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Comment by chrisjc | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat related, but I listened to recent episode of the acquired podcast where they were interviewing Brendan Eich and there were some pretty interesting moments discussing the state of Mozilla/Firefox over the years.

They even brought up XUL which I was extremely excited about at the time.

On a side note, as a dedicated Firefox user it was very disheartening to hear that as one of the crucial people involved in Mozilla over the years he decided against using a Firefox derivative for his new browser, instead choosing a chromium-based one instead.

https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/the-browser-with-brendan-ei...

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XUL is still under development as UXP, by the Pale Moon community: https://repo.palemoon.org/MoonchildProductions/UXP

I'm not sure how they are dealing with documentation. Someone posted this link on Reddit's r/palemoon less than a year ago: https://udn.realityripple.com/docs/Archive/Add-ons/Overlay_E...

> On a side note, as a dedicated Firefox user it was very disheartening to hear that as one of the crucial people involved in Mozilla over the years he decided against using a Firefox derivative for his new browser, instead choosing a chromium-based one instead.

I felt the same, and I may have done more than simply dismiss Brave if that were the case. Although I do understand that Gecko isn't exactly simple or easy for a third party to build off of.

There once was a browser based off of Gecko that was very popular until the team removed all the features that users loved about it. It was written in C and GTK+. It was much faster than seamonkey and only ran on linux, but when all the good features were dropped, most people moved to phoenix, later renamed firefox.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galeon

> 2002-11-01 6:48 AM

> Mozilla is nice, but Galeon…WOW, best browser i’ve ever used, and it beats mozilla hands down for speed (on my system atleast).

https://www.osnews.com/story/2054/

What features were removed and what was the stated reason?

https://web.archive.org/web/20021229134102/http://epiphany.m...

"[Galeon fork] Epiphany's main goal is to be integrated with the gnome desktop. We don't aim to make epiphany usable outside Gnome. If someone will like to use it anyway, it's just a plus. Ex: Making people happy that don't have control center installed is not a good reason to have mime configuration in epiphany itself."

https://web.archive.org/web/20051028022736/http://gnomedeskt...

"As such, we've reached the conclusion that we have to change our approach if we're going to avoid Galeon getting stale or bit-rotting"

"Epiphany has a bunch of active maintainers who are handling the things that we struggle to do for Galeon. But you say: Epiphany doesn't fit my needs or I'd be using it already! True, so our proposal is to bring Galeon to Epiphany."

A lot of features were removed like the control panel, variable width fonts and the tree bookmarks editor. It was 14 years ago, so it is hard to remember. The features removed weren't documented and reasons were never given. It just happened and it was very difficult to roll back because of the changes also required rolling forward or back the GTK+ libraries in debian.

There was already a browser called Epiphany and Galeon was changed to mirror the features in Epiphany even if that meant there were less features than in Galeon 1.2.x and removal of features was unpopular with the users.

https://noone.org/blog/English/Computer/Web/Browsers/Galeon%...

EDIT: I also forgot to mention that Phoenix, later renamed Firefox, was developed for Windows first. Linux development was considered an afterthought. It was recommended to use Mozilla or Seamonkey.

Whoops, I made a typo. I meant variable width tabs, not fonts. There never will be a web browser as fast or as intuitive as galeon again. It is the end of an era.

When Firefox ditched XUL it lost one of its most useful extensions: Pentadactyl

Have you tried Tridactyl [0] as a replacement?

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tridactyl-vim...

Interesting episode. I wonder why they seem to have removed it from their episode feed.. https://pod.link/acquiredlp

> "They even brought up XUL which I was extremely excited about at the time."

Don't forget XAML.

I too was excited for these two things as well ~20 years ago.

There is no data. There is only XUL!

XUL still rules in Sea Monkey Classic and Pale Moon.

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