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I might be one of the dozens of people in the world who actually shipped production software using XUL. It's a generic admin software for recruiting companies,

I might be one of the dozens of people in the world who actually shipped production software using XUL. It's a generic admin software for recruiting companies, still has some 200 daily users. At the time, in 2004, PrototypeJS was all the rage, and XmlHTTPRequest didn't exist yet. XUL helped us ship a more rich user experience without extreme pain. The whole thing was even a pseudo-SPA, using iframes everywhere, which we also used to fetch extra data for some pages without navigating.

fzzzy 4y ago
XmlHTTPRequest existed, it's just that Firefox hadn't implemented it yet. IE had it since 1999.
- sabellito 4y ago
  You are, of course, correct!
- unscaled 4y ago
  XMLHttpRequest was available since Firefox was called Firefox[1], and it should have been at least partly functional in 2002 when Phoenix 0.1 (the predecessor to Firebird and Firefox) was released. In 2004, Firebird just got renamed to Firefox (on version 0.8) and Safari implemented XHR. Opera and Konqueror would implement it in 2005. The main issue obstructing the use of XHR was not browser compatibility. Internet Explorer still had 95% market share, and almost nobody cared about compatibility with other browsers then. The issue was mostly about awareness, and lack of proper tooling. The term AJAX was only coined in 2005, so the technique of using XHR to reduce page refreshes and improve page responsiveness didn't even have a name. It was used here in there by savvy web developers, but it wasn't systematic. Before 2005, very few websites were built entirely on XHR. It was out there, lurking in the shadows, but not transforming the way web was done yet. Outlook Web Access (for which XHR was developed) is an obvious mention, but the first site that got XR popular was probably Gmail Beta, in 2004. I think a lot of developers suddenly wanted to replicate it, and with the popularization of AJAX in 2005, learning resources become easier to find, libraries and frameworks got developed to make its usage easier (anybody said jQuery?) and so on. [1] See: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=237606 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=237606. Interestingly enough, this bug report was about trying to access an XPCOM component from a web page, not about an incompatibility with whatever IE was doing. IE didn't even have XPCOM after all!
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    I used XHR in IE in 1999-2001 in a production web app at a well known investment bank. It was my idea to use it after stumbling across the docs got it on msdn or another developer-only resource. The docs were extremely limited so I just played until I figured it out. It was synchronous only at that time, I asynchronous calls. I wrote the Java server code to return XML I think? Users LOVED it. I never looked back.
ammmir 4y ago
I remember building an XULRunner-based OpenVPN client GUI for a customer, before there were sane web-like cross-platform UI toolkits. Yeah, I remember having to call out to XPCOM to do stuff like HTTP requests or TCP socket communication IIRC. It was the Electron of its time. RIP.

fzzzy 4y ago

XmlHTTPRequest existed, it's just that Firefox hadn't implemented it yet. IE had it since 1999.

sabellito 4y ago
You are, of course, correct!
unscaled 4y ago
XMLHttpRequest was available since Firefox was called Firefox[1], and it should have been at least partly functional in 2002 when Phoenix 0.1 (the predecessor to Firebird and Firefox) was released. In 2004, Firebird just got renamed to Firefox (on version 0.8) and Safari implemented XHR. Opera and Konqueror would implement it in 2005. The main issue obstructing the use of XHR was not browser compatibility. Internet Explorer still had 95% market share, and almost nobody cared about compatibility with other browsers then. The issue was mostly about awareness, and lack of proper tooling. The term AJAX was only coined in 2005, so the technique of using XHR to reduce page refreshes and improve page responsiveness didn't even have a name. It was used here in there by savvy web developers, but it wasn't systematic. Before 2005, very few websites were built entirely on XHR. It was out there, lurking in the shadows, but not transforming the way web was done yet. Outlook Web Access (for which XHR was developed) is an obvious mention, but the first site that got XR popular was probably Gmail Beta, in 2004. I think a lot of developers suddenly wanted to replicate it, and with the popularization of AJAX in 2005, learning resources become easier to find, libraries and frameworks got developed to make its usage easier (anybody said jQuery?) and so on. [1] See: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=237606 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=237606. Interestingly enough, this bug report was about trying to access an XPCOM component from a web page, not about an incompatibility with whatever IE was doing. IE didn't even have XPCOM after all!
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  I used XHR in IE in 1999-2001 in a production web app at a well known investment bank. It was my idea to use it after stumbling across the docs got it on msdn or another developer-only resource. The docs were extremely limited so I just played until I figured it out. It was synchronous only at that time, I asynchronous calls. I wrote the Java server code to return XML I think? Users LOVED it. I never looked back.

ammmir 4y ago

I remember building an XULRunner-based OpenVPN client GUI for a customer, before there were sane web-like cross-platform UI toolkits. Yeah, I remember having to call out to XPCOM to do stuff like HTTP requests or TCP socket communication IIRC. It was the Electron of its time. RIP.