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To add to this, there were a few cool XUL-based software out there back in the day: Songbird, ActiveState Komodo IDE, Zotero, etc. XUL didn't take over the worl

• mschuster91 3y ago
  It was both too late and not early enough. I 'member back in the VB6 era that you could easily embed Internet Explorer as an ActiveX (or was it OLE?) element right inside your application - a very early sort of WebView, just with absolutely no way to inspect what was going on there. I think Firefox never achieved a 1:1 compatible match for that... despite Microsoft keeping that utter shit around for ages for compatibility reasons as a lot of apps used it under the hood (e.g. HTML Help). And yes you could absolutely do a Matroshka with it: a VB6 app embedding Internet Explorer and the site embedding an ActiveX element written in VB6. Or inline Java applets. Funny times... an era in which security was barely a concern. Instead, you had open-ish, usually well documented interfaces for everything. What killed the idea though until Electron came along was simple: Browsers didn't even come close to feature parity. You had to write your own API layer to communicate between the website and the host application for everything going beyond XHR calls and file selector uploads. Electron took off once Chrome got enough native bridges that you could actually write capable web apps.