Re:Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client
by ultramancool on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @10:51AM
(#10656230)
Good luck - the main advantage of XUL IMO is that it looks and feels native to the platform. This is completely lacking in any HTML based UI I've ever seen. It's been a major advantage for FF extensions and I can't help but feel like it's a major step backwards to lose it.
Re:Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client
by pcwalton on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @12:18PM
(#10657093)
>
Good luck - the main advantage of XUL IMO is that it looks and feels native to the platform.
That you say that is a testament to how well the meticulous CSS styling of the XUL elements—which applies equally well to HTML (try it in a browser chrome shell!)—worked.
Re:Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client
by digi_owl on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @11:04AM
(#10656359)
I don't think that has anything to do with XUL directly, you can still find its original look by furing up Seamonkey, but that Firefox developers opted to rework the UI subsystem so that it translated XUL elements into native elements as much as possible. Iirc, this was done in part to speed up the Firefox UI compared to Seamonkey.
It was meant as a pro. Since it was their own language, they could do anything with it. They could make a better HTML.
But HTML caught up. Currently, I believe HTML is better than XUL, and making XUL great again is both a silly reuse of a political slogan and a waste of effort.
I for one would rather see efforts made to allow CSS styling of all input elements in HTML.