The Joy of XUL

[patrickjdempsey]

I'm having a hard time finding a single one of these reasons that isn't overwhelming still to this day. Maybe Mozilla needs to read their own propaganda some time.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/The_Joy_of_XUL

[Frenzie]

Does Mozilla present its arguments for getting rid of it anywhere?

[WaltS48]

Perhaps in the Deprecation of XUL, XPCOM, and the permissive add-on model section of The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons | Mozilla Add-ons Blog.

I have no idea when "The Joy of XUL" page was created. There is a lot of outdated material on the Web.

[patrickjdempsey]

I suspect it was likely created 15 years back when Netscape/AOL/Mozilla was actively trying to get other developers to use XUL/Gecko. That was actually a somewhat successful campaign, much to the chagrin of the developers who went down that route only to be repeatedly kicked by Mozilla as embedded Gecko support was dropped, XULRunner as a platform was introduced but largely ignored, remote XUL was dropped (with limited access via an extension), XPCOM support was dramatically changed, and rapid releases created an update nightmare.

My point is that I don't think it's all that outdated. There have been a handful of changes to HTML to make it slightly better for interface design, but it's still fundamentally NOT an interface language and forcing it to act like one is a serious pain. Not quite as big of a pain as it was 15 years ago, but still pretty bad.

[rsx11m]

The history says that the page was set up Aug 12, 2005 ("Ported from mozilla.org") and was edited as recently as Sep 7, 2014.