4 ms·

Thunderbird never quite used XULRunner, I think; they always built their own binary (though at some point quite a lot of the shared stuff moved into the XRE stu

by mook 3y ago

Thunderbird never quite used XULRunner, I think; they always built their own binary (though at some point quite a lot of the shared stuff moved into the XRE stuff). Think of it as they had a fork of Firefox (much like Firefox had a stripped down fork of the SeaMonkey stuff). Also, I think one of the Start Menus (might have been XP‽) was kind of HTA-ish? Not sure about that part, though.

jraph 3y ago
> they always built their own binary > Think of it as they had a fork of Firefox Yep indeed, you are right. Notable projects using actual XULRunner included Songbird (a music player) and BlueGriffon, an WYSIWYG HTML editor (a successor of Nvu and KompoZer, themselves succeeding Netscape Composer). Both released after 2006 indeed. I liked XUL, I strongly believe Mozilla could have dominated the market taken by Electron, had they pushed XULRunner more, and perhaps make it transition to pure HTML, like they did to Firefox's core, because that's what people know and because XUL was a maintenance burden. I think XUL tags made more sense than HTML to build UIs, though, and with XUL, Gecko have had a CSS flex-like mechanism for a long time by the way. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_%28software%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_%28software%29 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueGriffon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueGriffon
- vidarh 3y ago
  There was an experiment back in the hazy past around that time called Entity that did something similar. It was never complete enough to be a competitor to XULRunner, but it was fascinating for two reasons: 1) You could write event handlers in multiple languages, including C. If you wrote them in C, it spawned gcc and compiled it into a library, and dynamically loaded it... The overall idea of a polyglot runtime like that was fun. 2) #1 is only really weird because this could be done at runtime. One of the demo apps was an editor for the GUI itself, where you could add buttons to the editor, then write that event handler in C, and have it compiled and loaded into the editor itself... It was a fascinating starting point, though full of heavy duty foot guns, and I'm still sad nobody took it further.
  - mananaysiempre 3y ago
    > The overall idea of a polyglot runtime like that was fun. Active Scripting, which powers scripts in both WSH and old-school IE including HTAs, is polyglot and extensible. It’s why Active{Perl,Python,Tcl} are called that—the original headline feature (IIUC) was that they integrated with it. It’s also why you could write VBS in IE: IE just passed the text of the script along with the language attribute to AS and let it sort things out. Nobody did ever a C interprerer, though, I think—perhaps because you basically have to speak COM from Active Scripting, and while speaking COM from C is certainly possible it’s nobody’s idea of fun. (An ObjC-like preprocessor/superset could definitely be made and I’ve heard that Microsoft had even entertained the idea at the dawn of time, but instead they went with C++, and I haven’t been able to find any traces of that project.) That’s not to say AS is perfect or even good—the impossibility of caching DISPIDs[1], in particular, seems like a design-sinking goof. And the AS boundary was also why DOM manipulation in IE was so slow. [1] https://ericlippert.com/2003/09/16/why-do-the-script-engines-not-cache-dispatch-identifiers/ https://ericlippert.com/2003/09/16/why-do-the-script-engines...
- fouc 3y ago
  the best epub reader for desktop I've ever encountered, was epubreader (pre-WebExtension version), I used to launch it as a standalone app with XULRunner.

by mook 3y ago

jraph 3y ago

> they always built their own binary > Think of it as they had a fork of Firefox Yep indeed, you are right. Notable projects using actual XULRunner included Songbird (a music player) and BlueGriffon, an WYSIWYG HTML editor (a successor of Nvu and KompoZer, themselves succeeding Netscape Composer). Both released after 2006 indeed. I liked XUL, I strongly believe Mozilla could have dominated the market taken by Electron, had they pushed XULRunner more, and perhaps make it transition to pure HTML, like they did to Firefox's core, because that's what people know and because XUL was a maintenance burden. I think XUL tags made more sense than HTML to build UIs, though, and with XUL, Gecko have had a CSS flex-like mechanism for a long time by the way. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_%28software%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_%28software%29 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueGriffon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueGriffon

vidarh 3y ago
There was an experiment back in the hazy past around that time called Entity that did something similar. It was never complete enough to be a competitor to XULRunner, but it was fascinating for two reasons: 1) You could write event handlers in multiple languages, including C. If you wrote them in C, it spawned gcc and compiled it into a library, and dynamically loaded it... The overall idea of a polyglot runtime like that was fun. 2) #1 is only really weird because this could be done at runtime. One of the demo apps was an editor for the GUI itself, where you could add buttons to the editor, then write that event handler in C, and have it compiled and loaded into the editor itself... It was a fascinating starting point, though full of heavy duty foot guns, and I'm still sad nobody took it further.
- mananaysiempre 3y ago
  > The overall idea of a polyglot runtime like that was fun. Active Scripting, which powers scripts in both WSH and old-school IE including HTAs, is polyglot and extensible. It’s why Active{Perl,Python,Tcl} are called that—the original headline feature (IIUC) was that they integrated with it. It’s also why you could write VBS in IE: IE just passed the text of the script along with the language attribute to AS and let it sort things out. Nobody did ever a C interprerer, though, I think—perhaps because you basically have to speak COM from Active Scripting, and while speaking COM from C is certainly possible it’s nobody’s idea of fun. (An ObjC-like preprocessor/superset could definitely be made and I’ve heard that Microsoft had even entertained the idea at the dawn of time, but instead they went with C++, and I haven’t been able to find any traces of that project.) That’s not to say AS is perfect or even good—the impossibility of caching DISPIDs[1], in particular, seems like a design-sinking goof. And the AS boundary was also why DOM manipulation in IE was so slow. [1] https://ericlippert.com/2003/09/16/why-do-the-script-engines-not-cache-dispatch-identifiers/ https://ericlippert.com/2003/09/16/why-do-the-script-engines...
fouc 3y ago
the best epub reader for desktop I've ever encountered, was epubreader (pre-WebExtension version), I used to launch it as a standalone app with XULRunner.