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by marcosdumay 2401 days ago
From my POV, it didn't catch on because:

- It had all the problems of Electron in a time where memory was a much more of an issue

- Low quality documentation that didn't go into the details (although it had a great overview)

- Performance problems due to the high abstraction level and bad JS interpreter

- Memory leaking that appeared on several versions and disappeared on other versions, that randomly affected people and nobody could explain

All those problems got corrected eventually, but by then it was too late.
2 comments
eloisant 2400 days ago
It didn't catch on because Mozilla never gave a shit about XULRunner, and they were clear about it.

In the late 2000's there were many companies who launched products based on XULRunner (Miro, Songbird, Joost, Tom-Tom...), but when they encountered bugs in the platform Mozilla's response was always "bug doesn't affect Firefox, we don't care". Even if you made a PR yourself (actually a patch at the time), good luck to get it merged if Firefox wasn't impacted.

Note that XULRunner was called this way but you didn't have to use XUL, you could use HTML for UI just like in Electron today.

If Mozilla saw the potential in their platform as a development platform for third party, it might still exist and have a bigger market share than Electron today. Maybe GitHub would have used it instead of developing electron, actually.

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tracker1 2400 days ago
I have to agree... I'd wanted to use it for a few things in the early 00's, but the support just seemed absent.
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mathw 2400 days ago
I remember trying to write something in it and the performance was atrocious, it used masses of memory and I hadn't even really done much. I wasn't anything like the developer I am now back then of course, I was an undergraduate CS student, but still... also yes, the documentation was awful! The experience for an Electron developer today is far superior with documentation, performance and all sorts so much better before you even start doing work on making it go fast.

I'll pause now for my regular appreciation of what the Visual Studio Code team have managed to do with Electron.

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