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You have to be willing to lose in life. It's unrealistic to expect all hits all the time. If some organization or open source project seems too perfect, look for a "memory hole" where their negative results get flushed.

So XULRunner and Tamarin did not pan out. But we have lots of hits, some still ramping up: Firefox, Firefox OS, Gecko, Servo, Rust, Fennec, various SpiderMonkey iterations including OdinMonkey for Emscripten/asm.js, PDF.js, Shumway.

Negative results are important in science, as roc blogged once (he cited a "Journal of Negative Results", in one of the physical sciences I think). Let's learn from them and make better results, not deny that they happen or keep on banging heads against stout oak trees....



For me, XULRunner is a big success. I use it to run my own xul-based file manager (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/fire-commande...) and I definitely want this tech to stay alive and rocking!


Fair enough, and godspeed. But it's not a product, and it won't be a big consumer platform. We've fed "XUL, the good parts" into the web standards, e.g., flexible box in CSS; and still are, e.g., Web Components.

/be




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