Our goal is to expose the basic functionality required to write a browser to this HTML entry point, via CommonJS modules and as lightweight conventions on top of the DOM. This page is granted extra privileges (i.e., it can access CommonJS modules made available by the Jetpack platform). Instead of loading XUL, the application’s main execution point is an HTML file. Leveraging these existing Mozilla technologies made it possible for us to quickly get to a point where we could launch a XULRunner based application that is a blank canvas - chromeless. The current implementation is a remix of Atul Varma’s Cuddlefish Lab and the Jetpack SDK, combined with XULRunner.
It serves to illustrate the general idea of the project and does not yet provide proper sandboxing (among other things) - and plenty of details on the state of implementation are available in the form of annotations in the source code. This is a functional application written in HTML running on a pre-alpha version of the chromeless platform: the inner browser elements are iframes instead of XUL browser elements. The following screenshot is an example of a very simple browser application with page thumbnails used for tab handlers: We intend to create an experimental toolkit which will allow developers to build their own Web browser using standard Web technologies: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
It’s questions like these that have motivated us to start a new Mozilla Labs experiment, codenamed “chromeless”. What if the parts of the browser that are most interesting to contributors were implemented in standard Web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript? What kinds of wild-eyed experimentation would we see if a new conception of browser UI could be prototyped in about the same time it takes to write a web page? Firefox is put together in a way that seasoned developers are able implement features with amazing efficiency, but at the same time, the browser interface in XUL represents a barrier for potential contributors. Much of the user interface (browser chrome) of Firefox is implemented in XUL, which uses a lot of Web-based technologies such as the DOM and JavaScript. Have you ever had an idea to improve the user interface of your browser? Have you ever actually gone and tried to make that idea a reality? If you have, you would have probably used technologies like XUL and XPCOM. The “Chromeless” project experiments with the idea of removing the current browser user interface and replacing it with a flexible platform which allows for the creation of new browser UI using standard Web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
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