<soap-box>I don't have any first hand experience with XUL, but I'm skeptical.Case in point: XUL has been around for years (both in development andI think this has largely to do with the fact that Mozilla for teh past few years has been such a bloody slow beast that no one wanted to write applications for it. I myself had a hard time, until Firebird became stable. Now it's a joy to write for, even though the learning curve is pretty steep.
release), yet it is not widely adopted as a platform for software
development.
I've noticed that with mozilla and even firebird, it seems every minor
browser version breaks one or more skins. Some of the old skins can
crash the new browser. At least from my perspective as a user it
looks pretty brittle and fragile.
This, AFAIK, is due to changes in the underlying XUL. XUL describes the layout of the application, and the CSS describes what it will look like. CSS is usually bound to elements in the XUL code based on ID, and if changes in the underlying XUL occur, then the CSS must change as well.
Mozilla and Firebird are extremely complicated applications, and while the skinning functionality is a very flexible feature, it is as much a part of the application development process as the XUL+JavaScript itself. If you were developing an XSP web app, your XSL stylesheet would be an integral part of that application, and a fundamental change in one would require a change in the other. That is what's going on here.
So, this skinning method may seem brittle to end users, but gives the developers a very extensible development environment.
</soap-box>
I see what you mean though. I for one wish the Orbit theme worked on the latest nightly build. Oh well, you can't have everything.
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