On 04/12/2015 06:32, Douglas Turner wrote: > Hey Daniel,
Hi my friend! > a. all the underlying technologies of Thunderbird's world (XPCOM, XUL, > XBL, XUL-based add-ons) are on the verge of being deprecated. Is the > announced move a way to decouple faster, as it seems reading your > bullet point 8? What other areas of Gecko will be "cleaned up" if > that decoupling happens? This question is an absolutely major one > because it will deeply impact the rendering engine's choice. > > > > It's unclear at this point what would be deprecated or what time frame > we're talking about. > > The bigger picture is that I want the web to win. I want it to be > more-awesome than Android, iOS, Win32, and xul-gecko. I want people to > be able to build products like Thunderbird and BlueGriffon directly on > the web. This is where we're heading. Then we need to drastically increase the pace of submission to Standard bodies like W3C to fill the gaps. The dismissal of the File API a while ago is one of the crucial holes in the platform. We also need html-based UI to go far beyond what Gaia currently allows to reach all what all plaforms allow. Let's think Qt. And we need that to become a Standard. There are other crucial Gecko interfaces available to chrome code that have strictly no equivalent in the Open Web Platform. This will also help a lot FirefoxOS and Firefox, of course. Earlier in this thread was mentioned XUL that "never gained traction". It never gained traction not only because of the market, but also because there was reluctance at some point in the past to submit it to W3C and have a WG reach a Standard. Because of that, XAML became a competitor, while my high-level contacts at Microsoft were all in favor of a standard and interoperable solution. Qt also got a competitor UI language. This was a strategic mistake we should probably not make again. > b. Thunderbird will still need to embed a browser, even if it does not > use any more XUL or XPCOM in the future. Embeddability of Gecko has > always been a poor parent of the project. > > > Very familiar with that problem... Fifteen years ago I was embedding > Gecko into the AOL/Gateway Crusoe! I had the same issue with AOL/Anvil if you recall correctly. > This is speculation. Maybe someone would carry a branch with XUL > support. Or maybe someone would build a transcompiler. Or maybe the > authors of these programs would rewrite to the web. > > Keep in mind, there is no plan to remove XUL or stop supporting XUL. > Firefox depends on XUL and it's unlikely that will change anytime soon. I have been asking for that for years, and this is the very first time I get such an answer, thank you. Now, I only need to have a sense of what "anytime soon" means. I should also note I heard quite different messages from some Moz employees. That's normal, but you have to understand this is a direct and immediate threat to the business of several companies and these companies cannot remain in such darkness. The cost of decoupling Postbox or BlueGriffon from Gecko would be tremendous. </Daniel> _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
