Posted on by Mark Finkle

XULRunner 1.9 RC2

A while ago I posted about getting XULRunner builds to coincide with Firefox milestones. Work has been moving ahead on the goal. In fact, we have XULRunner 1.9 RC2 binary runtimes and SDKs available for testing. If you use XULRunner, or want to use XULRunner, you should grab these builds and give them a spin. Let us know (file bugs) if you see something wrong.

Another great addition for XULRunner developers – Microsoft symbol and source server support. Look here for information on Mozilla’s symbol and source server support. Just use http://symbols.mozilla.org/xulrunner instead of the Firefox URL. This is a huge deal for helping developers debug problems using the non-debug releases of XULRunner runtimes and SDKs.

If you haven’t tried using XULRunner yet, now is a great time to start. Use markup/JS/CSS to build real desktop applications using native OS look-n-feel, with complete access to custom and OS binary functionality.

Look for more cool XULRunner developer support coming soon.

4 Replies to “XULRunner 1.9 RC2”

  1. Is there a good sample XULRunner application which shows you how to build your UI using XUL and write code in your preferred language (not Javascript; maybe C, Java, Python/Ruby)? Something as simple as a calculator will do. Even though there are apps like SongBird which are Opensource, their code bases are too complex for beginners to learn from.

  2. Harish – For simple examples of XULRunner-based applications, I would suggest looking at McCoy (http://wiki.mozilla.org/McCoy) and XULExplorer (http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/XUL_Explorer).

    As for writing code in your preferred language, C would require straight XPCOM. Java and Python would require usage of JavaXPCOM and PythonXPCOM respectively. Ruby currently doesn’t have a language binding, although an old, non-functioning version exists somewhere.

  3. Awesome news! Thanks for the update Mark.

    The SDKs are newer-ish right? Any docs or tips on what’s in those, or where to get started?

  4. Thanks for the heads up! I’m looking forward to the official release.

    Do you (or anyone else, for that matter) know if more advanced CSS3 support is planned for Firefox 3/XULrunner 1.9? In particular, being able to use multiple background-images inside a browser element would save me so much HTML work. Perhaps it’s already too late in the game for big changes, what with both at the release candidate states…

Comments are closed.