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by dependenttypes 2406 days ago
People seem to love laggy web-sights, let's port the lag into the browser's UI!
4 comments

Firefox has always been built with DOM, JS, CSS technologies, as the linked article calls out. This change replaces a large proprietary extension, XBL, with a standard equivalent.
Calling XBL a proprietary is weird when considering that it is published by w3c and that firefox is FOSS.

> Firefox has always been built with DOM, JS, CSS technologies, as the linked article calls out

I am aware of that (and imo, it was a mistake). That however does not mean that moving to more web-y stuff will not make the performance any worse.

The language is official.

https://mozilla.github.io/firefox-browser-architecture/text/... says:

> XBL is a proprietary technology developed by Mozilla. We are solely responsible for the maintenance and improvement of XBL. Any time spent on doing this doesn’t contribute to the evolution of the Web so effectively we don’t spend anytime improving XBL except for plugging serious holes.

What they mean is they 'own' it, the good, the tedious and the bad parts.

The web is not inherently slow.
The modern web certainly is.
It's not. You just have to care.
No, the developers of the web pages you use have to care.
Yes, that's what I meant by "you". But if you want to take a more active role in improving the web, you're free to interpret that "you" as actually referring to you.
But ultimately you can't get everyone to care. That's why the web will always be slow.
"web-sights"
It's not just the rendering that makes a website slow.