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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

#221

Post by lenkite »

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.

No - Chrome uses the OS certificate store on both Windows and MacOS and hence works with all internal apps of enterprises that generate client certificates for their users and manage the OS certificate using strict policies.

Firefox does not.

Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#222

Post by axilmar »

Was there a reason for XUL in the first place? Why wasn't Firefox built using some GUI library? I've read what the posted page said, and the comments in here, and the first results from Google don't give any reason why XUL was necessary.

To me it seems many hundreds, if not thousand, man years spent on something totally unnecessary.

Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#223

Post by lucideer »

saint-loup wrote: post #129
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

I see people (legitimately) complaining about the longstanding lack of support for Mac OS native widgets but personnally I'm equally annoyed with the new behavior of menus. The standard of basically every OS is that hovering the pointer over an item opens a submenu (if there's one). In Firefox, I have to click, for instance to open "Help" in the burger menu. The sub-menu then appears by replacing the parent, instead…

On the click-vs-hover issue, I actually very much like Firefox's approach, and wish it were more widely used.

W.r.t. it being an "old, solved HCI problem", it isn't. The link you post actually posits positioning solutions to problems inherent to the hover approach. It doesn't discuss hover-vs-click at all, and while these positioning strategies still apply to some degree with the click approach, the problems they solve are much less severe there (namely, the submenu doesn't disappear if the user takes the wrong cursor route to a submenu item).

Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#224

Post by [deleted] »

ergo14 wrote: post #73
mosselman wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean that it is OK to have messy code as long as your competitors do too or do you mean that since chrome is doing it, it can't result in messy code?

I see no connection between WC's and messy code. Can bo good, can be bad.

[deleted]

Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#225

Post by IanSanders »

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…

>It has its own certificate system

And it's great. If you're running it portable on another machine you don't have to trust its certificates

Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#226

Post by jasode »

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.…

>, so I'm not sure what unit of measure I'd need to observe the failure of Java desktop software.

When people say "Java failed on the desktop", it's in relation to the initial massive hype in 1995 by Sun Microsystems as the "Microsoft evil empire killer". Microsoft took the desktop threat seriously and quickly reacted in 1996 with a Java-clone called the J++ language -- which resulted in Sun's lawsuit.

There was a popular Java slogan back then of "write once, run anywhere"[1]. In other words, instead of writing desktop apps that specifically target the Win32 API, you write Java & Java byte code for the Java Virtual Machine. Instead of writing raw Javascript, code in Java to run as Java applets in the web browser. This was the same time period as the slogan "the network is the computer" that Oracle's Larry Ellison was also pushing. Both Sun and Oracle were trying to minimize Microsoft Windows' dominance with Java.

So yes, even though niche desktop software like JetBrains IDEs running on Java is a reality today, it is still somewhat of a failure when it's measured against the 1990s breathless promises.

It turns out that Java was much more successful on the server side. Ebay, Amazon, Google, etc all run tons of server-side Java. It is ironic that Javascript as the "toy" language to add a little dynamic interactivity to webpages over-achieved on the desktop while Java the "serious" language under-achieved its goals for the desktop.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_once,_run_anywhere

Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#227

Post by abyssin »

matheist wrote: post #196
girvo wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s been so long that I genuinely can’t remember what that full screen mode looked like! Do you have a screenshot by any chance?

The content stretches all the way to the top of the screen. No menu bar, no tab bar, no toolbars.

This is the only feature I miss from Chrome on OSX.

Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#228

Post by interlocutor »

spankalee wrote: post #192
interlocutor wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It handles all of that.

That does not appear to be correct.

https://github.com/Polymer/lit-html/wiki/How-it-Works#4-upda...

Excerpt:

update() simply iterates through each part and value (the parts array and values array are always the same length) and calls part.setvalue(v) for each part.

https://lit-html.polymer-project.org/guide

Excerpt:

Behind the scenes lit-html creates HTML elements from your JavaScript templates and processes them so that it knows exactly where to insert and update the values from expressions.

This is very limited. You need to manually update DOM unless your updates are simple changes in values of expressions.

Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#229

Post by majewsky »

steveklabnik wrote: post #83
user_50123890 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ticket opened 20 years ago, damn.

There was a very old ticket that was closed recently when a component was re-written in Rust. I can't find a link right this second, but if you could have told the future, it's kinda amusing. "Sorry, we'll fix this, but first we have to invent a new programming language. We'll get back to you in a decade." Frankly, I think it's pretty amazing that bugs this old end up getting fixed. Not many projects live even live t…

I once fixed a bug in Kolf (the KDE mini-golf game) which was about the ball glitching through walls if you hit them in the right angle. The patch that fixed the issue was rather huge, since I ripped out the home-grown collision detection and replaced it with a standard 2D physics library.

Sadly, my patch broke some custom levels which relied on the glitch. https://xkcd.com/1172/ is more true than you'd expect.

Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

#230

Post by mweibel »

jhatax wrote: post #195
dkonofalski wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's helpful. Thanks. Would still like for it to be in the context menu, though, but this will do in a pinch.

Another trick if you have the new "Magic" trackpads: Select the word, place three fingers on the pad, press down (force press), and you can see the definition of the selected word (will be highlighted in yellow).

Only one finger needed
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