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They want to kill XUL for Firefox so they can be all fancy HTML. So they have to kill Thunderbird, a XUL app. In a few years the all new HTML Firefox will come
by betteringred 11y ago
They want to kill XUL for Firefox so they can be all fancy HTML. So they have to kill Thunderbird, a XUL app.
In a few years the all new HTML Firefox will come out. My bet is that it will suck. It will lack a TON of features that the existing Firefox has, but hey, it's all HTML! And you won't be able to stick on the old one, because within a week or two some critical security flaw will be discovered and eventually (like six weeks later) they'll stop supporting those for old Firefox.
Initially the HTML Firefox will suck. When you take an app that's been worked on for 15 or so years and then replace it's UI you're going to lose a TON of features. They'll slowly reintroduce some of the most popular features (hamburger menu will be priority #1!) but there will be a TON that they will not reintroduce. Why? Because when they were first introduced a decade ago it was a cool idea someone had, and no one knew how popular it would be, so heck, why not implement it. But now they know that only 10 million or even 1 million people use that feature, and they're only interested in 100 million user features! If Google Chrome doesn't have it, it must not be important!
As much as people complain about XUL not looking native, wait for HTML Firefox, it will take them forever to get where XUL was years ago.
They can't just kill XUL for Firefox though, they have to burn down the XUL ecosystem first so they're just releasing a new Firefox, nothing to see here.
1. They try to kill xulrunner as a project separate from Firefox. They try to move everyone to firefox -app.
2. They stop releasing binaries for xulrunner.
3. They deprecate XUL extensions.
4. They distance themselves from Thunderbird. They say it's better for Thunderbird. Yeah right! Thunderbird is built on XUL, it's not going to be rewritten in HTML any time soon, definitely not by volunteers. It's not going to be able to maintain XUL either, and when Mozilla stops supporting XUL for Firefox a few years after deprecating XUL extensions then Thunderbird will be screwed, but hey, it's not our project! We abandoned it years ago!
So when the crappy HTML Firefox shows up, with way less features than the Firefox of today, remember that this (Thunderbird) was one of the things given up to have it.
But hey, donate to Mozilla! $5, $15, $25, anything helps. Because we already make hundreds of millions of dollars and we do whatever is shiny and new, screw the "community" of existing stuff. We're fighting for an open web! (where you can use Gmail for email)
- toyg 11y agoIt happened before, with the transition from Mozilla Suite to Firefox. And let's be honest: XUL was just lipstick on the pig that is cross-platform development. HTML/CSS/JS are now fast enough to look like a slightly better pig, so here we go. Also, there's a generational shift underway. You and me could find crazy that people would openly choose to use IDEs built on HTML/CSS/JS, but that's what a lot of young folks are doing (Atom, VSCode etc etc). That's their world, that's what they like. An entire generation now exists, who learnt to code from web scripting rather than C or BASIC. They have taken over. It's just how it is. (this said, I agree that donating to Mozilla feels a bit silly, looking at how much money they make from commercial agreements. It's like donating to Ubuntu or RedHat.)
- ZenoArrow 11y ago> "You and me could find crazy that people would openly choose to use IDEs built on HTML/CSS/JS" Why is that crazy? Makes perfect sense to me, especially as the performance of the programming language element improves. Ultimately these IDEs are sure to make use of WebAssembly, which should take away the remaining performance concerns.
- toyg 11y agoIt's crazy because, apart from performance concerns (it looks like we love to make our computers slower and slower every 10 years), you're just discarding all the features of the containing desktop OS. Formatted copypasting, usability features, network features, etc etc... you'll have to reimplement them all, solving all the problems that systems developers solved 10 or 20 years ago. The OS will become little more than a very expensive pixel pipe. But that's what people like, because C++ is hard, native widgets are hard to customise, and everyone loves designing interfaces, so that's where we're going. I anyone ever starts making javascript-optimised CPUs and GPUs, they're going to make billions. At the moment we only have micropython, but who knows...
- danellis 11y ago> I anyone ever starts making javascript-optimised CPUs and GPUs, they're going to make billions. They said the same about Java in the 90s. Java accelerated CPUs never really took off.