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XUL was pile of garbage riddled with bugs. I've made Todo app in remote XUL and every 30 minutes of development I encountered some major functional bug. Idea wa
by dvh 7y ago
XUL was pile of garbage riddled with bugs. I've made Todo app in remote XUL and every 30 minutes of development I encountered some major functional bug. Idea was great but implementation was terrible. I've used many UI frameworks over the years but when I see three letters XUL, the first flashback I have are all those bugs.
- vbezhenar 7y agoThat's surprising. I wrote an extension back in the days, I think it was Firefox 1.5, I used XPCOM to use C code and it worked well. I don't remember stumbling into too many bugs. Actually I liked XUL and I thought that it has great future, because it was so much better for UI than HTML.
- The_rationalist 7y agoWould you care elaborating why it is better than HTML5?
- kevingadd 7y ago"HTML5" + things like css grid and flexbox that you need to build UI in a sensible manner are pretty new inventions. XUL predates them dramatically, building UI in HTML at the time would have been an absolute nightmare. I know because I had to ship it in multiple applications
- The_rationalist 7y agoI understand that it probably was a better technology at the time. But are there any concepts/technologies in XUL that would be useful to add in the HTML standard?
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y agoIt's a minor problem, but CSS, unlike XUL, doesn't provide a way to crop text in the middle[1][2]. [1] - https://www.w3.org/wiki/Text-overflow_middle_cropping https://www.w3.org/wiki/Text-overflow_middle_cropping [2] - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Mozilla/XUL/Attribute/crop https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Mozilla/XUL...
- roca 7y agoCropping text in the middle is extremely hard to spec and implement for general inline CSS. Cropping at the start or end can be implemented as a purely paint-time operation. Cropping in the middle means you have to change the layout, and you have to define the layout of the stuff in the middle that has been cropped away in case someone does element.getClientRects() etc. It is far from obvious how that should work. XUL texboxes avoided this problem by only supporting a single plain text string, but applying that constraint to HTML+CSS would be incredibly ugly (and people soon be complaining about that constraint, anyway).
- loeg 7y agoHTML5 (2014) and Firefox 1.5 (2005) were not contemporaneous.
- vbezhenar 7y agoI think that XUL had better layout engines, suitable for apps instead of web pages. May be with modern CSS this gap is closed. Also native controls were nice.
- dblohm7 7y agoEven though there are still bits of XUL in Firefox, the XUL tech itself has not been maintained along with the rest of Gecko. It was probably not in much of a better state in Firefox 56 than it was back when you were working with it.
- sroussey 7y agoWe had a special version of firebug used to debug firebug itself and also XUL. It was never stable enough to deploy for general use, so I get it. But it did help quite a bit to see what was happening.
- tomc1985 7y agoRemote XUL? Never even heard of that. My experience writing regular local client xul with HTTP calls went pretty snoothly
- dvh 7y agohttps://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Mozilla/XUL/Using_Remote_XUL https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Mozilla/XUL...