4 ms·

> electron eats so much cpu & memory simply because it's > still a web browser, it has to support all those 20 years > of HTML/CSS history and it was designed

• marktangotango 8y ago
  I often wonder why/how xulrunner has descended into obscurity while electron has blossomed. Anyone have input on that?
  • zmix 8y ago
    If I'd give you an honest answer, I'd be downvoted to hell ;-)
    • zmix 8y ago
      See?
      • roywiggins 8y ago
        Comments about downvoting are nearly always downvoted.
      • yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
        You didn't give an answer; your post was downvoted for not contributing anything.
      • dang 8y ago
        Would you please review the site guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN?
  • cweagans 8y ago
    I tried building something with xulrunner a while back and the experience was awful, IMO. I was up and running with Electron within an hour. xulrunner may be a superior technology, but if it's a PITA to work with, then nobody is going to want to use it.
  • drblast 8y ago
    I haven't used electron, but in 2007 xulrunner was such a pain in the ass to write code for it wasn't worth the effort for anything where you didn't absolutely need an embedded browser, and even then there were better options. Documentation was poor or non-existent and IIRC the API was based on the half-baked XPCOM because COM and CORBA were all the rage at the time it was created.
    • zmix 8y ago
      > Documentation was poor or non-existent That's absolutley not true. "Rapid Application Development with Mozilla" has been published before 2004. It is still online: http://mb.eschew.org/ http://mb.eschew.org/ XUL (and assorted technologies) is/were broadly documentet on MDN.
      • Rondom 8y ago
        Not to mention xulplanet.com which had been very helpful as well.
  • zerkten 8y ago
    Wasn't xulrunner based on XPCOM which Mozilla deprecated? I think this is one of the technical reasons for its decline, but I think the biggest reason was timing. When xulrunner was being developed there wasn't the same interest in desktop software. It seems like Chromium reached a point where you could build desktop-class software, but the distribution model wasn't right. Someone then decided to adapt Chromium to solve the distribution problem and you have Electron. If Firefox had evolved to allow the tipping point experience that Chrome did, then you might well have seen xulrunner be that thing. It was years ahead of itself, but perhaps you could question the focus of the folks on the Mozilla side who were spread across so many concepts/ areas compared to the folks at Google - but I think that's for a different thread.
  • sametmax 8y ago
    JS had nowhere the popularity it had today. At the time, creating a desktop app in Javascript was not regarded as serious. The reason electron became popular is because so many people from other fields (designers, integraters, students...) learn programming through copy / pasting JS and wanted JS for everything. Hence node. And now electron.
    • zmix 8y ago
      Firefox, Thunderbird (and their spin offs) were all considered serious desktop apps. They all were written with XPFE/XULRunner.
      • TeMPOraL 8y ago
        They didn't advertise that much, though. I only learned about XULRunner when I was trying out a keyboard-driven browser (Conkeror). Unlike Electron, XUL wasn't promoted.
        • zmix 8y ago
          And that is the main reason, IMO. Mozilla Inc. never wanted to do more with it.
    • cztomsik 8y ago
      uh, I wouldn't say electron got popular because of copy-pasting newbies. webapp development is a lot of work and SPAs are actually even harder... and so is server development with node. I love javascript, yet I don't think it's suitable for everything. electron got popular, because companies could reuse code and tooling, only for the cost of cpu & memory
  • zmix 8y ago
    In the early 2000's there many people, who'd want to develop with XUL (especially Intranet solutions were often done this way by people, who wanted an alternative to Microsoft technologies). Several people started creating IDEs or addons for Eclipse. Mozilla Inc. never showed any interest (or support) in this. There never has been an official schema or DTD for XUL, for example. I don't know the reasons, Mozilla Inc. hated their own (technical) identity so much, back then, all the rage was promotion of Firefox on the web (Firefox coffe mugs, Firefox BBQ parties, community videos, etc., cheap, superficial themeing (Personas)). So, they dealt with identity on the social level. The CEO, back then, was a female lawyer. It was very clear, that Mozilla Inc. didn't want XUL to become more important. If we compare the addons, that existed for Firefox with those, that exist now for the Chrome/Firefox type of extension API, they were hugely superior. Now it seems, that half of those apps in the app stores are being used by the marketing teams of some companies, to place their logo somewhere, so people can see it.
    • pimlottc 8y ago
      How was the gender of Mozilla’s lawyer a factor in this?
    • pvg 8y ago
      The CEO, back then, was a female lawyer. Really?
• cztomsik 8y ago
  I wonder what do you think about this: https://github.com/cztomsik/node-webrender https://github.com/cztomsik/node-webrender node+react+servo, consumes ~30M ram on my osx (if you precompile typescript files) it's nowhere near to XUL but it's also little more powerful because of react (vdom is more dynamic than XML, it will be possible to use react-devtools and it should support HMR too)
  • zmix 8y ago
    I am actually only interested in scriptable XML technologies, so pretty much like Mozilla's XPFE (XUL) was.