I don't think we have a concrete 100% worked-out *plan* at this point on
exactly how to remove all of XUL, but Benjamin said that there is a
*desire* to remove it. I can't speak for platform, but IME certainly
large portions of the Firefox frontend team do feel that way.
And realistically we *are* slowly but surely moving away from it, even
for existing XUL things. For instance, the new tab page moved to HTML
somewhat recently (yes, it was XUL before). I believe devtools are also
working on moving (further) away from XUL. The feed reader subscription
UI is moving to HTML. I was talking to Dave the other day about writing
an HTML-based treeview implementation so we can stop using XUL <tree>,
which will help moving things like about:sessionrestore and the
in-content prefs and so on away from XUL and XBL as well.
IMO, the only way to find out exactly how this is going to work for all
instances of "X is easy with XUL/XBL and hard(er)/impossible with HTML"
is to start doing it - there's no way to plan our way out of this before
we start, XUL and XBL's surface area is simply too big. When the surface
area is smaller (e.g. just outer windows and similar OS integration
left) then we can plan more easily. Right now it is too big a problem to
create a "from 0-100%" plan. But we're chopping away at it.
In the same way, it would be wise for things like bluegriffon,
Thunderbird, and other projects that rely on Gecko, to "write new stuff
using html5", and where they're redoing things anyway, to rewrite them
in HTML.
Ultimately though, I don't know that any of this is all that relevant to
this thread. We won't have a XUL-less Firefox "for a while", and the
conversation about Thunderbird's future is more immediately coupled to
build system issues, mozilla-central, discussions at a high level
between MoFo/MoCo/TB-council, etc. Less so "but what about XUL", AIUI.
~ Gijs
On 04/12/2015 16:48, Douglas Turner wrote:
If there is a plan, please reference it! I guess what I am thinking here
is that there is a difference between writing new stuff using html5 and
rewriting all of Firefox to remove XUL.
On Fri, Dec 4, 2015 at 7:50 AM, Benjamin Smedberg <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 12/4/2015 12:32 AM, Douglas Turner wrote:
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.
Doug, I'm surprised to hear you say that. There is definitely a desire
within the Firefox org to stop using XUL in its current form, and I've
heard a distinct desire within the DOM and layout team to stop supporting
the -moz-box layout paths in particular, the non-standard XUL parser, and
XBL.
--BDS
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