On Fri, Jan 1, 2016 at 11:48 PM, Patrick Burroughs (Celti) <celti@celti.name> wrote:
On Fri, 1 Jan 2016 11:53:45 -0800 Kyle Terrien <kyleterrien@gmail.com> wrote:
It's amazing how the pattern of removing features and changing things arbitrarily for the "greater good" is spreading around nowadays. It has invaded Firefox recently. Mozilla is talking about deprecating XUL this year.
Deprecating XUL (and XPCOM) actually has a good and logical reason, which is making Firefox properly threadable and removing many security holes that the present architecture has. It's not change for the sake of change (which I will admit some Firefox changes have been) — it is change for the sake of keeping up with the modern world.
~Celti
No, threading isn't the problem. The main reason is that the entire system is too flexible and exposes lots of internals. Because of this, every Firefox version so far had to strike a balance between breaking addons and making necessary improvements. Creating a new, smaller API would ease cleaning up Gecko while keeping ported extensions working. XUL would still get used, but only internally. Secondly, it's a step towards replacing Gecko completely. I guess we'll be seeing Servo as the content renderer within a year or two. Gecko will only be used for the chrome and eventually will vanish completely, taking XUL with it.