On Android, Mozilla offers GeckoView.

I don't think that there's a desktop offering at the moment. There used to be quite a few (XULRunner, Prism, etc.) but they all died from lack of love.

I regret XUL was abandoned - it was a great idea, but much ahead of its time.

XUL was just a markup language to create interfaces, it became obsolete as HTML got refined.

Even to this day, XUL is far more capable than HTML. It has built-in widgets for many common desktop GUI elements that still need to be created from scratch in HTML+Javascript, and notably uses the native chrome of whatever OS it is running on to render them.

Abandoned by Mozilla, not by Pale Moon/Basilisk though.

http://thereisonlyxul.org/

XUL is a great idea but not for browser chrome. That’s an area where it is truly worth the effort to make it fast and light, secure and stable.

That was before Firefox was born, right? Or was the success of Firefox the demise of XUL?

XUL was the markup language used by the Mozilla Communicator Suite for designing user interfaces. It was what Add-on development used.

Mozilla deprecated it not that long ago in favor of HTML but stalwarts have clung to it and complained.

I use to maintain a couple Add-ons and developed some simple UIs for it. I was never impressed by it and it was easy enough to use so I had no objections either.

I'm not sure what you're asking exactly but XUL existed a long time after Firefox was born and became popular. I remember using a XUL app at work around 2010.

Plus one. This was the beggining of the rot in Mozila. This marked the moment the went from making general purpose web/http based platforms based on OpenSource principals to builing a single a www specific advertising platform. I still use Firefox and support them financially. Its the best we have. But they stopped caring about anything other that being the frontpage to the Internet a long time ago. They gave up on supporting developers.

XULrunner was a great idea, so the executives of the Mozilla Corporation had to sack it.

You mean like Positron? That was abandoned several years ago. So was Spidernode, FirefoxOS/apps, etc. Other dropped projects include Shumway, the JavaScript flash runtime. Basically every interesting thing they do that isn't directly related to improving Firefox seems to get dropped eventually.

Then there's GeckoView, which they explicitly decided not to make available as a WebView drop-in to be available systemwide on Android. In this case, at least they seem to have a reason, though it seems to me that having an alternative to Google's WebView would be valuable enough to continue.

Not sure of your meaning of "Linux void of polished apps." Do you mean commercial apps running natively on linux?

FWIW, I've been running Linux as my primary desktop through 4 companies and 20+ years thus far. I'm not at a loss for applications, native or hosted, that I use in my day to day work.

I'm actually quite happy that I no longer need to worry about installing Microsoft office (current day job uses this suite). Online works great, and when offline, libreoffice 6+ allows me to continue to work with the same docs.

Prior to this, Google docs worked perfectly fine for $dayjob-1, and worked perfectly well across Linux, Mac, Android, so I didn't have any significant issues with it.

Really, Linux is a fine desktop. Seems to be about 2x more common accessing my blog than Mac, and about 1/2 that of windows. I can't imagine all of those are server users. Must be some polished and usable desktop apps in the mix to be able to see that.

Not sure about the website you run but there might be a corelation to Linux users and your site. It could be either due to your network and the way people came to know about the site or it could be the content among other things

There’s a ton of cool apps for productivity, time management, health, note taking, all in iOS due to iPad ecosystem. Apple pulled a smart one and democratized file extension monopolies by making App Store ecosystem relatively cheap for customers. This incentivized a ton of high quality lower cost apps that now all have their own file extensions on top of importing stuff like pdf and psd, and the iOS share menu has basically turned apps into Linux command line tools where you set up your own work flow chain. Apple has now positioned iOS libraries in next OS X to be importable into OS X, thus now all these iOS apps can be posted easily into OS X. Essentially, iOS has now liberated the user from .doc, .ppt, .xls, .psd dependencies and soon it will spread into OS X.

Linux has no such source of ample high quality apps that don’t cost hundreds of dollars in fees like in windows (office 365 and adobe, I’m looking at you)

When I switched from Windows to Mac a while back it struck me that I needed to rely on paid apps a lot more. There seemed to be more quality freeware for Windows.

I'm also running a fair few Electron apps on my Mac at the moment.