We ditched it quickly and just wrote a Gtk application instead.
A great case for why having a simple "hello world" application with simple instructions for building it goes a long way.
you're right, and I almost mentioned some of this. I developed some extensions in 2007-11, and lack of documentation was definitely a big issue.
Back then, I wrote a pretty slick client for some RESTful API (I think it was a photo browser for flickr).
XUL always felt like it was just made for Mozilla. It wasn’t but when you don’t provide documentation, stable APIs, and good tooling, that’s the message that you give.
As a user, you also know other users will have trouble too and that just tells you that it won’t take off.
Here are some things that won't work with WebExtensions…
* Vimium-FF does does not respond to input when a page is loading. With VimFX I press the h key to “go back one page” and the l key to “go forward one page” and it works while the page is loading, in Vimium-FF it does not. Imagine, in age of 5 MB web pages, not being able to go back because the page is loading.
* Focusing on the address bar is only possible if you open a new tab. With VimFX you press o and you can immediately begin to type your URL in your current tab. In Vimium-FF an HTML/CSS/JS input box opens in your viewport. It can access your bookmarks and history but sorts them in strange ways and it does not understand bookmark keywords.
* Opening a new tab disables Vimium-FF. Firefox can be set to show either “Blank Page” or “Firefox Home” when opening a new tab. Both of these options will focus on the address bar and focus can’t be reclaimed using Vimium-FF shortcuts. Actually, it can’t be reclaimed at all. So, effectively, opening a new tab using the Vimium-FF shortcut t disables Vimium-FF. The ugly way around it is to install the New Tab Override add-on and set an HTML document as your new tab URL.
* It routinely and unexplainably fails when browsing some pages.
VimFX will be sorely missed. It still works in Waterfox, but who knows for how long…
As far as keyboard browsing, doesn't vimperator cover that?
Except they are and they do. Last I checked, Chrome was still gaining, not losing, on Firefox. Or more accurately: Firefox is losing whatever tiny userbase it still has, while Chrome already is the new IE (hell, even the new IE is Chrome).
For nearly a decade now, the only reasons to use Firefox instead of Chrome is, first and foremost, because Firefox is not made by Google, and secondly, because it had some extra technical flexibility that made the overall worse general-audience UX tolerable. The more Firefox loses on that technical flexibility, the less reason there is to use it.
The ones who didn't care for such extensions might have jumped ship earlier, but advanced browser extensions were non trivial sticking point for a lot of the remaining user base
At the moment Firefox is a memory and processor hog (Chrome sometimes seems to have improved now). Only some ad-blockers keep Firefox alive.
When Chrome kills ad-block (something that Google seems to be working on), then probably more people will come back to Firefox. But at the moment Firefox (even with ad-blockers) is a worse product than chrome.
But think how many blog posts were written and how many people used Firefox as a stepping stone in their careers. Who cares that the product is just genuinely bad now.
Also Firefox was always "the" customizable browser that all the techie people used. It spread via word of mouth - "hey, your browser does not show those nasty ads all the time, how do you do that". Or the techies installing Firefox to their family. At the moment you barely have an incentive, since Firefox feels like mostly a re-skin of Chrome. And bad at it too.
But the problems with extensions started far earlier. It was a common joke how every bigger update broke many popular extensions, made some of them even impossible. In the early days of Firefox, extensions very growing wild and rich. But over time so many were dying a slow death. At the end of the early days (around Firefox 3 or 4), mostly nothing was left, and Firefox was already significant crippled in ability. The later removal of XUL only gave it the last hit.
Today it's basically a handful of popular extensions who keep this feature alive, and most of them are just Adblockers.
A long time ago, Mozilla had a choice between making XUL an open standard or investing in HTML5 and decided very consciously to invest in HTML5, rather than fragmenting the web.
Source: I worked at Mozilla around that time.
Of course, that certainly prevented some optimizations.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_(software)
* https://scenari.software/en/ * Repository: https://source.scenari.software/projects/dev-core/repository
- InstantBird, a multi network instant messenger client
- Celtx, a media prepoduction software
- Boxee, a HTPC app
- Kiwix, an offline Wikipedia reader
Many of these either vanished or transitioned to something else (I think both Komodo and Celtx did).
I know Celtx decided to drop the concept of desktop app altogether and went full web-based-only SaaS.
The desktop Celtx app was a good screenwriting program that was easily affordable for hobbyists and the pivot to a paid subscription service with less focus on just screenwriting and more focus on other preproduction activities left a small hole for a short while. (These days the Fountain ecosystem seems the best suggestion for the hobbyest screenwriter.)
Mozilla Prism was basically PWA before there were PWAs.
Mozilla gave up all of the head start if had with regards to embedability and extensibility.
In fact those that tried (epiphany AKA the GNOME web browser) gave up on it because Mozilla were so hostile towards third parties actually trying to use xulrunner!
Subversion picked APR, along with other poor ideas such as storing the repository in Berkeley DB, basing the network protocol on WebDAV, and running the server as an Apache module (mod_dav_svn). On the other hand, choosing http(s) as transport turned out to be a huge advantage.
However, I didn't find XUL very intuitive. For one, it seemed verbose for common stuff. If there were a rhyme and reason behind its oddball approach, it never clicked with me.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CRUDology/comments/10ze9hu/missing_...
It was hoped that other people would follow the Mozilla Suite's (before Firefox, Mozilla's standard distro was an application suite containing a browser, email reader, chat client, and HTML editor) example and use JavaScript, XUL, and XPCOM to build cross-platform desktop applications. The last of those, XPCOM (Xross Platform COM), was Mozilla's take on Microsoft's Component Object Model, where you would write lower-level components in C or C++ (using the NSPR, Netscape Portable Runtime) that were callable from JavaScript
Unfortunately, virtually no one outside of Mozilla adopted the XUL/JS/XPCOM stack. One of the few I remember was ActiveState's Komodo IDE.
I still regard it as a huge missed opportunity for Mozilla.