Future of XUL as an application independant UI structure language?

[Marius Heil]

Hey there,

I'm just preparing a presentation about XUL and I'm wondering whether XUL is just used and updated for Mozilla products like Thunderbird and Firefox.
When looking at the official documentation https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/XUL The last mentioned version is Firefox 3, which looks to me as if that project is kinda dead?
What's the future of XUL?

Thanks,
Marius

[Philipp Wagner]

Am 01.05.2013 00:27, Marius Heil wrote:
> Hey there,
>
> I'm just preparing a presentation about XUL and I'm wondering whether
> XUL is just used and updated for Mozilla products like Thunderbird
> and Firefox. When looking at the official documentation
> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/XUL The last mentioned
> version is Firefox 3, which looks to me as if that project is kinda
> dead?

XUL is still used (and probably will in the foreseeable future be used)
for Desktop Firefox and Thunderbird (and Seamonkey of course). It is
also used in Firefox OS (although not very much) and AFAIK still in some
parts of Firefox for Android

It's also used by third-party offerings like Songbird (the desktop
version), Bluegriffon and others.

> What's the future of XUL?

XUL itself is on the decline, being replaced mainly by HTML, which gains
more and more capabilities that previously only XUL had (the most recent
example being flexboxes).

On XULRunner, just (more or less) recently there was a README added to
each XULRunner distribution, stating that it's essentially a byproduct
of the core Mozilla offerings (mainly Firefox) and not much work goes
into maintaining it as a framework on its own. That being said, if you
put some work into it, you will find a great and helpful community and a
great framework for your own "close-to-the-web" application. Just don't
expect it to work in the next release, and also expect to put some work
into it yourself.

Philipp

[Eric Shepherd]

On 2013-04-30 22:27:48 +0000, Marius Heil said:

> I'm just preparing a presentation about XUL and I'm wondering whether
> XUL is just used and updated for Mozilla products like Thunderbird and
> Firefox.
> When looking at the official documentation
> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/XUL The last mentioned version
> is Firefox 3, which looks to me as if that project is kinda dead?

If you flip through it, you'll find updates elsewhere too. It's just a
matter of what's changed; we only mark Firefox or Gecko versions on
content that's actually been updated.

--
Eric Shepherd
Developer Documentation Lead
Mozilla
Blog: http://www.bitstampede.com/
Twitter: @sheppy

[totalkn...@gmail.com]

It is unfortunate to hear that XULRunner is on the decline, as there is nothing really out there right now that lives in the same development space as far as I am aware.

If one wants to develop a desktop application using web technologies to make the GUI design easier, XULRunner seems the best option.