No XBL Components Left in Firefox
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I'm not saying it was the right thing to do, but XUL and the component architecture were major reasons Mozilla took forever to be released, and then forever again to become usable.
And then a major reason why Firefox extensions became a thing long before using web tech was an option.
I tried to find uses for it back in the days, read a book and played around with it. What killed it for me was hooking into C meant dealing with Mozilla's internals a lot more than I would have preferred. These days serverless is common, but back then it was practically unheard of.
I did use Songbird [0] for a while, but it was always slow and buggy for me. And it never really went anywhere, not for a lack of trying from the looks of it.
ActiveX, Corba, Bonobo; they always seem to get so complex and bloated that no one wants anything to do with them when there are other options.
The only experience I've had with any of these technologies that didn't end up inducing nausea was ATL. It made COM/ActiveX tolerable for common, simple use cases. I learned the CRTP while writing ATL components and applied it in my own C++ work to some success.
Using ActiveX, nowadays COM/UWP, is never an issue from Delphi, C++ Builder, .NET, Visual C++ via MFC, C++/CX, C++/WinRT, Eiffel.
I once did some Java EE in Eclipse. They both look mostly the same to me. A mountain of crufty crap covered with as much lip stick as it took to make it sort of flop along.
I'm sorry if I'm stepping on toes here, this is just my experience. May I ask what you're using component frameworks for these days? I spent 13 years professionally writing reservation and accounting client/server apps in Delphi but never even came close.
This obsession with making everything "web" friendly is backsliding desktop into horrible, non-native UI.
[1] - https://www.w3.org/wiki/Text-overflow_middle_cropping
[2] - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Mozilla/XUL...
XUL texboxes avoided this problem by only supporting a single plain text string, but applying that constraint to HTML+CSS would be incredibly ugly (and people soon be complaining about that constraint, anyway).
Web extensions are severely limited, mostly because of security considerations, that is, to protect against malicious code.
Web is no more a friendly children's sandbox it was in 1995.
If Firefox wanted they could have created a new extension system with XUL that would also have the same limitations the web extensions do. For fairly obvious reasons they decided to transition to Web tech based extensions and used that opportunity to tighten up security as well.
Only in the "cannot fuck up your computer" kind of way. All addons I've installed still require "Access your data for all websites", thus have full access to my online life. Thus I only install addons from sources/authors i trust, just like back when jQuery was the coolest thing.
Also you're forgetting Longhorn SDK was available as preview before the project was canned.
But yeah just conspiracy theories from my side.
I used to build a Firefox addon and the things you could do were amazing -- I could render into the status bar and popup a native window fed with data from a remote server. All from an XML file and some javascript! And you could style it with CSS!
The hacks and contortions addons have to go through now just to do something like that are insane, and the results are almost always janky as fuck.
Now we have Electron and all my wildest dreams came true.
If yes, is this available as some kind of framework that can be used to develop custom desktop applications (like Qt)?
Proud that you need to use your HTML/JS engine to render your UI instead of using faster native code? I mean you have the opportunity of getting rid of XUL and instead you change it... for something similar?