Subj : Re: Microsoft
To : hollowone
From : Lmorchard
Date : Mon Apr 03 2023 07:01 pm
Re: Re: Microsoft
By: hollowone to Tracker1 on Sun Apr 02 2023 01:11 pm
> I know XUL, it was pitched by Mozilla years after NN collapsed as something
> that may help Javascript conquer desktop app development. It never resonated
> though.
>
> But that makes sense to me, if XUL predecessor as Wikipedia claims developed
> initially by Netscape Communications in around 1997 was responsible for NN6
> rendering and I experienced it around 1999/2000 with my Celeron 300Mhz, no
> brainer it was slow as hell.
Turns out, XUL was kind of just ahead of its time. Nowadays, there's a booming business in desktop apps based on Electron, which is essentially just HTML/JS/CSS web apps with some enhanced APIs and backend resources.
It's also kind of why Apple's Webkit took off rather than Mozilla's Gecko: Where Webkit was made to be easily embeddable into other apps, Gecko & XUL kind of assumed you'd build your apps *inside* it as a framework.
So, when it turned out that the world really wanted an embedded web view component rather than to buy into a whole app framework, Mozilla kind of lost the contest there.
