[shockinglytrue]

> tolerable cross platform toolkit

..for the 90s. There was very little about XUL that would survive today other than its layout model

Ignoring that XUL has a single implementation and for the most part a single application suite actually using it (not 100% true but very close), I'm not sure what there was to blow.

OTOH I remember some custom XUL apps of yesteryear, and they were always pretty nice to use. Does Firefox have any XUL left? I know there have been ideas to rip it out for a very long time.

[aryonoco]

I remember there was a whole Linux distro written in XUL. Can't remember its name for the life of me, but from memory it was vaguely based on RedHat and was targeting kiosks and internet appliances. I remember setting it up for my parents circa 2001 as it looked fool proof and tamper proof.

[solarkraft]

> XUL has a single implementation

What's the issue with that? GTK, WPF Qt, Flutter ... all have a single major implementation.

> for the most part a single application suite actually using it

That is now, but it could've been a lot different.

I'm not that familiar with XUL (I'm just old enough to experience it being phased out) but it appears like a great idea to me: XML is not exactly bad for a UI, but XAML is Microsoft-specific (and not exactly great) and HTML is made for documents (leading to problems with worries about semantic tags, lack of layout features ...).

I also quite like how well Firefox integrates with all kinds of platforms. But who knows, maybe that's not in XUL, but specific to FF.

[floatboth]

> Does Firefox have any XUL left?

Yes, recently there's been a big rewrite of lots of things as web components, but some XUL leftovers are still there.