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Comment by ljm | Hacker News Reader

I hope to see Firefox eventually providing an embeddable framework, considering that Chromium isn't just monopolising the web browser space... it's spreading into desktop applications through Electron. Left unchecked, Google will manage to poke its fingers into every pie within reach.

It seems like the ideal solution of using the OS's native web toolkit hasn't been successful so far. So the next best offering (aside from building on Qt), is to have an Electron competitor too.

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On Android, Mozilla offers GeckoView.

I don't think that there's a desktop offering at the moment. There used to be quite a few (XULRunner, Prism, etc.) but they all died from lack of love.

I regret XUL was abandoned - it was a great idea, but much ahead of its time.

Plus one. This was the beggining of the rot in Mozila. This marked the moment the went from making general purpose web/http based platforms based on OpenSource principals to builing a single a www specific advertising platform. I still use Firefox and support them financially. Its the best we have. But they stopped caring about anything other that being the frontpage to the Internet a long time ago. They gave up on supporting developers.

That was before Firefox was born, right? Or was the success of Firefox the demise of XUL?

I'm not sure what you're asking exactly but XUL existed a long time after Firefox was born and became popular. I remember using a XUL app at work around 2010.

XUL was the markup language used by the Mozilla Communicator Suite for designing user interfaces. It was what Add-on development used.

Mozilla deprecated it not that long ago in favor of HTML but stalwarts have clung to it and complained.

I use to maintain a couple Add-ons and developed some simple UIs for it. I was never impressed by it and it was easy enough to use so I had no objections either.

XUL was just a markup language to create interfaces, it became obsolete as HTML got refined.

Even to this day, XUL is far more capable than HTML. It has built-in widgets for many common desktop GUI elements that still need to be created from scratch in HTML+Javascript, and notably uses the native chrome of whatever OS it is running on to render them.

Abandoned by Mozilla, not by Pale Moon/Basilisk though.

http://thereisonlyxul.org/

XUL is a great idea but not for browser chrome. That’s an area where it is truly worth the effort to make it fast and light, secure and stable.

XULrunner was a great idea, so the executives of the Mozilla Corporation had to sack it.

You mean like Positron? That was abandoned several years ago. So was Spidernode, FirefoxOS/apps, etc. Other dropped projects include Shumway, the JavaScript flash runtime. Basically every interesting thing they do that isn't directly related to improving Firefox seems to get dropped eventually.

Then there's GeckoView, which they explicitly decided not to make available as a WebView drop-in to be available systemwide on Android. In this case, at least they seem to have a reason, though it seems to me that having an alternative to Google's WebView would be valuable enough to continue.

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