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0 pointseloisant6y ago0 comments

It didn't catch on because Mozilla never gave a shit about XULRunner, and they were clear about it.

In the late 2000's there were many companies who launched products based on XULRunner (Miro, Songbird, Joost, Tom-Tom...), but when they encountered bugs in the platform Mozilla's response was always "bug doesn't affect Firefox, we don't care". Even if you made a PR yourself (actually a patch at the time), good luck to get it merged if Firefox wasn't impacted.

Note that XULRunner was called this way but you didn't have to use XUL, you could use HTML for UI just like in Electron today.

If Mozilla saw the potential in their platform as a development platform for third party, it might still exist and have a bigger market share than Electron today. Maybe GitHub would have used it instead of developing electron, actually.

0 comments

tracker16y ago

I have to agree... I'd wanted to use it for a few things in the early 00's, but the support just seemed absent.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointseloisant6y ago0 comments

It didn't catch on because Mozilla never gave a shit about XULRunner, and they were clear about it.

Note that XULRunner was called this way but you didn't have to use XUL, you could use HTML for UI just like in Electron today.