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> Then they wiped out an extension ecosystem that had been growing for more than a decade with the justification that they needed to get rid of technical debt.
by Ygg2 4y ago
> Then they wiped out an extension ecosystem that had been growing for more than a decade with the justification that they needed to get rid of technical debt.
Do you have any proof that wasn't the case? From what I saw, XUL was invented to define UIs in XML but over time HTML became better than it for defining UIs.
And the great freedom XUL allowed made some optimizations impossible.
- johnny22 4y agoit wasn't xul that was the problem, but xpcom
- Ygg2 4y agoAny more details? I definitely get impression killing old addons wasn't just change for change's sake, but I don't know the details behind it?
- marcthe12 4y agoBasically xpcom and XUL can be treated in same way as gnome-shell. XPCOM was a object model from the 90s and had several legacy issues. On top of that was XUL and XBL were obselete by improvements to web api and was badly mainatined. Like Gnome-shell, xul extentsion were monkey patching firefox internals. So firefox was limited on certain security and performance improvement. By removing old addons, firefox could start replacing the mess of the old subsystems. XBL was removed for example and xul I think still exist but a fraction of the former self. I don't think the can remove xpcom until they can port a 50% of firefox to rust though
- dblohm7 4y agoRemoving XPCOM is orthogonal to adding rust. In fact, if you search Bugzilla you fill find many references to deCOMtamination, which is about removing unnecessary XPCOM.
- dblohm7 4y agoFormer Firefox developer: It was both.