4 ms·

Yes, they plan to switch away from XUL. I'm not sure about the situation with Thunderbird, but I believe Firefox will be dropping XUL this year or early next ye

Yes, they plan to switch away from XUL. I'm not sure about the situation with Thunderbird, but I believe Firefox will be dropping XUL this year or early next year. There are two sides to this migration. The main Firefox UI is being rewritten (how much of XUL remains after this rewrite is unclear), and extensions developed in XUL are being dropped. https://www.neowin.net/news/mozilla-is-working-on-a-new-ui-for-firefox-57 https://www.neowin.net/news/mozilla-is-working-on-a-new-ui-f... https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2017/02/16/the-road-to-firefox-57-compatibility-milestones/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2017/02/16/the-road-to-firef...

482794793792894 9y ago
The new UI for Firefox 57 is still written in XUL. It's just the XUL extension API that is being deprecated in favor of WebExtensions with Firefox 57. This deprecation of XUL extensions could prove problematic for Thunderbird, as it means that Mozilla can now move a lot faster and make breaking changes without having to worry about mass-breakages in extensions, therefore making it more likely that they'll leave Thunderbird behind at some point, but XUL itself isn't yet being deprecated. There are some long-long-term plans to maybe eventually replace XUL with HTML/CSS/JS, but they need much better performance still before that becomes viable. There are some efforts into that direction already[0], building a framework for it as well, and those mostly focus around Servo, as that will have the necessary performance, so I'd guess at least a couple of years still. [0]https://github.com/browserhtml/browserhtml https://github.com/browserhtml/browserhtml
brute 9y ago
There are plans to rewrite Thunderbird because of this issue. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14156251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14156251

4 ms·

Yes, they plan to switch away from XUL. I'm not sure about the situation with Thunderbird, but I believe Firefox will be dropping XUL this year or early next ye

by ZenoArrow 9y ago

482794793792894 9y ago
The new UI for Firefox 57 is still written in XUL. It's just the XUL extension API that is being deprecated in favor of WebExtensions with Firefox 57. This deprecation of XUL extensions could prove problematic for Thunderbird, as it means that Mozilla can now move a lot faster and make breaking changes without having to worry about mass-breakages in extensions, therefore making it more likely that they'll leave Thunderbird behind at some point, but XUL itself isn't yet being deprecated. There are some long-long-term plans to maybe eventually replace XUL with HTML/CSS/JS, but they need much better performance still before that becomes viable. There are some efforts into that direction already[0], building a framework for it as well, and those mostly focus around Servo, as that will have the necessary performance, so I'd guess at least a couple of years still. [0]https://github.com/browserhtml/browserhtml https://github.com/browserhtml/browserhtml
brute 9y ago
There are plans to rewrite Thunderbird because of this issue. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14156251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14156251