XULRunner 6.6.0.0 Developer Preview

[mrnhmath]

In spirit of advancing and solidifying the Unified XUL Platform as the de facto successor to the Mozilla platform, the XULRunner runtime along with its accompanying SDK has been revived and is now available for testing.

XULRunner 6.6.0.0, based on the latest Pale Moon 33.0.1/Goanna 6.6.0 platform code is the first developer preview. It enables a standalone runtime for Mozilla applications that can be as powerful as Firefox derivates and a software development kit for more in-depth uses of Mozilla technology such as XPCOM. You can learn more about XULRunner in the archived MDN documentation.

Preliminary testing binaries can be found at Pale Moon's FTP server, targeting win32 and linux-x86_64-gtk2.

[moonbat]

Wow, this is excellent news

Thank you for bringing XULRunner towards a usable state!

[mrnhmath]

XULRunner 6.6.0.1 has been released, based on the same platform code as Pale Moon 33.1.0. This release should be considered its first stable developer preview.

Note that I won't be doing 32-bit builds of my projects from now on, so if you want to play with XUL in an older machine, the 6.0.0.0 win32 binary will be kept around.

Runtime binaries and accompanying SDK are available over Pale Moon's FTP server.

[malcolmd]

Thank you so much for the work done to get this to the developer preview stage.

The Linux version worked straight away using an existing project - this makes me so happy as I have not managed to get xulrunner working on a modern Linux previously!

I initially had an issue with the win32 version - the application displayed "Cannot load XPCOM" on launch. Running xpcshell - helped me find the issue as this reported that VCRUNTIME140.dll, MSVCP140.dll and VCRUNTIME140.dll were not found. A google search pointed me to https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/win ... 3fb7c38625 - which informed me I needed to install the Microsoft Visual C++ 2015 - 2022 Redistributable x64: https://aka.ms/vs/17/release/vc_redist.x64.exe

Installing this fixed the issue - I thought I'd post this info here in case it helps someone else.

[mrnhmath]

I initially had an issue with the win32 version - the application displayed "Cannot load XPCOM" on launch. Running xpcshell - helped me find the issue as this reported that VCRUNTIME140.dll, MSVCP140.dll and VCRUNTIME140.dll were not found. A google search pointed me to https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/win ... 3fb7c38625 - which informed me I needed to install the Microsoft Visual C++ 2015 - 2022 Redistributable x64: https://aka.ms/vs/17/release/vc_redist.x64.exe

Installing this fixed the issue - I thought I'd post this info here in case it helps someone else.

I forgot to mention that unlike mainline XUL applications like Pale Moon and Basilisk, these XULRunner releases were not built with the MSVC redist files included. Thanks for pointing it out and the encouragement as well.

[malcolmd]

@mrnhmath - I wondered if any further versions of the xulrunner are planned, build on the latest version of Goanna.

If there are any build instructions - I would be happy to try to create a build. I created a build environment to build the Linux GTK2 version of the palemoon browser.

Thanks in advance.

[noobsoftware]

Glad to see this. Hopefully this will encourage more applications allowing extensions. I have a few apps I'm releasing my self which i want to move towards allowing extensions (although not using UXP).

[noobsoftware]

When trying to download the runtime i get a username and password request. Also, probably a stupid question, but what is the difference between the sdk and the runtime? Can you possibly provide a simple example how to use it to run an xul application?

--Edit--

Runs fine on windows. I would love to be able to use XULRunner embedded in an Objective-C Cocoa app or something like GeckoFX in a c# app. I've found this: https://developer.apple.com/documentati ... guage=objc

Which presumably would allow to accomplish this, i have struggled with understanding XPCom but hopefully i can grasp it to succeed with this. GeckoFX seems to be to outdated to work with any recent .NET based project type so i was unable to test if it works with this version of XULRunner, but presumably it would work. I think generally this would be a nice expansion for the use cases for UXP and XULRunner in general. As a side note i have been developing my own programming language called "NoobScript" which supports multithreading, thread safety and most recently deep recursion. And i also have a pretty simple layout engine for native Cocoa layout elements which i use a html-like syntax and a css-like syntax for defining the layout for native elements one of those elements usually being a WebView. I've been using WebKits webview on the mac side and WebView2 in .NET for the windows side. And this configuration is mostly useful for native elements, i've been using VideoViews from VLCKit for example and have support for animating between layout configurations. And the ideas was to be able to support configuration, scriptability and extensions at some point for mac and windows, objective-c/NoobScript/JS and C#/NoobScript/JS based apps respectively. But i find myself missing XUL all the time and i really prefer XUL based browsers and browser engine to webkit. So if anyone wants to contribute and make a mac running version of XULRunner i could hopefully have some luck with this.

Currently i have a few ideas for XUL based applications, a source code editor would be fun and also of course a new browser would be fun to tackle.