Revisiting how we build Firefox
Some context that might help people understand this email...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.Firefox, built on top of Gecko, is written primarily in XUL and XBL (and JS).https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XUL
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBLWhat'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.There are at least three big advantages to doing this:1. Eliminate the need to support XUL and XBL in Gecko.2. Contributing to Firefox gets easier because there is no need to learn what are essentially Mozilla-specific languages.3. Mozilla learns more about what it takes to build complex applications like Firefox itself using Web technologies.The only real downside is the amount of work involved.