Mozilla Plans to Revitalize Firefox

[froggyboy604]

In a post on Mozilla’s firefox-dev mailing list, Director of Engineering for Firefox Dave Camp outlined the bare bones of a plan to move Firefox off its legacy XML User Interface Language (XUL) architecture and onto a newer stack that more directly complements the modern Web.
 

There’s a huge body of shared wisdom about how to build applications on the Web. It’s time to go back and examine how we can bring that wisdom back into Firefox.

 
Camp pointed out how XUL and its associated technologies don’t receive the kind of platform attention as HTML itself, creating issues of performance and unneeded complexity. 
 

It’s harder for even experienced Web developers to get up to speed. It’s further from the Web, and that doesn’t help anybody.

 
Right now, there’s no clear successor for XUL, either in terms of replacing it with or in carrying it out. However, there’s the sense that a replacement is needed and a conversation needs to take place. One technology likely to be involved, Mozilla’s Rust language (now in its 1.1 incarnation), has not yet been explicitly tapped to build the next generation of Firefox, but the Servo layout engine being built with Rust has long been rumored to be a candidate technology.
 
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I hope Mozilla can Revitalize Firefox web browser.

 

[Demon_Skeith]

I doubt this will end well.

 

[Claraviolet]

That sort of major changes are hardly appreciated by the end users.

 

[lb]

Well, let's hope they make it faster, cause the latest updates make it run kind of sluggishly when handling more than 15 tabs at the same time.

 

[VirusZero]

My question here is "how". How are they planning to revitalize their browser? I mean giving it a facelift is one thing, but not really enough. (Plus I sort of hope they ditch this Chrome-copy look they have going on right now and move to something a bit more unique.)

I'd like to see them rework how some of their features behave. Namely their private window should include the option for a single private tab. (So no longer would you have to open a whole window to just for one tab. Or have to go find a plugin that can allow this feature.) Additionally give the tabs themselves an overhaul. Make it possible for users to stack, duplicate, pin, etc... from default. No more having to hunt down a plugin to add those options. (I'm sorry tabmix plus, but you really should be default.)
And there are probably more that could stand an upgrade, but those are the two off the top of my head that I would like to see changed.

 

[Demon_Skeith]

I hear update 41 is supposed to be big.