XUL Layout is gone
What&#x27;s really sad imho isn&#x27;t that XUL is gone (when I considered using it, I quickly gave it up for mostly the same reasons that several others already wrote about ITT)…<p>… no, what&#x27;s really sad is that there is still no satisfying solution to the problem that XUL was trying to solve, i.e.: the need for a native cross-platform GUI lib; and apart from the special situation of the likes of Mozilla (where a Web browser engine is the central major part of the product and its UI anyways so it makes sense that they use that engine for what little and relatively simple and not performance-sensitive GUI is added to or around the browser view as well)…<p>… apart from very few such cases, Web isn&#x27;t the answer either. In particular, Electron apps suffer from the unnecessarily enormous added deadweight of the de-facto-integrated browser and while its performance is good enough for simple use cases, it quickly becomes limiting when the UI gets more complex or when you need to integrate stuff that is performance-sensitive or requires a different rendering.<p>There are a couple cross-platform UI libs out there, but compared to other domains (where it&#x27;s often easier to find a satisfying lib), I find that they all have some major problems, in particular:<p>* Qt, which did look promising in its Nokia days, went down a sore downhill shitslope since Microsoft mole Stephen Elop threw it out to Digia, where (especially since splitted out as QTCOM) the licensing focus of Qt has shifted from &quot;make it more open and permissive so as to gain wide dev community&#x2F;traction&quot; (the strategy under Nokia) to &quot;try to force devs into commercial licensing schemes and monetize to the max you can milk out of it while it lasts&quot;… and as a consequence, more and more previously Qt-oriented devs looking elsewhere.<p>* neither GTK nor Flutter are satisfying answers either.<p>I think there is really a big window of opportunity and gap to be filled by a new modern cross-platform UI toolkit with wide portability (at least Windoze, Linux, MacOS, iOS, Android, embedded; though a Vulkan-based renderer can be made to run pretty much anywhere), a permissive open source license, a C interface&#x2F;wrap to allow a wide programming language binding support, and an easily extensible and themable set of basic widgets.