API. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Web_Components/... It is extremely simple.

First time reading this. On one hand it looks neat. This is something i expected browsers to be able to do since i noticed that Mozilla (pre-Firefox) implemented (or ?) in JavaScript. On the other hand it looks like it'll become much harder for JavaScript-less environments to extract data from web-pages as now an article on a news site could be something like and the JavaScript side will do the rest. But being able t…

Oh, wait for webassembly, that's gonna be fun.

Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#220

Post by fnordsensei »

marcosdumay wrote: post #105
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.

Most people don't like native desktop UIs. What is a shame, because we still didn't get something as nice to program for the web.

Oh boy, I've seen nothing to confirm this.

/user researcher (etc.)

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