What XULRunner Provides

The goal of XULRunner is to provide a solution for deploying XUL applications (primarily Firefox and Thunderbird), as well as providing an embedding mechanism. The following features are either already implemented or planned:

Gecko Features

User Interface Features

The following user interface is supplied by XULRunner, and may be overridden by embedders under certain circumstances:

Embedding APIs

The following embedding APIs are provided by XULRunner:

  • Cross-platform embedding (XRE_InitEmbedding)
  • JavaXPCOM embedding
  • gtkmozembed (Linux only)
  • ActiveX control (Windows only) (not yet complete) Obsolete since Gecko 7.0
  • NSView-based-widget (Mac OS X only) (not yet complete)

The "Maybe" List

The following features have been discussed and may be included if developer time permits and code size is controlled:

  • LDAP support
  • Spellchecking support (with or without dictionaries provided) see bug 285977
  • Core support for profile roaming (with application-specific extensibility)
  • PyXPCOM embedding (not yet complete) - but it does work, if you compile a custom build that includes the PyXPCOM bindings and there is a working python available. ActiveState uses PyXPCOM in their products.

What's out

XULRunner will not supply:

  • Bookmarks or History UI (must be managed by the application/embedder)
  • XForms (XForms will be available as an extension)

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 Last updated by: teoli,