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by Lukas_Skywalker
2410 days ago
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A bit of nostalgia: I created an application based on XULRunner at the end of high school. The project started out as a Firefox Extension, and since I wanted to create a standalone application, XULRunner was the obvious choice. I didn't know much programming, but it was, coupled with the excellent documentation on MDN, enough to get me started. What I remember best are the following few things: - XULRunner had an included application update mechanism. You basically created a diff between two application versions and placed that on a server. XULRunner would automatically detect it and apply it. No configuration needed. This was huge. - XULRunner obviously had a built-in browser. Using a few XML elements, you could embed a browser view. - Porting from a Firefox extension to a standalone application was very easy. Add some boilerplate and you are done. Pretty much no need to change the application code. - Since my application didn't include any native code, it was automatically cross platform. And it integrated beautifully into all platforms. |
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The tooling was great, and it did set the precedent for what we expect today.