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Comment by fidotron | Hacker News Reader

Is this itself entirely a webapp?

As an aside, I'm amazed the way Mozilla have co-opted the term "Web" to mean whatever they want it to. The way they've branded all sorts of non-standard APIs in FFOS "Web" APIs to confuse people into thinking these are somehow more open than anything else is impressive.

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> Is this itself entirely a webapp?

Actually, yes: http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/devtoo...

XUL is a web technology now?

That's my point. It's not.

EDIT: ici: http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/devtoo...

There is no XUL in there.

Last time I checked, the vbox/hbox is XUL. https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/XUL/vbox

Sure, but that's only in index.xul, which is a very small part of the project. Everything else is plain old js+html (xhtml necessary for localization). Apologies, I didn't notice that when I said "there's no XUL in there".

As a meta-discussion, <vbox> is just a fancy way of saying:

div { display: -moz-box; -moz-box-orient: vertical; }

...which is the old flexbox implementation. But I digress :)

edit: link to the MDN article about `display: box`: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/box-orient

We could probably rewrite the entire Firefox UI in HTML nowadays, but that'd mostly be busywork (and would break a bunch of extensions). I would bet that Servo's UI will just be HTML.

Servo is just the browser engine, like Gecko. The UI/browser-chrome will be a separate project (named Crow, but not started yet afaik). Also relevant is the fact that Servo wants to be embeddable, like Webkit.

Mozilla lost their focus long ago. They are now mostly political organisation with side busines of making software and financed by a competitor. I loved them so much since the days of the Phoenix (I think it was 0.6 which I made my default browser), I admired Blake Ross. They had a great goal: to make the best browser. Now? I couldn't care less. I don't know who the leader is, or do they even have one. I know they are good I writing manifestos and have some evangelists not too shy to lie. Will those political games help anyone? I doubt so. But if once great organisation is determined to become irrelevant, how can you forbid that? MDN is good, though.

Mozilla is not Apple, they can very much function without a leader.

They have the ONLY fully featured modern browser that is also free software. IMHO, it fits the "make the best browser" philosophy.

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