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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

I believe that part of the idea here is that Mozilla is more-or-less fed up with XUL (the foundation of Firefox's UI), and rather than reimplementing it to serve as the basis for Servo's UI would rather just leverage the stock web technologies that Servo already supports.

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I think it's more like this: The Web platform (HTML, JS, CSS, the DOM, and friends) has evolved most of capabilities that Mozilla pioneered with XUL so we can now attempt a "stock web technologies" approach to front end development.

I think they already threw away XUL for Firefox on Android.

Not so much because we're fed up with it as simply the performance characteristics of low end Android phones and the user expectations regarding mobile browsers not being compatible.

Startup time is just so darn important.

Not being able to rely on Gecko for stuff that must be accessible immediately means that Firefox for Android has to re-implement a load of things. That's not a choice that was made voluntarily.

On the plus side, Firefox for Android loads up quite a lot faster relative to the built-in Browser and Chrome today than it used to in the XUL days.

Doesn't it still use Gecko though?

Yes, for web content, but not to render all of the UI as well.

Keep in mind that on the desktop, firefox renders the user interface using XUL and CSS. In this case, (I assume) it's just using a native android ui instead.

Yes, Firefox for Android still uses Gecko.

On the contrary, if I'm not mistaken Firefox for Android threw out most of the "webbiness" in the UI and uses native UI heavily. That's why it's not portable to let's say Sailfish / Nemo and other mobile Linuxes, unlike the old XUL Fennec.

Not sure why it doesn't use IPC embedlite though when it's already went the native UI route. It's used successfully for the Sailfish browser (which uses Gecko embedding): https://wiki.mozilla.org/Embedding/IPCLiteAPI

Because this code never landed on the upstream repository.

I think Mozilla never accepted it, it was proposed to land it.

Fortunately, a good embedding story is one of Servo's top-line goals.

That's good.

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