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> 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.



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.


The problem (or at least one of them) is that maintaining XUL and HTML is expensive. XUL, like HTML, has a bunch of weird corner cases, tricky layout behavior, complex interaction between elements, etc. The focus of the platform developers at Mozilla is obviously on the Web, so XUL has been in a crappy maintenance mode for a long time now.

Doing the Firefox chrome (heh) in HTML is another way to put our money where our mouth is, like the Firefox OS and Web App Runtime efforts.

There's a more detailed explanation of the situation of XUL here: https://lists.mozilla.org/pipermail/dev-platform/2014-Octobe...


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




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