Remember when a tab freezing didn't make Firefox's UI chrome unresponsive? I do, too.
When was that?
The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components
31–40 of 260 posts
Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components
#32Just peeking through the tracker history https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1397874 and you can see the effort it took to land this magnitude of a change -- pretty astounding. Big hat tip to Brian and the FF crew!
Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Firefox used to be built in a custom markup language called XUL, which had a number of security issues over the years as it got less attention than the HTML, etc used to render page contents. So this should help Firefox be more secure, by decreasing attack surface.
But XUL was simpler, wasn't it?
Maybe marginally so in isolation? But that isn't the metric that matters, since a browser has to render HTML. HTML + XUL is more complex than just HTML.
Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components
#34Poor web components. Everybody rags on them.
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.
This is one of the goals of Polymer- a cleaner API/abstraction layer on top of web components, right?
Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components
#35Security implications? Does this strip away a layer of security?
When you control the webview, you can establish fairly strong limits on where content and code can come from, same as with CSPs. Injection into the context really shouldn't be possible. You'd need to hit some kind of exploit such as an image-parsing buffer overflow, which any other frontend technology would be vulnerable to. Given that web tech gets a lot of attention to avoid those kinds of exploits, I think web platform UIs might be the safer call.
Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components
#36Does this mean the missing extension icons I got for a few days now are because of this? (I use nightly) or is this an uncorrelated bug and I now think that the rewrite is at fault because I combine unrelated information?
I think so, but that issue was fixed w/in a few days
Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components
#37can it cause perfomance issue ? I know for example the devtool is written in react and it's a lot slower than chrome devtools (I don't know how chrome devtool is written) and the javascript debugger is sometime not even usable because it's so slow.
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!
Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components
#38can it cause perfomance issue ? I know for example the devtool is written in react and it's a lot slower than chrome devtools (I don't know how chrome devtool is written) and the javascript debugger is sometime not even usable because it's so slow.
Chrome devtools is also a JS application: https://github.com/ChromeDevTools/devtools-frontend .
In fact it looks like it is also webcomponents.
https://github.com/ChromeDevTools/devtools-frontend/blob/mas...
Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components
#39Earlier 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.
This is one of the goals of Polymer- a cleaner API/abstraction layer on top of web components, right?
Well, forget about "Polymer the library", it served us well but it's very legacy at this point. The successor is https://lit-element.polymer-project.org and it's awesome.
Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components
#40Poor web components. Everybody rags on them.
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.
You are correct, they are pretty low level. You want something like lit-element or stencil (or vue, svelte... etc) on top of them for a pleasant experience.