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This was basically Electron before there was Electron.

It was hoped that other people would follow the Mozilla Suite's (before Firefox, Mozilla's standard distro was an application suite containing a browser, email reader, chat client, and HTML editor) example and use JavaScript, XUL, and XPCOM to build cross-platform desktop applications. The last of those, XPCOM (Xross Platform COM), was Mozilla's take on Microsoft's Component Object Model, where you would write lower-level components in C or C++ (using the NSPR, Netscape Portable Runtime) that were callable from JavaScript

Unfortunately, virtually no one outside of Mozilla adopted the XUL/JS/XPCOM stack. One of the few I remember was ActiveState's Komodo IDE.

I still regard it as a huge missed opportunity for Mozilla.

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I tried to adopt it, but it was (a) undocumented with no simple examples, (b) ever-changing, and (c) required you to use the Mozilla build system, even IIRC requiring you to basically build your code as part of the browser tree (I don't recall the exact details on this last point, but it was extremely difficult to use).

We ditched it quickly and just wrote a Gtk application instead.

A great case for why having a simple "hello world" application with simple instructions for building it goes a long way.

>tried to adopt it, but it was (a) undocumented with no simple examples, (b) ever-changing, and (c) required you to use the Mozilla build system, even IIRC requiring you to basically build your code as part of the browser tree (I don't recall the exact details on this last point, but it was extremely difficult to use).

you're right, and I almost mentioned some of this. I developed some extensions in 2007-11, and lack of documentation was definitely a big issue.

I don't get it? I was excited about XUL back in 2007 (call me silly) and there was a whole resource site dedicated to it, complete with documentation and examples. XUL Plannet (https://web.archive.org/web/20070607174323/http://www.xulpla...) if I recall it correctly.

Back then, I wrote a pretty slick client for some RESTful API (I think it was a photo browser for flickr).

re: "undocumented". I bought whatever big oreilly book there was on it - "building XUL apps" or similar (https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/creating-applications-w...) it was impossible to follow. Granted, some new-to-me concepts and such in there, but after having respected colleagues try to work through the book with me, and they also gave up, I had to conclude this was not something worth pursuing. I mean no explicit disrespect to the authors; any book is a big effort, and the publisher sometimes overrides decisions or releases something too early. In any event, I vacillate between 'what a big missed opportunity' and 'we all dodged a massive bullet there' - I still can't decide which.

I also had that book. I think a problem with it was that XUL was moving quite quickly and the book itself was out of date.

I tried too and had the same experience.

XUL always felt like it was just made for Mozilla. It wasn’t but when you don’t provide documentation, stable APIs, and good tooling, that’s the message that you give.

As a user, you also know other users will have trouble too and that just tells you that it won’t take off.

It has been used under the radar till this day. VimFX[1] uses it for keyboard navigation that works. Real keyboard navigation is impossible to implement with WebExtensions. And yes yes, Vimium-FF[2] and all the other extensions that attempt to do this are broken.

Here are some things that won't work with WebExtensions…

* Vimium-FF does does not respond to input when a page is loading. With VimFX I press the h key to “go back one page” and the l key to “go forward one page” and it works while the page is loading, in Vimium-FF it does not. Imagine, in age of 5 MB web pages, not being able to go back because the page is loading.

* Focusing on the address bar is only possible if you open a new tab. With VimFX you press o and you can immediately begin to type your URL in your current tab. In Vimium-FF an HTML/CSS/JS input box opens in your viewport. It can access your bookmarks and history but sorts them in strange ways and it does not understand bookmark keywords.

* Opening a new tab disables Vimium-FF. Firefox can be set to show either “Blank Page” or “Firefox Home” when opening a new tab. Both of these options will focus on the address bar and focus can’t be reclaimed using Vimium-FF shortcuts. Actually, it can’t be reclaimed at all. So, effectively, opening a new tab using the Vimium-FF shortcut t disables Vimium-FF. The ugly way around it is to install the New Tab Override add-on and set an HTML document as your new tab URL.

* It routinely and unexplainably fails when browsing some pages.

XUL and VimFX will be sorely missed. It still works in Waterfox, but who knows for how long…

[1] https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx/

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/

I think Vimperator was the same. I don't recall blank and loading pages, but it definitely didn't have the "page is not focused" issue all the current ones have (where you have to click on the page and then it starts responding to keys).

Yes, it was the same. Killing XUL killed effectively keyboard navigation. My only hope is Qutebrowser, but I'm not sure who wants to surf the web without access to any extensions these days.

Can and "wants to" are two different things. On iPhones and iPads, there's very limited access to extensions. So anybody on those platforms can't. (For now. The EU decision may change things.)

As far as keyboard browsing, doesn't vimperator cover that?

Vimperator was abandoned when XUL add-ons were abandoned, presumably because they couldn't pull it off with WebExtensions.

Partially, the reasoning they gave back then was it was too tightly integrated with Firefox's internals. Even if WebExtensions had all the APIs needed, it would have needed nearly a complete rewrite and they weren't up to it.

Ah yeah Vimium, for Chrome, not Vimperator, is the one was thinking of.

SeaMonkey browser is still maintained and is XUL based, it's the continuation of the original Mozilla browser

Latest release March 21, 2023!

It's XUL based but has lots of other Mozilla garbage, like the bits of Rust they jammed in there and which are now essentially unmaintained.

Why do you believe Rust to be "Mozilla garbage"?

Thanks! I'll likely use that until the XUL show is over for SeaMonkey. I'm currently on Waterfox, but I'm open to any alternative as it's owned by an adtech company...

keyboard support is already such a 3rd-class citizen everywhere, and then it gets further degraded by steps like this...

But hey someone could write a nice blog post about removing useful code! That person will soon land a nice 800k per year job in FAANG. Who cares about disabled people? Also who cares that firefox had a 40% market share when it allowed extensions? Extension model was hard to program so the code was depreciated and now Firefox has 2% share. But people responsible for this are not there any more.

From what I can see, Firefox deprecated the old add-on structure in August 2015, and the statistics then were ~15% usage for Firefox -- well into its decline from its heyday.

Yep. There's a meme that always pops up on these threads that changes made to Firefox to "be more like Chrome" were the catalyst for its decline, but that's clearly not true if you look at the data; if anything, that meme reverses cause and effect. It also doesn't make sense: people wouldn't switch to Chrome if they disliked the changes Firefox was making to become more like it.

> people wouldn't switch to Chrome if they disliked the changes Firefox was making to become more like it

Except they are and they do. Last I checked, Chrome was still gaining, not losing, on Firefox. Or more accurately: Firefox is losing whatever tiny userbase it still has, while Chrome already is the new IE (hell, even the new IE is Chrome).

For nearly a decade now, the only reasons to use Firefox instead of Chrome is, first and foremost, because Firefox is not made by Google, and secondly, because it had some extra technical flexibility that made the overall worse general-audience UX tolerable. The more Firefox loses on that technical flexibility, the less reason there is to use it.

The switch to be more like chrome definitely removed incentives that kept a portion of the user base on Firefox.

The ones who didn't care for such extensions might have jumped ship earlier, but advanced browser extensions were non trivial sticking point for a lot of the remaining user base

It makes sense if you think just a bit deeper: if Chrome was better in some regards (e.g. performance), and if Firefox removed things where it was better (e.g more customizations) to be more like Chrome, there is no reason not to use the better Chrome

I use both Firefox and Chrome (and Opera too) - and I can tell you that the current version of Firefox is not only a "Chrome clone". It is worse chrome-like browser than Chrome.

At the moment Firefox is a memory and processor hog (Chrome sometimes seems to have improved now). Only some ad-blockers keep Firefox alive.

When Chrome kills ad-block (something that Google seems to be working on), then probably more people will come back to Firefox. But at the moment Firefox (even with ad-blockers) is a worse product than chrome.

But think how many blog posts were written and how many people used Firefox as a stepping stone in their careers. Who cares that the product is just genuinely bad now.

Also Firefox was always "the" customizable browser that all the techie people used. It spread via word of mouth - "hey, your browser does not show those nasty ads all the time, how do you do that". Or the techies installing Firefox to their family. At the moment you barely have an incentive, since Firefox feels like mostly a re-skin of Chrome. And bad at it too.

It wasn't until 2018(?) that they removed the old system for real. And back then they promised to replace all lost functionality with proper designed APIs, to make all add-ons workable. Never happened beside some low hanging improvements.

But the problems with extensions started far earlier. It was a common joke how every bigger update broke many popular extensions, made some of them even impossible. In the early days of Firefox, extensions very growing wild and rich. But over time so many were dying a slow death. At the end of the early days (around Firefox 3 or 4), mostly nothing was left, and Firefox was already significant crippled in ability. The later removal of XUL only gave it the last hit.

Today it's basically a handful of popular extensions who keep this feature alive, and most of them are just Adblockers.

Have you tried the Palemoon browser - http://www.palemoon.org/ ? It is a hard fork of Firefox that still supports XUL and the old XUL based Firefox extensions.

There was Songbird [1] and Postbox [2] at least at some point was based on Thunderbird. I believe, Zotero [3] still uses XULRunner. I'm sure there were more.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_(software)

[2]: https://www.postbox-inc.com/

[3]: https://www.zotero.org/

Scenari is based on XULRunner too.

* https://scenari.software/en/ * Repository: https://source.scenari.software/projects/dev-core/repository

There were also, among others:

- InstantBird, a multi network instant messenger client

- Celtx, a media prepoduction software

- Boxee, a HTPC app

- Kiwix, an offline Wikipedia reader

Many of these either vanished or transitioned to something else (I think both Komodo and Celtx did).

And songbird, a media player.

> Many of these either vanished or transitioned to something else (I think both Komodo and Celtx did).

I know Celtx decided to drop the concept of desktop app altogether and went full web-based-only SaaS.

The desktop Celtx app was a good screenwriting program that was easily affordable for hobbyists and the pivot to a paid subscription service with less focus on just screenwriting and more focus on other preproduction activities left a small hole for a short while. (These days the Fountain ecosystem seems the best suggestion for the hobbyest screenwriter.)

There was also Miro which was a pretty neat media player with RSS Torrent support

- http://www.getmiro.com/

The Palemoon browser [0] also still uses XUL, and is in many ways a continuation of XUL browsers (was originally forked from FF 29, updated with various components from FF 50+, and with many other tweaks).

[0] https://palemoon.org

There was also instantbird - an IM client that let you connect to various IM platforms (MSN, AIM, Yahoo!, Facebook before “Messenger”)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instantbird

Given the popularity of things like SwiftUI and other declarative models it was way ahead of its time. What killed it wasn’t the technology per se, but rather all of the other things that you have to do to make a technology successful in the open-source community. I have an app that i am writing on SwiftUI. I hate it because it’s so good, and there’s no real way to make it cross platform. Taking a step back on any other technology. Feels like a horrific waste of my time. But not being able to target. Linux is a huge issue.

I agree it there were several missed opportunities.

Mozilla Prism was basically PWA before there were PWAs.

Mozilla gave up all of the head start if had with regards to embedability and extensibility.

I think Songbird was the most consumer facing XUL app that didn’t originate from Mozilla

> virtually no one outside of Mozilla adopted the XUL/JS/XPCOM stack

In fact those that tried (epiphany AKA the GNOME web browser) gave up on it because Mozilla were so hostile towards third parties actually trying to use xulrunner!

That honour belongs to MSHTML though, unless we count in the cross platform part.

I used to write HTAs all the time. Active Desktop anyone?

One of the neatest features of MSHTML was how everything was exposed as a classic COM object, which allows you to drive and interact and customize it with anything that can speak COM, and do a bunch of neat things easily.

Of course, that certainly prevented some optimizations.

Ironically, it was their own success that made the XUL stack die off. Mozilla’s work on making browsers better enabled developers to write ever more complex webapps, and we’ve never looked back.

That was by design, actually.

A long time ago, Mozilla had a choice between making XUL an open standard or investing in HTML5 and decided very consciously to invest in HTML5, rather than fragmenting the web.

Source: I worked at Mozilla around that time.

If I want to use the Firefox platform as an Electron alternative today, is that possible? Sounds like it should be.

There is a big need for a state-ful GUI markup standard, for both desktops and http apps, as HTML/CSS/DOM has many gaps and problems (see link), and reinventing them via JS/HTML/CSS/DOM has proven to be a chaos party.

However, I didn't find XUL very intuitive. For one, it seemed verbose for common stuff. If there were a rhyme and reason behind its oddball approach, it never clicked with me.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CRUDology/comments/10ze9hu/missing_...

Apache also offered a portable runtime called APR. Like NSPR, it had few adopters besides Apache's own web server.

Subversion picked APR, along with other poor ideas such as storing the repository in Berkeley DB, basing the network protocol on WebDAV, and running the server as an Apache module (mod_dav_svn). On the other hand, choosing http(s) as transport turned out to be a huge advantage.

Zotero also used (uses?) XUL I think.

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