![]() They wanted to bring the web to the desktop, woo-hoo!Īs it turns out, the opposite workflow won: applications are now built by web developers targeting the web, in a way that allows for desktops to come onboard where required. Applications would be built by desktop developers targeting the desktop in a way that would allow for the web to integrate in the background. When Mozilla started working on XUL, the future of the web looked a lot like XML and fat clients. Desktop support is a bonus for people who need it. > Slack has a standalone app? I never even realized Discord I never even realized that WhatsApp īut that's exactly how Electron and friends got popular: they allow for web-first development. > Whether you need to migrate an existing web application to the desktop, are looking for a technology that will enable you to easily port your applications to multiple platforms, or want to integrate your own cool features into the browser, XUL warrants serious consideration.Īnd now they are arguably failing to push it to themselves as they're entirely abandoning it for Firefox and will rewrite the UI and extensions APIs to get rid of XUL. They were rather enthusiastic at some point: They didn't fail to "push it to the web". > so it's a stretch to say that Mozilla failed to execute on pushing XUL. ![]() These are not just webapps contained in chrome, they definitely need native access to local APIs. ![]() People are writing, not one, but multiple competing implementations of things like. It's arguably more popular now for new apps than even toolkits like Qt and WxWidgets. Outside of Slack, WhatsApp and Discord (see a pattern? pretty much all new chat apps are using it), I'm not sure if there's any other truly popular (among users) electron app, but among developers, electron definitely is popular and far more often used than XUL was. > I'm not convinced that Electron today is any more popular than XUL was back thenĬomex already named two highly popular ones (slack in particular can't be overlooked) but there are more. Most software written in XUL has either been abandoned or going to die, anyway. There's also Miro, Songbird, Google's adwords editor (. Thunderbird is not the only notable app written in XUL beside Firefox. required XUL, in favor of Chrome's addon API. They are rewriting everything related to UI in Firefox and also terminating the traditional addon API which. ![]() The reason why Thunderbird is a dead is because XUL is dead, or rather, will die soon. XULRunner versions were released concurrently with new Firefox versions. Firefox is also built on top of the same technologies. It wasn't developed specifically for Thunderbird. The difference with electron is that it was built with more native-apps facilities, like spawning up Wizard dialogs: And there also was a XULRunner which was to Gecko/Firefox what Electron is to Blink/Chrome: a way to develop native apps using the browser engine as a UI toolkit. Thunderbird was built against something that the Mozilla foundation used to tout as the future of building software in general: XUL. the way Thunderbird is designed was that it was a kind-of-fork of Firefox, and too many resources were being wasted just keeping the "fork" up to date from changes to internal Firefox APIs.
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