5 ms·

> the way Thunderbird is designed was that it was a kind-of-fork of Firefox, and too many resources were being wasted just keeping the "fork" up to date from c

by M_- 10y ago

> the way Thunderbird is designed was that it was a kind-of-fork of Firefox, and too many resources were being wasted just keeping the "fork" up to date from changes to internal Firefox APIs. No. Thunderbird was built against something that the Mozilla foundation used to tout as the future of building software in general: XUL. And there also was a XULRunner which was to Gecko/Firefox what Electron is to Blink/Chrome: a way to develop native apps using the browser engine as a UI toolkit. The difference with electron is that it was built with more native-apps facilities, like spawning up Wizard dialogs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XUL/Tutorial/Creating_a_Wizard https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XUL/Tu... All written in their XML. It wasn't developed specifically for Thunderbird. Firefox is also built on top of the same technologies. XULRunner versions were released concurrently with new Firefox versions. The reason why Thunderbird is a dead is because XUL is dead, or rather, will die soon. They are rewriting everything related to UI in Firefox and also terminating the traditional addon API which.. required XUL, in favor of Chrome's addon API. Thunderbird is not the only notable app written in XUL beside Firefox. There's also Miro, Songbird, Google's adwords editor ( https://support.google.com/adwords/editor/answer/106323?hl=en https://support.google.com/adwords/editor/answer/106323?hl=e... ) and many others. Most software written in XUL has either been abandoned or going to die, anyway.

mwcampbell 10y ago
XUL was the future of old-school, heavy desktop applications. But people generally aren't interested in those anymore. At least HTML and the rest of the web stack work OK on mobile platforms.
- Dylan16807 10y ago
  What definition of heavy are you using here? Because despite often being 'thin clients', most of the programs I run that embed HTML engines for the UI end up being stupendously resource-intensive compared to their native equivalents.
  - kibwen 10y ago
    I think that your parent commentator is noting that people pretty much just stopped writing desktop apps altogether, at least relative to webapps. In my childhood I downloaded desktop apps left and right for everything, but nowadays I only download apps in two categories: developer tools and Steam games. E.g. something like http://hirnsohle.de/test/fractalLab/ http://hirnsohle.de/test/fractalLab/ would have invariably been a desktop app only a few years ago.
- mbel 10y ago
  > XUL was the future of old-school, heavy desktop applications. The old-school, heavy desktop apps seem to be so unbelievably light in comparison to current electron-based craziness. But I guess we deserve all the bloat for not being able to come up with sensible common API for desktop development :(
  - kibwen 10y ago
    Thunderbird didn't lose to an Electron-based app, it lost to Gmail.
    - j3097736 10y ago
      Because Google usually does a pretty good job as far as performance is concerned. ie: They have a simple 404 page instead of some novelty page with funny text and a random webm playing in the background
      - chriswarbo 10y ago
        Maybe different Google departments have different opinions about such things. Chrome's error pages include a game http://www.omgchrome.com/chrome-easter-egg-trex-game-offline http://www.omgchrome.com/chrome-easter-egg-trex-game-offline
        comex 10y ago
        But performance-wise, the error pages still load instantly and don't waste CPU when the game isn't activated, so who cares? ...though I don't know why anyone would care about slow 404 pages either, given that they should be rarely visited and quickly left.
    - toyg 10y ago
      Yes, but we're talking about XUL the platform. That platform was built with the same use-case in mind that Electron has: allowing people to build cross-platform desktop applications with web technologies (html, js etc). Unfortunately Mozilla failed to execute on that vision, leaving the field open for Electron and friends to emerge. Part of that failure was due to bad technological choices (RDF-XML was terrible), part to the unwieldy Mozilla legacy (the build system was notoriously byzantine) and part to them de-prioritizing anything that Firefox did not need. They had a working general-purpose JS-based UI runtime more than 15 years ago, and still the rise of nodeJS and html-based toolkits passed them by pretty spectacularly - because they had eyes only for Firefox and vanity projects like FFOS.

by M_- 10y ago

mwcampbell 10y ago

XUL was the future of old-school, heavy desktop applications. But people generally aren't interested in those anymore. At least HTML and the rest of the web stack work OK on mobile platforms.

Dylan16807 10y ago
What definition of heavy are you using here? Because despite often being 'thin clients', most of the programs I run that embed HTML engines for the UI end up being stupendously resource-intensive compared to their native equivalents.
- kibwen 10y ago
  I think that your parent commentator is noting that people pretty much just stopped writing desktop apps altogether, at least relative to webapps. In my childhood I downloaded desktop apps left and right for everything, but nowadays I only download apps in two categories: developer tools and Steam games. E.g. something like http://hirnsohle.de/test/fractalLab/ http://hirnsohle.de/test/fractalLab/ would have invariably been a desktop app only a few years ago.
mbel 10y ago
> XUL was the future of old-school, heavy desktop applications. The old-school, heavy desktop apps seem to be so unbelievably light in comparison to current electron-based craziness. But I guess we deserve all the bloat for not being able to come up with sensible common API for desktop development :(
- kibwen 10y ago
  Thunderbird didn't lose to an Electron-based app, it lost to Gmail.
  - j3097736 10y ago
    Because Google usually does a pretty good job as far as performance is concerned. ie: They have a simple 404 page instead of some novelty page with funny text and a random webm playing in the background
    - chriswarbo 10y ago
      Maybe different Google departments have different opinions about such things. Chrome's error pages include a game http://www.omgchrome.com/chrome-easter-egg-trex-game-offline http://www.omgchrome.com/chrome-easter-egg-trex-game-offline
      - comex 10y ago
        But performance-wise, the error pages still load instantly and don't waste CPU when the game isn't activated, so who cares? ...though I don't know why anyone would care about slow 404 pages either, given that they should be rarely visited and quickly left.
  - toyg 10y ago
    Yes, but we're talking about XUL the platform. That platform was built with the same use-case in mind that Electron has: allowing people to build cross-platform desktop applications with web technologies (html, js etc). Unfortunately Mozilla failed to execute on that vision, leaving the field open for Electron and friends to emerge. Part of that failure was due to bad technological choices (RDF-XML was terrible), part to the unwieldy Mozilla legacy (the build system was notoriously byzantine) and part to them de-prioritizing anything that Firefox did not need. They had a working general-purpose JS-based UI runtime more than 15 years ago, and still the rise of nodeJS and html-based toolkits passed them by pretty spectacularly - because they had eyes only for Firefox and vanity projects like FFOS.