6 ms·

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 sta

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.
    - kibwen 10y ago
      But lots of people did write apps in XUL. My first IRC client and my first FTP client were both XUL apps. I'm not convinced that Electron today is any more popular than XUL was back then (aside from Atom (or VS Code, based on Atom), I can't name any programs that use Electron). Additionally, XUL uses web tech, but it is not a standard and was never intended to be a standard (not even an informal specification exists AFAIK), so it's a stretch to say that Mozilla failed to execute on pushing XUL. What would the web gain by pushing it?
      - comex 10y ago
        Slack and Riot.im use Electron; Signal's desktop app uses the soon-to-be-deprecated Chrome app platform and will probably end up on Electron (AFAIK). I refuse to use any of them, having been spoiled by IRC clients that can actually handle large message volumes without flopping over.
      - wsy 10y ago
        VS Code is not based on Atom.
        __derek__ 10y ago
        It's built on Electron, which was created as the heart of Atom.
  - morsch 10y ago
    FWIW, and this is not make a point either way, Google Mail downloads about 14 MB, two thirds of which is JS. Most of that can be cached, though. It also uses 120 MB RAM after initial load, more as I click around. Figures as reported by the Firefox dev tools.
- no_wizard 10y ago
  I know this might sound insane to everyone, just hear me out. I always thought Mozilla should have built a Linux distribution (or rather, forked debian like everyone else ha!) and implemented their Firefox UI kit (Gecko right? I'm not as familiar.) and made a Front end for it that was smooth and easy to build apps for using web technologies, but could still run native *nix apps via debion packages. I believe that now as much as I did when I was younger, but the itme for desktop OSs may have passed. It would have been a hit I think. Well designed, well maintained, well documented. At least in my starry eyed version of this universe where unicorns exist
  - JimmyAustin 10y ago
    I think you might be describing something fairly close to ChromeOS.
    - no_wizard 10y ago
      Yeah, except ChromeOS is shipped with ubuntu 15.04 i think, and its heavily modified, and you don't have regular access to the greater file system, and the front end isn't really rendered out from blink/chrome, i don't believe.
  - qbrass 10y ago
    They tried that for mobile devices and failed. I doubt they'd have done any better on the desktop.
    - no_wizard 10y ago
      in my opinion, the last iteration of FFOS looked pretty good. Granted, apps were not there, no shocker. I thought they did a great job with it design wise though, and it had some neat features. I think if it was done 5 years ago it'd been a game changer for linux on the desktop.

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.
  - kibwen 10y ago
    But lots of people did write apps in XUL. My first IRC client and my first FTP client were both XUL apps. I'm not convinced that Electron today is any more popular than XUL was back then (aside from Atom (or VS Code, based on Atom), I can't name any programs that use Electron). Additionally, XUL uses web tech, but it is not a standard and was never intended to be a standard (not even an informal specification exists AFAIK), so it's a stretch to say that Mozilla failed to execute on pushing XUL. What would the web gain by pushing it?
    - comex 10y ago
      Slack and Riot.im use Electron; Signal's desktop app uses the soon-to-be-deprecated Chrome app platform and will probably end up on Electron (AFAIK). I refuse to use any of them, having been spoiled by IRC clients that can actually handle large message volumes without flopping over.
    - wsy 10y ago
      VS Code is not based on Atom.
      - __derek__ 10y ago
        It's built on Electron, which was created as the heart of Atom.
- morsch 10y ago
  FWIW, and this is not make a point either way, Google Mail downloads about 14 MB, two thirds of which is JS. Most of that can be cached, though. It also uses 120 MB RAM after initial load, more as I click around. Figures as reported by the Firefox dev tools.
no_wizard 10y ago
I know this might sound insane to everyone, just hear me out. I always thought Mozilla should have built a Linux distribution (or rather, forked debian like everyone else ha!) and implemented their Firefox UI kit (Gecko right? I'm not as familiar.) and made a Front end for it that was smooth and easy to build apps for using web technologies, but could still run native *nix apps via debion packages. I believe that now as much as I did when I was younger, but the itme for desktop OSs may have passed. It would have been a hit I think. Well designed, well maintained, well documented. At least in my starry eyed version of this universe where unicorns exist
- JimmyAustin 10y ago
  I think you might be describing something fairly close to ChromeOS.
  - no_wizard 10y ago
    Yeah, except ChromeOS is shipped with ubuntu 15.04 i think, and its heavily modified, and you don't have regular access to the greater file system, and the front end isn't really rendered out from blink/chrome, i don't believe.
- qbrass 10y ago
  They tried that for mobile devices and failed. I doubt they'd have done any better on the desktop.
  - no_wizard 10y ago
    in my opinion, the last iteration of FFOS looked pretty good. Granted, apps were not there, no shocker. I thought they did a great job with it design wise though, and it had some neat features. I think if it was done 5 years ago it'd been a game changer for linux on the desktop.