XUL Overlays Removed
This is hopefully the last thing you’ll ever hear about XUL overlays as they have now been completely removed from Firefox[1]. For those unfamiliar with overlays, they provided a way to merge two XUL documents and were mainly used by legacy extensions and in several places within the Firefox UI. While overlays served a purpose, they were removed since we no longer support legacy extensions and they added unneeded complexity to Firefox. Removing overlays cut around 3.5K lines of code from Firefox and in my opinion made understanding which resources get loaded into which documents easier to reason about (see one example of a before[2] and after[3] below). This is just one piece of the broader XUL removal effort, but it does highlight that things can be simpler in a post-XUL world. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1426763 [2] https://bug1441378.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=8954951 [3] https://bug1441378.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=8954952 Key: Arrow direction: where elements go from -> to. Red: MacOS only Green: Non-MacOS Blue: where the element went ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: XUL Overlays Removed
On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 02:10:54PM -0700, Brendan Dahl wrote: This is hopefully the last thing you’ll ever hear about XUL overlays as they have now been completely removed from Firefox[1]. \o/ Thank you to everyone who was involved in this! Removing overlays cut around 3.5K lines of code from Firefox and in my opinion made understanding which resources get loaded into which documents easier to reason about I completely agree. I can't count the number of times I've made a change in one place that seemed obviously sound, only to have it break on try because some completely unrelated piece of code loads a special overlay into the window only on OS-X. ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: XUL Overlays Removed
> This is just one piece of the broader XUL removal effort, but it does > highlight that things can be simpler in a post-XUL world. Well I agree that cleaning up overlay usage was overdue. Otherwise the simple post XUL world world is just dumb. Removing things without a functional replacement and putting in spaghetthi code seems to be the current mantra. Preprocessing with include files is even worse. FRG Brendan Dahl wrote: This is hopefully the last thing you’ll ever hear about XUL overlays as they have now been completely removed from Firefox[1]. For those unfamiliar with overlays, they provided a way to merge two XUL documents and were mainly used by legacy extensions and in several places within the Firefox UI. While overlays served a purpose, they were removed since we no longer support legacy extensions and they added unneeded complexity to Firefox. ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: XUL Overlays Removed
> On Jul 13, 2018, at 3:05 PM, Frank-Rainer Grahl wrote: > > > This is just one piece of the broader XUL removal effort, but it does > > highlight that things can be simpler in a post-XUL world. > > Well I agree that cleaning up overlay usage was overdue. Otherwise the simple > post XUL world world is just dumb. Removing things without a functional > replacement and putting in spaghetthi code seems to be the current mantra. > Preprocessing with include files is even worse. The preprocessor was a perfectly good replacement for the way we used overlays used in the Firefox UI - it makes it easier to look at a document and figure out which resources are going to be loaded into it. Work to simplify our chrome documents (including reducing preprocessing) can now be done from a foundation where we know which documents will be affected by changes. Brian ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform