A couple of weeks ago, we landed a commit that took years of effort at Mozilla. It removed “XBL”, which means we’ve completed the process of migrating the Firefox UI to Web Components. It wasn’t easy – but I’ll get to that later.
[…]It’s taken a couple years of work of remarkably steady progress by a small team of engineers along with the support of the rest of the organization, and I’m happy to report that we’ve now finished. This is a big accomplishment on its own, and also a foundational improvement for Firefox. It allows teams to focus efforts on modern web standards, and means we can remove a whole lot of duplicated and complicated functionality that wasn’t exposed to websites.
The fact the people at Mozilla have been able to do this without any major disruptions to Firefox users is pretty impressive.
That is so stupid. XBL/XUL is web technologies. It’s an SGML derivative (like XML and HTML), it’s styled with CSS and runs on the JavaScript engine Mozilla uses for Firefox. It’s not HTML, and have not become an industry standard, but that’s about all. It was web-technologies before and it is now. The rest is marketing.
I have no idea what you’re ranting about here. Maybe you misread one sentence and stopped reading there and came here to vent?
While the process of moving from XUL to standard web components can be considered as an effort with zero visible progress, I guess they are now able to deprecate and eventually scrap a big pile of code from the browser. Web components are anyway required because they are a part of the actual web whereas XUL is a redundant blob doing something pretty similar yet completely different.
Erez thinks Web Components is the same as Web technologies and didn’t read the linked article.
Tip for Erez: There is a reason Components is written with a capital C
Without any disruption to Firefox users?!
They trashed an entire ecosystem of extensions in the process to support this transition.
I’m pretty sure that qualifies as a disruption – it certainly was/is for me.
jmorgannz,
+1 Good point.
I limit the number of plugins I use to keep my attack surface as “stock” as possible. The only useful extension I lost was DownThemAll.
Which is available again using WebComponents
‘paride5745
Which is available again using WebComponents”
Big Whoop. What about the ones which aren’t and never will be and have been around for *YEARS* and with never have a workable replacement such as the *OFFLINE* password managers? How about Mozilla fracking up people’s computer’s by disabling plugins and other things *WITHOUT* the computer owners *PERMISSION?*
Quite frankly,just as it is illegal for *YOU* to alter settings on a computer you *DON”T OWN*, it’s long past time that these laws be applied to and enforced against Mozilla and other outfits as well.
such as the *OFFLINE* password managers?
*cough* KeePassX *hack*
They switched their UI elements without a large disruption. This has nothing to do with the switch from single process to multiprocess which caused the extension mass extinction event.
From here on out the Firefox extension mass extinction event will be referred to as FFEMEE (fee mee), and we will establish a religion based on this event. Every year we will gather and mourn the switch to multiprocess by reciting stories of extensions which were lost that day. We will call ourselves Ffemeeites.
Who’s with me? Should we buy some land in Wyoming?
It’s also basically killing off non-Firefox mozilla apps – Seamonkey and Thunderbird (/Lightning) – they don’t have the level of porting resources Firefox do, and with Mozilla starving them out of the Mozilla ecosystem anyway they’re stuffed
“2019-11-22 3:26 am
Gargyle
such as the *OFFLINE* password managers?
*cough* KeePassX *hack*
Pretty much the only one, and a piece of crap compared to the older ones-tries too hard to be cutesy……
New Mozilla plugins aren’t really a improvement over the older ones. More a waste of time and effort.