Firefox.html: Rebuilding Firefox UI in HTML

https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/firefox-dev/2014-December/002510.html

by ash • 12 years ago

609 144 12 years ago

mail.mozilla.org

icefox5• 12 years ago

The browser shipped with Blackberry 10 was written in HTML and was a real joy to develop.

Edit: some more public details

The default browser on the BlackBerry 10 platform was a completely new browser application. The chrome was written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Being able to develop the chrome on your desktop browser or being able to run inspector remotely and using your desktop was very handy. The core was a command line application called webplatform that "launched" a url that was a "webapp". The webapp had API's exposed to it such as creating WebView's in or out of process (yup blackberry has had multi-process tabs for a while now...). One joy was being able to pull up the Javascript console for the browser WebView and dynamically calling exposed c++ API's in any WebView in any process to test out features or diagnose problems.

It started out as a quick little proof of concept I tossed together over a day and the upside was large enough to invest time into. One of the reasons for making the main browser in html was that as a platform we wanted web application to succeed. Eating our own dogfood we made sure webapps could handle the job. The API's that were needed were there, memory usage were low, startup time was fast etc. And if you search for reviews of the blackberry 10 browser you will find that the end result was a success.

Edit 2: Much more in depth information can be found on this video which was a presentation given at Blackberry Jam by several of my colleagues. Skip to the 23 minute mark to see some actual code of what a webapp browser would look like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZ8vxhTezvs

passwordis• 12 years ago

HTML and joy in the same sentence. Whoa

oatmealsnap• 12 years ago

Why?

of• 12 years ago

What is that browser called?

icefox5• 12 years ago

Hmm didn't really have a name as it was the browser that was included and just called "Browser" if I recall.

icefox5• 12 years ago

Another very cool feature I forgot about was that when developing the browser application on the device it would not actually have any browser bits on the device, but just have the environment variable CHROME_URL set to my desktop where I had a webserver serving up my browser files. This let me very rapidly develop the html/css/javascript code without having to transfer my "mobile app" to the device. Reducing the edit/"compile"/see cycle was a big win.

soapdog• 12 years ago

Congratulations on awesome tech. Can you confirm the browser still work like this or did they change it to a non-HTML version in recent revisions?

icefox5• 12 years ago

I left RIM in 2012 so I could not confirm that this is how the browser works in new devices released today. But given the success and advantages that having the html browser gave us there would have to be some really compelling reason (or $$$) to abandon it. The group I was part of was formally TorchMobile and as a group had significant browser experience having written a fair number so we understood the hassles of maintaining two projects. Being able have webkit developers help with part of the browser made development go faster on both sides (webkit devs could easily abuse the browser to test new feature). Even if it isn't used in the browser as mentioned at the bbjam the weblauncher application was used by not only the browser, but for a number of other purposes.

I can only imagine there is a fair amount of overlap in Mozilla where there are two developers working on the same thing, one for xul, one for html.

icefox5• 12 years ago

Slides for the presentation: http://hosting.desire2learncapture.com/RIM/Content/attachmen...

mdm_• 12 years ago

I switched to BlackBerry from Android last year and the browser is amazing (composing this reply with it on my Passport). Just wanted to say thanks!

misuba• 12 years ago

Is there a connection between this and the old Chromeless project? (It doesn't say there is, so I suppose my real question is, why not?)

Yoric5• 12 years ago

There have been many attempts at a chromeless app runner for Gecko, including Prism and WebAppRT. If I recall correctly, Paul is using a variant of WebAppRT as a runtime.

Morgawr• 12 years ago

Color me surprised, but when we get to the point where we run HTML to build a browser that is supposed to be the tool used to render and display such HTML... haven't we gone too far? Is a browser necessary? What is rendering that HTML if not a browser?

I mean, I get it, a browser is used to browse (duh) the internet, not necessarily to render HTML, but at this point we really need to ask ourselves "why are we doing this, again?".

EDIT: Still impressive though, nice proof of concept!

EDIT 2: As much as I hate the "Why am I getting downvoted?" shenaningans that people usually pull, I want to clarify the intent behind this post. I'm not flaming or hating on the project, it's a cool idea. I was trying to spark some insightful conversation on "where do we want to go from here?" and "do we really need a browser if we have gone this far?". If you want to downvote me, why not just reply to this post and have a nice interesting conversation instead?

lamacase• 12 years ago

What is rendering that HTML if not a browser?

I don't think the search-box and tabs are rendering it.

The firefox interface is already described in an XML format (XUL) and rendered from that. Instead of having two markups and two renderers, this allows you to simplify and consolidate to a single one.

I would hardly construe that as having "gone too far".

Igglyboo• 12 years ago

What is rendering that HTML if not a browser?

The browser is rendering it's own UI.

towelguy• 12 years ago

Dogfooding?

michielvoo• 12 years ago

What is rendering that HTML if not a browser?

The rendering engine (Gecko). I guess for it to make sense you must separate the drawing engine from the browser, which adds things like tabs, bookmarks, themes and add-ons.

kibwen4• 12 years ago

This can be seen today in Servo, which can browse the internet but has no GUI of to speak of (e.g. to visit a URL you must pass it as a command-line parameter to the executable).

paulrouget4• 12 years ago

A browser is 2 things: a HTML engine and a UI (tabs, urlbar, back button, …). Usually, the UI is built in C++/ObjectiveC/XUL. Here, I'm proposing to use the HTML engine to render the UI as well. It's already the case with Firefox, the engine also renders the UI. But it doesn't use html, but another markup language (XUL).

hmsimha• 12 years ago

In addition to things mentioned by other users, a browser also enforces a security model and (nowadays) provides a Javascript engine and the browser object model, and handles HTTP and session state,

kibwen4• 12 years ago

I'm very excited at the potential of the browser chrome being implemented entirely via standard web technologies. And given that Servo is never going to implement XUL, it would save a lot of effort that would otherwise be spent implementing a bespoke, minimally-functional UI (which has been tentatively named Crow, if the MST3K reference wasn't already obvious).

See also this other thread linked from the discussion in the OP, "Moratorium on new XUL features": https://lists.mozilla.org/pipermail/dev-platform/2014-Octobe...

paulrouget4• 12 years ago

I've built that. Just to be clear: this is a personal project, not a mozilla project (even though I'm a mozilla employee).

Also - many people find it silly to use HTML instead of the operating system toolkit library. But it's not HTML or native. It can be both. In this case, the HTML code define the layout, and we can draw native widgets inside (look at the <input type=submit> tag in HTML, it's a native widget). For example, if you run the current build on Mac, you'll see that new tabs use Yosemite "vibrancy" effect. Native look and native performance, can, in theory, be achieved.

lucianmarin• 12 years ago

Why don’t you use SVG instead of PNG for icons? Then you can use CSS to customize them for different themes.

paulrouget4• 12 years ago

I want to use SVG. See issue #24. I just don't have the assets.

ANTSANTS• 12 years ago

But it's not HTML or native. It can be both. In this case, the HTML code define the layout, and we can draw native widgets inside (look at the <input type=submit> tag in HTML, it's a native widget).

No troll, I thought that was what XUL was.

chadzawistowski• 12 years ago

Problem being that XUL is quite long in the tooth?

There might be other advantages of replacing XUL with HTML, rather than developing them in parallel.

pawelk• 12 years ago

I've always conceptualized XUL as something similar to what is now known as Web Components + a native touch.

alex_duf• 12 years ago

Between that, rust and servo, it seems we have a new experimental technology stack shaping for the future of firefox.

It may or may not be used in the end, but I'm excited by the potential.

kibwen4• 12 years ago

One of Rust's goals for 2015 is to ship a tiny Rust-based component in Firefox (e.g. an image decoder), so we'll find out within the coming year. :)

cpeterso• 12 years ago

Mozilla is also experimenting with Boot2Servo, a possible future for Boot2Gecko (Firefox OS):

https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Workweek-boot-2-servo

valarauca1• 12 years ago

As a guy who works with primarily back end server code. I hate UI stuff primarily because even creating small input UI windows requires jumping though hoops of fire it feels like with strange API calls, and documentation that says, "Just follow the example it'll all be fine in a couple minutes." But I'm 8 inheritance levels deep trying to figure out why my text box isn't rendering.

I've often wondered why OS's just don't host browser render engines internally and draw their UI with that.

Well I don't for long, I know HTML is much younger then X. Also browser engines are massive resource hogs. But with the advent of 8-16+ GB of ram in consumer computers can we really say 2-3GB for windows rendering is heavy?

Especially if it offers that much empowerment to developers.

recursive• 12 years ago

I've often wondered why OS's just don't host browser render engines internally and draw their UI with that.

I believe Windows 8 can do this.

rancur7• 12 years ago

no more software layers please! my PC was much faster when my programs were native. Apps rendered with chrome rendered with webkit...8GB used to be enough, then all these "developers" with their "development machines" who think it's no big deal that their Hangouts implementation takes 200MB when Pidgin takes 20.

people used to complain about Firefox hogging memory, I think it's Chrome we should be worried about...

10098• 12 years ago

no, screw that. My 4GB RAM machine is slow enough as it is with all this html and javascript crap running.

tracker12• 12 years ago

AFAIK, Windows 8, Gnome, Unity and others offer desktop html+javascript compositing with support for webservice calls. Some may be more powerful/limited, but it's something already being done.

Even in a thread earlier today there was a post about the state of desktop web apps... node-webkit and atom-shell aren't bad options either.

I always wanted to like XUL, but a shell mode for HTML+JS that can have more control over iframes than is allowed in the browser... it would definitely be interesting. It would be more interesting if it followed node's API (at least for JS-level modules).

fbender• 12 years ago

That's the spirit of FirefoxOS – any other prior concept still used "native" stuff while in FirefoxOS, "native" is the Web!

k00pa3• 12 years ago

But with the advent of 8-16+ GB of ram in consumer computers can we really say 2-3GB for windows rendering is heavy?

This attitude is why we have phones with 1G of memory and 1Ghz+ CPU's lagging when just trying to read email.

Yes, there is more memory available than before, but that doesn't mean we should just waste it for useless stuff.

For example if we eat 2-3GB of memory on a system with 8GB of memory, thats over 25% of the usage. Then some applications that are actually used. (Let me use my own process mem counts here...) 1.3Gb for Firefox, 0.6Gb for Android emulator, 0.5Gb for Visual studio....

And there would have gone over half of the 8GB of ram!

I am sure my current memory usage would be half of what its now if developers would actually give some shit about memory usage... Not just allocate too much memory because "there is so much memory it doesn't matter"

slezakattack• 12 years ago

Windows Presentation Foundation does just this with the XAML markup language. It's almost like designing a web app. You can use this markup for designing windows phone apps. I'm sure Apple also has their own markup as well for developing desktop/mobile apps but I have no experience in this so I'm not completely sure.

com2kid4• 12 years ago

I've often wondered why OS's just don't host browser render engines internally and draw their UI with that.

CSS is, by far, not a good way to try and do UIs. It sort of works, and it is getting better, but it started out with lots of legacy cruft and things have only gotten worse.

One can make any sort of layout imaginable in any of the modern UI frameworks within a few hours.

Want 3 columns boxes at a precise position in CSS? Well thankfully the latest version of the spec has support for that, but up until very recently....

But for code running on the platform, you can take any 1st year CS student who has passed a class or two and have them put that sort of app together in Swing. WPF is a bit more work due to the data binding magic, ignoring that the layout stuff is also incredibly easy!

On the web, getting data is the easy part, making the UI is the hard part. On the PC, getting the data is the hard part, putting the UI together is easy!

Compare the richness of apps even on mobile phones to what you get in the browser. Sure if you hire top notch web developers who have been studying web development for 3+ years you can get something that is just like an app, but holy crap.

tl;dr HTML+CSS is the Win32 of layout engines.

yAnonymous2• 12 years ago

HTML+CSS are better than any other layout engine and if the performance is good enough to make apps for mobile devices, it's good enough for any system.

Why spend time on other UI systems that will only end up requiring more work for a visually worse result?

Sophistifunk• 12 years ago

What's the license on this? I'd like to steal your tab bar for something I'm building :)

striking• 12 years ago

Likely MPL because it derives from the Mozilla browser design

agumonkey3• 12 years ago

I'm always pleased when I use chrome devtools on chrome devtools. So I can't welcome this enough. Have fun.

kbrosnan• 12 years ago

This has worked on Firefox since the beginning of time. One could use the DOM inspector and venkman JS debugger, then Firebug chrome inspector and more recently the Firefox developer tools to inspect Firefox's XUL.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Tools_Toolbox...

agumonkey3• 12 years ago

Ha, weird, I never felt the same direct access to the metalevel as in Chrome. Just the other day I spend an afternoon trying to access Firefox restore session url list through the developper tools without any luck, the XUL ~DOM element was an opaque type I couldn't inspect.

bkeroack• 12 years ago

I realize this is a personal project, but this is deeply amusing considering that:

1. Way back when (circa 1998-2001?), the Mozilla project started as a radical redesign of the next gen Netscape browser. One of the core principles of the architecture was that the browser itself would render the UI elements (using an HTML-like tech call XUL).

2. The Firefox browser (then called "Phoenix") was a reaction against the above, which was thought to make the browser too heavyweight and slow. Originally Phoenix was the Gecko engine in a native UI window without all the XUL overhead (and without all the other components of the Mozilla Suite like the email client).

Now we're seeing the reverse trend, 15 odd years later.

EDIT: It turns out I misremembered about Phoenix dropping XUL completely--rather they dropped XPFE for a "new light-weight XUL toolkit", along with dropping all the non-browser components of the Mozilla suite.

nevir• 12 years ago

Rendering perf is catching up

frik• 12 years ago

Similar concepts from Microsoft (browser wars era):

Microsoft integrated Trident (Internet Explorer HTML engine) to Win95 with the ActiveDesktop refresh (part of IE4 installation) and shipped with Win98 by default. The desktop background wallpaper was a large HTML page, there were DHTML widgets, the Explorer sidebar was HTML. In Windows 2000 and ME you could even preview Videos in the HTML based sidebar. WinXP's sidebar is HTML based too, also the slow applications window where you can uninstall applications, as well as the control panel. Even in Win7 and more modern versions the UI render code for the control panel, some new popup dialogs, and some Office UI and Windows Media Player is based on a forked render code that happened in the XP era. The EU even mandated that Microsoft has to release the API to the public, so that other developers could create such beautiful Windows applications based on that UI code.

Use your favorite PE resource explorer (e.g. reshacker) to verify it. The DHTML source is in various shell related dlls in the Windows directory.

cwyers• 12 years ago

I'm pretty sure Firefox has used XUL during its entire lifespan; Camino is the Mozilla browser that used native GUI.

http://www-archive.mozilla.org/roadmap/roadmap-02-Apr-2003.h...

Yoric5• 12 years ago

Well, XUL was quite ahead of its time. Most of XUL has now been incorporated (and improved, and optimized) in HTML.

Also, Phoenix kept using XUL, just a rewrite that didn't attempt to do everything from scratch, but relied upon native components wherever available. Most of the Firefox UI is either XUL or HTML.

pimlottc• 12 years ago

XUL also had my favorite namespace URI of all time:

https://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.x...

kemayo• 12 years ago

You're getting your browser history mixed up a little -- Phoenix was a reaction against the general bloat of Mozilla, but it was still a cross-platform XUL-based affair.

Check out the Phoenix 0.1 announcement: http://website-archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_r...

"Phoenix is a redesign of the Mozilla browser component, similar to Galeon, K-Meleon and Chimera, but written using the XUL user interface language and designed to be cross-platform."

maxerickson• 12 years ago

Phoenix dropped XPFE in favor of lighter XUL that relied more directly on OS widgets. Here's a message talking about it:

http://sourceforge.net/p/xul/mailman/message/1494849/

I think Firefox mostly started out from an urge to make a "Browser product", rather than whatever the hell the suite had become. It shows in the release notes:

http://website-archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_r...

A bunch of stuff about convenience and fast and fixing problems and usability is in there.

mirzmaster• 12 years ago

Originally Phoenix was the Gecko engine in a native UI window without all the XUL overhead

I'm not sure Phoenix was ever a reaction to XUL. Phoenix was more a reaction to the kitchen sink feature-list of Netscape 5 and Mozilla Application Suite, seeking to pare down the feature set to a minimally viable browser.

In XUL (and moreso XBL) Mozilla had a web technology that there was talk of submitting for standardization and which brought with it a level of expression that HTML didn't offer at the time. As HTML, CSS and JavaScript have evolved, XUL/XBL bring less and less to the table.

asadotzler• 12 years ago

You are wrong. When we started Firefox (before "Phoenix") one of the primary goals was to prove that XUL on Windows could be fast enough and look native enough that no one would care. We succeeded.

hencq• 12 years ago

Way back when wasn't the original plan for Seamonkey to use Gecko to render the UI as well? Maybe they were too far ahead of their time back then.

Yoric5• 12 years ago

Yep, and most of the UI in Firefox is either XUL or HTML, both of whom are rendered by Gecko. This is not the case on Android, for technical reasons (libxul is too long to load, so we rely on Java, which is pre-loaded by the OS, to display the UI).

1ris• 12 years ago

Is this the first step to switch to servo?

Yoric5• 12 years ago

There are discussions on that topic. However, everybody needs to realize that this is Paul's personal project, not an official Mozilla project, so don't get your hopes too high.

That being said, I'm quite excited about that project, I opened a pull request a few hours ago and it was accepted :)

kibwen4• 12 years ago

Can you link to the pull request? I'm curious to see it, but can't find it.

grumblestumble• 12 years ago

I'm all for it if it means we finally get ::-webkit-scrollbar equivalency in Firefox...

phkahler• 12 years ago

What widgets are used? (I'm not a web dev and only dabbled in that over 15 years ago) If you use native widgets, then you end up with a cross-platform app framework. If you create your own widgets, then you end up with a cross-platform GUI toolkit and app framework. Which is it? Either way, this seems quite interesting. OTOH, can you do apps this way with anything other than js?

hawski• 12 years ago

This sounds like a good idea. But change should happen gradually - no to parallel versions. Like author of zeroconf, when he was rewritting in in OCaml: http://roscidus.com/blog/blog/2014/06/06/python-to-ocaml-ret...

nacs• 12 years ago

Reminds me of Breach[1] / Thrust[2] which basically lets you do the UI plus some low level stuff via Node/JS.

There is a 'browser in a gist' [3] using Breach which is a good example of its use.

[1] http://breach.cc/

[2] https://github.com/breach/thrust (I believe this is the new core of Breach by the same people)

[3] https://gist.github.com/morganrallen/f07f59802884bcdcad4a

espadrine2• 12 years ago

Can HTMLRunner be used as the basis of something like node-webkit[1]? What's its strength / weaknesses compared to that?

[1] https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit

paulrouget4• 12 years ago

weaknesses: I built it in a couple of days. It's ugly. Designed for Firefox.html only. Don't use it :)

voltagex_• 12 years ago

How did you build it? I always thought the Firefox code was huge and monolithic and couldn't be used like this.

shmerl2• 12 years ago

Interesting. But on Android Mozilla already deviated form this approach of "webbiness" in favor of using native UI. Same as Sailfish browser does with Qt and Gecko through IPCembedlite.

If not for that, Sailfish browser could reuse the UI.

minor_nitwit• 12 years ago

Firefox OS on the otherhand is HTML.

shmerl2• 12 years ago

Yeah. So I wonder if Mozilla is going to switch to HTML UI on other mobile platforms too.

simonw• 12 years ago

Would it be possible to implement XUL using Web Components and port the existing XUL interface to HTML that way?

fnump• 12 years ago

Possibly, yes. Though I would not recommend implementing it as is... XUL was never versioned as far back as when I used to work with it, which is about 5 years ago. It's messy. Not easy to use. Although still easier than the new flexbox standard that evolved from it.

Anyway I'd hope for something better than XUL/XBL. The potential was always there. Mozilla the platform! —

I massage HTML and CSS professionally since 1996, and I must say I'd prefer something like "XUL2" over my beloved web standards any day. I wouldn't mind if "XUL2" was in actuality created with web components. Though seriously, CSS and DOM (HTML/XML) were created to make you suffer. That's their true purpose.

There is no easy way out of this. And rewriting the web won't work either.

matthewmacleod• 12 years ago

This is a fantastic idea and I'm really glad to see experimentation in this area. It's already great to look at how things like Webkit's dev tools are implemented in HTML and see how that idea might be extended.

At it's core, a browser is an HTML/JS rendering engine with some chrome to allow users to manage what pages they're looking at – and in most cases, that chrome is actually pretty minimal. It seems like a natural evolution to play with the idea of implementing that chrome in the natural UI language of the browser engine too. Yeah, the tools aren't there yet – but experiments like this will give us some scope to play around with what might be possible and identify the pain points that must be overcome to make it a reality.

Great stuff.

taf22• 12 years ago

This is great. My experience with XML for UI went something like this.

1. build an XML language for abstracting C++ UI MCF or gtk

2. realizing the need for HTML content - embed mozilla/xulrunner

3. realzing xulrunner /mozilla already provide a cross platform toolkit use XUL to build the user interface with xpcomm wrappers

4. realize that HTML is better for user interface, and only write HTML/javascript with xpcomm wrappers.

5. switch to web development completely and avoid desktop apps all together :)

6. from time to time check in on the state of desktop/app development and see if they've finally figured out html is better for interfaces than any interface builder

tracker12• 12 years ago

You should look into atom-shell and node-webkit... both are nice options if you want a cross-platform UI app with html+css+js.

adl2• 12 years ago

from time to time check in on the state of desktop/app development and see if they've finally figured out html is better for interfaces than any interface builder

Is this for real? I can name numerous advantages of Web Apps have over desktop/native Apps, "Building better interfaces" is not one of them.

Trying to build a UI with CSS and DOM manipulation (not to mention <div> hacks, Bootstrap, Dojo/JQueryUI, different rendering engines, etc) is an exercise in pain compared to basically _any_ modern UI toolkit. (From XAML to Qt, Android, hell even GTK.)

edit: minor correction, I meant to say " build a UI" not "build a native UI"

taf22• 12 years ago

see it's crazy. I don't know how to relate and I see it's the same for you. To me there's nothing easier than building UI in HTML with CSS and JavaScript. Using code to tweak padding and positioning in native code with a compile step is much slower IMO then

10.times { alt+tab, edit, cmd+r } -> perfect

[edit] - i should mention I spent a lot of time building desktop apps but haven't put much time into the newer mobile apps ios or android maybe it's improved a lot in ten years?

[edit] - last edit, I know it's improved and I suspect it's a matter of taste and proficiency that makes the difference.

STRML2• 12 years ago

You're right - but the real win here is that hundred of thousands of developers already know HTML + CSS, and very few developers know XUL or even any native UI API. Given that these native APIs change with the platform, many developers have given up on them since HTML + CSS will be useful for the foreseeable future.

Is XUL really better than HTML + CSS? Probably. But HTML + CSS is getting a lot better (flexbox, etc), and tons of developers know it now and can contribute. Plus, dogfooding. I think it's a really good move!

Sure, RAM usage will probably get worse, but perhaps it will motivate them to improve that as well, and all users of the browser on all pages will benefit as a result.

mcao• 12 years ago

The one thing that absolutely annoys me about the current Firefox is the location of the refresh button, which is a tiny icon stuck in the far right of the location bar. Worse of all you can't customize it natively. You have to download extensions to change the UI and still you won't get it to look 100% how you want it. Being able to modify a HTML based UI would be awesome.

Edmond• 12 years ago

love the idea, web tools built on web technology.

agumonkey3• 12 years ago

Live demo from github instructions : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcCtRpkq53M

ps: not my work, see : http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2ow1g0/firefoxh...

browserxul• 12 years ago

Copy this into firefox's URL bar for a fun treat:

    chrome://browser/content/browser.xul

ehsanu1• 12 years ago

Nice, and it nests too! Though with strange behavior after the first nesting.

gesman• 12 years ago

I wonder if this could be used to visually replay captured HTTP traffic?

Say, I want to visualize what my site visitors are seeing - and I capture complete request/reply stream of data off Ethernet interface.

donniezazen2• 12 years ago

I have been running Firefox for almost a month now. The divide between firefox and Chrome is getting bigger and bigger.

1. What do you guys think about sidebars and multiple toolbars? There is only a limited space available on screens these days for most people. I find them very archaic.

2. Dropdown arrows - I also don't understand the purpose of actually showing that if you click here a menu will open. A folder expands when you click it. There is nothing to be said about it.

3. Lack of overlay icons. There is literally a block with yellow background which shows number.

4. Lack of interest in devs to innovate on Firefox. There is a difference in versions of Evernote webclipper for Firefox and Chrome. Diigo extension is in atrocious condition.

Why do you think a solid browser like Firefox is lagging behind in UI compared to Chrome?

realusername• 12 years ago

It depends on your point of view, I could bring up similar arguments with Chrome. There is still no way in Chrome to open more than 25 tabs without the tabs being so small we can't see them and the Settings page of Chrome is not an example of clean UI either.

donniezazen2• 12 years ago

They both are great browser. I am not trying to say one is good and other is bad. What I am trying to say is that because of the reasons mentioned above it has been hard for me to adopt to Firefox. Chrome is Google's platform they want to push their services and has become more of an application platform with Chrome only apps and less of a browser. I would like a browser that promotes a free web.

For example, Diigo's addon doesn't have overlay icon so it is impossible for me to tell if I have already bookmarked a page or not. Like many addons on Firefox Diigo has both sidebar and toolbar. So basically they have developed 3 UI elements and none of which work well. There is clearly Diigo's fault here but applications are as good as platform.

blueskin_3• 12 years ago

we could drop XUL and close the gap between B2G and Firefox Desktop

I hope not. Customisability is always the first thing to die in mobile 'apps'. As soon as that happens on the desktop, I'm moving to Pale Moon permanently.

dschep• 12 years ago

What about this (using HTML instead of XUL) would make it less customizable? If anything, it's at least more accessibly customizable because more of us know HTML than know XUL.

Also, I imagine if this truly the way forward, XUL will be removed from the FF code base, thus making a XUL based Pale Moon trickier since it would be so different from upstream at that point.

earp• 12 years ago

This is like watching a nuclear superpower go down in a fist fight. I honestly think HTML5 was designed to eliminate Mozilla.

Firefox.html: Rebuilding Firefox UI in HTML

Related Stories