Revisiting how we build Firefox
Some context that might help people understand this email...<p>There are two high-level components which make up Firefox. The first is Gecko, the rendering engine. The second is Firefox, the application itself, which uses Gecko to render Web pages and itself.<p>Firefox, built on top of Gecko, is written primarily in XUL and XBL (and JS).<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XUL" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XUL</a>
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBL" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBL</a><p>What's going on here is that Mozilla is considering getting rid of XUL and XBL and building Firefox with the same technologies that people use to build Web content.<p>There are at least three big advantages to doing this:<p>1. Eliminate the need to support XUL and XBL in Gecko.<p>2. Contributing to Firefox gets easier because there is no need to learn what are essentially Mozilla-specific languages.<p>3. Mozilla learns more about what it takes to build complex applications like Firefox itself using Web technologies.<p>The only real downside is the amount of work involved.