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by chillingeffect 3860 days ago
> But hey, donate to Mozilla! $5, $15, $25,

Ah yes, thank you for the reminder!

http://imgur.com/hLZp8SG

Now that I actually have a career and money I have no problem giving back. I'm glad I can donate to Ubuntu and Wikipedia nowadays. I am grateful for everything Firefox has given me for well over 10 years...

I really don't know what XUL is (intermediate language between HTML and FF UI?), but I guess I do feel sorry for people who have been using Thunderbird. I hope it's significant enough a property that people will want to continue, write it in Rust?
2 comments
toyg 3860 days ago
Not sure if serious, but...

XUL (or rather XULRunner) is a cross-platform UI toolkit, basically a Javascript+XML runtime built with C++. It's what Mozilla programs are built with today, abstracting out a lot of OS-specific details. It's unlikely to ever be rewritten in any language, and pretty much failed to get any traction outside of the Mozilla ecosystem.

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72deluxe 3860 days ago
Why rewrite it in another language? It isn't currently broken.

Things that are not broken do not need rewriting.

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acdha 3860 days ago
> Why rewrite it in another language? It isn't currently broken.

You need to support that claim. The people who actually work on Firefox have a list of reasons why they made this decision:

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev...

Why are we to believe that you are better qualified to make that call?

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orik 3860 days ago
Maybe they decided there's too much technical debt and they can't make changes to the browser as fast as they wish they could in the current framework?

Not 'broken' in a traditional sense but still a valid reason to rewrite.

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toyg 3860 days ago
Yeah, but there is a trade-off involved. If you spend 3 years rewriting your toolkit, then the time you will eventually save on further changes has to offset those 3 years, and that's very hard for most projects.
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