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While I understand from a technical and business perspective (particularly due to the security implications of needing to manually review each and every new add

by jd3 6y ago

While I understand from a technical and business perspective (particularly due to the security implications of needing to manually review each and every new addon) why Mozilla eventually went down the WebExtensions route, having personally revived the old XUL/XPCOM "MessageFaces" addon (a Plan9/unix era vismon/faces knockoff for Thunderbird/SeaMonkey) from 2004 when I was in college in ~2016, I was devastated to hear that Mozilla was removing support for XUL/XPCOM and the Add-on SDK from Firefox. Nothing that the extension achieved is even remotely possible anymore — adding custom column in mailbox Thunderbird XUL, custom icon vbox in the Thunderbird mail header, reading from a browser profile directory to display picons, windowed preferences, etc. I find this sad. https://github.com/JohnDDuncanIII/messagefaces/ https://github.com/JohnDDuncanIII/messagefaces/ http://cs.gettysburg.edu/~duncjo01/sites/messagefaces/ http://cs.gettysburg.edu/~duncjo01/sites/messagefaces/ https://kinzler.com/picons/ftp/ https://kinzler.com/picons/ftp/ What's most sad to me is that my workflow was never quite the same after I stopped using SeaMonkey with many of the famous XUL-based extensions (Old Addons Page, Chatzilla, MessageFaces, etc.) — it was aesthetic bliss, particularly with the Orthodox (Netscape/Mozilla Suite) complete theme. I've ranted about this in the past, but I still feel like XUL was a bit ahead of its time (see Facebook's JSX). Had Mozilla invested more development time in fleshing out the XULRunner APIs and marketing it as a universal platform-independent "native" UI language, perhaps the modern web ecosystem would look a bit different today. I fear that the web today is slowly converging, aesthetically speaking, through the further limitation of site interfaces and UI, into a corporatized unary devoid of any creativity/novelty.

narag 6y ago
I still feel like XUL was a bit ahead of its time But you said that you understand that from a technical perspective they had to replace it. That sounds more like a dead end than ahead of its time, unless there's something more? IMHO, it was the wrong solution for a number of problems. Most of them don't exist anymore.
- jd3 6y ago
  Sorry, i should have clarified — i feel like XUL, at a very early stage in the web's development, helped inform what advanced / platform independent interfaces might eventually look like (Facebook JSX -> React -> React Native, svgs, dom parsing, etc). In recent years, particularly through the proliferation of things like JSX, javascript with XML-based extensions seems to be quickly becoming (for better or for worse) the dominant interface rendering paradigm. I agree that XUL was, ultimately, probably the wrong solution due to a number of reasons, but its effects are definitely still somewhat visible in the ecosystem today. What i'm still trying to figure out is how we recapture the freedom and aesthetic creativity that thrived during the early years of the web. We can argue that this was mostly a cultural/demographic shift in users, but I would also argue that, as McLuhan noted, shifting interfaces (particularly through a uniformity of aesthetics) can influence culture.
  - narag 6y ago
    I see what you mean. Maybe some new app with a feature of creating something. Lately most novelty is in the consumer side.
jd3 6y ago
as an aside, it was also extremely cool/interesting to me that i was able to get the extension working with only a couple of modifications to the XPCOM api calls that had changed between 2004 and 2016

by jd3 6y ago

narag 6y ago

I still feel like XUL was a bit ahead of its time But you said that you understand that from a technical perspective they had to replace it. That sounds more like a dead end than ahead of its time, unless there's something more? IMHO, it was the wrong solution for a number of problems. Most of them don't exist anymore.

jd3 6y ago
Sorry, i should have clarified — i feel like XUL, at a very early stage in the web's development, helped inform what advanced / platform independent interfaces might eventually look like (Facebook JSX -> React -> React Native, svgs, dom parsing, etc). In recent years, particularly through the proliferation of things like JSX, javascript with XML-based extensions seems to be quickly becoming (for better or for worse) the dominant interface rendering paradigm. I agree that XUL was, ultimately, probably the wrong solution due to a number of reasons, but its effects are definitely still somewhat visible in the ecosystem today. What i'm still trying to figure out is how we recapture the freedom and aesthetic creativity that thrived during the early years of the web. We can argue that this was mostly a cultural/demographic shift in users, but I would also argue that, as McLuhan noted, shifting interfaces (particularly through a uniformity of aesthetics) can influence culture.
- narag 6y ago
  I see what you mean. Maybe some new app with a feature of creating something. Lately most novelty is in the consumer side.

jd3 6y ago

as an aside, it was also extremely cool/interesting to me that i was able to get the extension working with only a couple of modifications to the XPCOM api calls that had changed between 2004 and 2016