Comment by zobzu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zobzu | Hacker News Reader

the issue is XUL, not Gecko-Gecko per se. tho I agree - XUL while providing this cool extensibility, gets huge.

just take a look at Fennec's nightly. what they did is wipe XUL. thats right.

- It's using Native UI, aka, it's using whatever the OS provides (here, Android's UI). and just runs Gecko in it.

- It breaks addons touching XUL.

- It uses very little memory in comparison

- It's freaking FAST. Puts Chrome, Opera, you name it to shame. Yes, really!

- UI NEVER lags. Thats right, fixes that too.

- Oh and it does support Flash for Android this time.

Then again, its a pretty early nightly of a whole new Fennec so there _are_ bugs and missing functionality.

Why I'm saying that? Well, despite the addons issue I'd wish for at least such an experimental version for Win/OSX/Linux. It's just that good.

Fennec doesn't use XUL for primary UI, but it's still compiled with XUL enabled.

Fennec's improved launch speed is partly due to the order in which components are loaded: the primary UI can appear before the layout engine is ready.

Compiling without XUL would shave some size off the binary, but probably not a whole lot. Most of the code involved in rendering XUL is the same code that renders HTML.

I agree. A non-XUL version of Firefox would be excellent. The mobile work in this area shows great promise.

Unfortunately support for embedding Gecko has been woeful, making experiments in this area difficult. The lack of an embedding story for Gecko is a big reason for it losing ground to WebKit in my opinion.

Err… you're wrong. Native Fennec doesn't use XUL for the UI. It still uses Gecko and XUL for web content.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Fennec/NativeUI/Architecture_Overvi...

Another great fact of Fennec (Aka Firefox Mobile) - the latest version is the highest scoring tablet/mobile browser on html5test.com, scoring the same as Desktop Firefox.

I'd love a browser without xul with native tab trees.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com