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.
The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components
91–100 of 260 posts
Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not. You just have to care.
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.
Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components
#93XUL 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…
So is Thunderbird still using XUL or not?
Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components
#94Earlier 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…
They don't close when you release right-click, they don't contain services, they don't select the word you are on. That's the stuff I've noticed in the couple of days I've been using Firefox.
One of the things that I use a lot that isn't on there is the "Look up" function/service to get the definitions of words from the dictionary, wiki, etc. Super useful and I miss it so much after switching from Safari.
Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components
#95XUL 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…
I worked on an application based on XULRunner for a couple of years and I do miss it sometimes. The mixture of (in our case) C++ based XPCOM, mixed with JS and XPIDL fine to work with.
What I wonder thoug is whether that company was able to migrate of it already or not...
Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components
#96I don't know if the move to web components somehow resulted in superior font rendering for Firefox on Mac, but I just checked version 71.0b11 and it looks great – at least as good as Safari.
I just couldn't stand the blurry text, so now I'll give it a go and switch back to Firefox. Although, the colors look far more saturated than they should be, like the orange Hacker News navigation bar.
Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components
#97Earlier 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…
They don't close when you release right-click, they don't contain services, they don't select the word you are on. That's the stuff I've noticed in the couple of days I've been using Firefox.
As I expected, petty bullshit. Firefox should do those things if other applications do and it's reasonable to say as much, but to say that it's "garbage" for those reasons is completely out of proportion.
Edit: Response to response:
Didn't I just say that Firefox should conform to the standards of the platform? Failure to do so might be severe, or it might be petty, in either case it should be fixed. In this instance the examples given are definitely petty, and they should still be fixed.
But to call it "garbage" is borderline offensive and definitely out of proportion.
> "removing OS functionality"
That is a very hyperbolic characterization of the cited issues.
Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components
#98Isn't this the kind of thing we've been looking to move away from?
I personally think that this modern trend of implementing, or even worse -porting-, important functionality in Javascript is very worrying. There was another recent controversial discussion of Electron on HN where I and many others shared our reservations about badly Electron apps perform overall. They're disproportionately resource intensive, shred battery life, hog resources etc.
I don't think that deprecating XUL is a bad thing, but is moving to another JS based solution really a good idea?
I've been a supporter of Firefox for a long time and intend to continue to do so. I tend to favor lightweight programs and while I want to continue to give FF my support, I'm concerned with how bloated and slow it's becoming.
Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components
#99Bah, I was wondering why it suddenly feels less snappy. Generally I am against Electron and other web based UI layers. However since browser must have built in web GUI framework by definition it does make mush sense from the architectural and business standpoint to use the same thing for browser own GUI as well.
Re: The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components
#100XUL 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 and nobody could explain
All those problems got corrected eventually, but by then it was too late.