Two years later : "Mozilla will sunset it's games team to focus on Internet for dogs"
Sarcasm aside, I saw XUL, I saw Thunderbird, I wrote code for both, it's hard for me to believe in Mozilla.
Mozilla also has products they've supported for a long time, including Firefox and Bugzilla.
> I saw XUL
I know they're phasing it out in some ways but hasn't it lasted around 15 years, since before Firefox? Some people think Mozilla stuck with it for too long. It's possible XUL is older than a few (precocious) Mozilla contributors.
Every once in a while, the sheikh tells people to build a grand palace, then changes his mind before it's completed. A few madmen will stubbornly continue to work on it.
Every once in a while, the sheikh agrees to build nuclear weapons "because it's better if we do it ourselves in the open, than leaving our enemies free to do it in the dark". The fact that enemies alone cannot do it, is dismissed as a detail.
Every once in a while, the sheikh decides this or that market stall becomes an official Kingdom Stall, where everyone has to shop at least once when they enter the bazaar.
And so on and so forth...
For example FirefoxOS could be considered a failure but I think many things they researched and developed are now part of web standards, especially those concerning offline webapps.
Shitty apps and shitty tech :) XUL was conceptually nice but in reality a nightmare for efficiency and pretty much it was just hard to work with due to a lack of tooling and solid evolution over time. I don't know of many sad to see it go
You can't do the Smalltalk/JS speculation tricks if you're a compiled AOT language (actually, even worse: a language-independent ABI). So COM performance will always be mediocre.
Every company has its duds.
And you can use self hosted webmail instead of Thunderbird.
Can you explain why, or point to existing information on this subject?
And on Linux, Chrome's custom toolkit feels much faster than the Firefox XUL. Everything from opening new tab, switching tabs, menus, etc. And using Electrolysis doesn't help. So it's an issue with the XUL toolkit.