Brian Grinstead

This is the special “0 bindings left” seventeenth edition of the XUL/XBL Replacement Newsletter. I’m proud to announce that as of today, we have no more XBL bindings left in Firefox!

There’s still a lot more to do on the larger XUL Replacement project, and we’re still in the process of removing XBL support in Gecko. I’ll send a follow up post outlining the next steps, but I wanted to take this opportunity to celebrate the accomplishment and acknowledge the efforts over the last two years of steady progress. There have been too many people to list who have been involved with writing and reviewing patches, answering questions, and breaking down bugs. And others who haven’t been directly working on this but have been affected by it being prioritized over other work.

Binding Removals

There are 0 bindings left, compared to 7 from the last update and 300 from the start of the project. Here’s a list of changes:

• Alex Surkov converted the popup binding into the menupopup Custom Element.
• Alex also converted the panel and arrowpanel bindings to a Custom Element using Shadow DOM and CSS Shadow Parts, with assists from Emilio Cobos Álvarez and Mike Conley to figure out a tricky performance issue.
• I converted the arrowscrollbox binding to a Custom Element using Shadow DOM and CSS Shadow Parts, with Dão Gottwald reviewing.
• Tim Nguyen converted the autocomplete binding to a customized html:input Custom Element. He’d been leading the charge on migrating all instances of xul:textbox elements in our UI to html:input.
• And with only one binding to go, Tim removed the textbox binding, with assists from Emma Malysz and Alex who broke down and removed the remaining <xul:textbox> tests. Thanks to them and to all the folks who gave us speedy reviews in those blockers to help us land it.