I realize this is a personal project, but this is deeply amusing considering that:
1. Way back when (circa 1998-2001?), the Mozilla project started as a radical redesign of the next gen Netscape browser. One of the core principles of the architecture was that the browser itself would render the UI elements (using an HTML-like tech call XUL).
2. The Firefox browser (then called "Phoenix") was a reaction against the above, which was thought to make the browser too heavyweight and slow. Originally Phoenix was the Gecko engine in a native UI window without all the XUL overhead (and without all the other components of the Mozilla Suite like the email client).
Now we're seeing the reverse trend, 15 odd years later.
EDIT: It turns out I misremembered about Phoenix dropping XUL completely--rather they dropped XPFE for a "new light-weight XUL toolkit", along with dropping all the non-browser components of the Mozilla suite.
You're getting your browser history mixed up a little -- Phoenix was a reaction against the general bloat of Mozilla, but it was still a cross-platform XUL-based affair.
"Phoenix is a redesign of the Mozilla browser component, similar to Galeon, K-Meleon and Chimera, but written using the XUL user interface language and designed to be cross-platform."
Similar concepts from Microsoft (browser wars era):
Microsoft integrated Trident (Internet Explorer HTML engine) to Win95 with the ActiveDesktop refresh (part of IE4 installation) and shipped with Win98 by default. The desktop background wallpaper was a large HTML page, there were DHTML widgets, the Explorer sidebar was HTML. In Windows 2000 and ME you could even preview Videos in the HTML based sidebar. WinXP's sidebar is HTML based too, also the slow applications window where you can uninstall applications, as well as the control panel. Even in Win7 and more modern versions the UI render code for the control panel, some new popup dialogs, and some Office UI and Windows Media Player is based on a forked render code that happened in the XP era. The EU even mandated that Microsoft has to release the API to the public, so that other developers could create such beautiful Windows applications based on that UI code.
Use your favorite PE resource explorer (e.g. reshacker) to verify it. The DHTML source is in various shell related dlls in the Windows directory.
> Originally Phoenix was the Gecko engine in a native UI window without all the XUL overhead
I'm not sure Phoenix was ever a reaction to XUL. Phoenix was more a reaction to the kitchen sink feature-list of Netscape 5 and Mozilla Application Suite, seeking to pare down the feature set to a minimally viable browser.
In XUL (and moreso XBL) Mozilla had a web technology that there was talk of submitting for standardization and which brought with it a level of expression that HTML didn't offer at the time. As HTML, CSS and JavaScript have evolved, XUL/XBL bring less and less to the table.
You are wrong. When we started Firefox (before "Phoenix") one of the primary goals was to prove that XUL on Windows could be fast enough and look native enough that no one would care. We succeeded.
Well, XUL was quite ahead of its time. Most of XUL has now been incorporated (and improved, and optimized) in HTML.
Also, Phoenix kept using XUL, just a rewrite that didn't attempt to do everything from scratch, but relied upon native components wherever available. Most of the Firefox UI is either XUL or HTML.
I think Firefox mostly started out from an urge to make a "Browser product", rather than whatever the hell the suite had become. It shows in the release notes:
1. Way back when (circa 1998-2001?), the Mozilla project started as a radical redesign of the next gen Netscape browser. One of the core principles of the architecture was that the browser itself would render the UI elements (using an HTML-like tech call XUL).
2. The Firefox browser (then called "Phoenix") was a reaction against the above, which was thought to make the browser too heavyweight and slow. Originally Phoenix was the Gecko engine in a native UI window without all the XUL overhead (and without all the other components of the Mozilla Suite like the email client).
Now we're seeing the reverse trend, 15 odd years later.
EDIT: It turns out I misremembered about Phoenix dropping XUL completely--rather they dropped XPFE for a "new light-weight XUL toolkit", along with dropping all the non-browser components of the Mozilla suite.