The current set of XUL widgets in the Mozilla toolkit is quite nice. For the most part they are stable, simple, and work well. That isn’t to say I’m not interesting in making them more useful.

I’ve filed a number of enhancements to current widgets. Once in a while, I even get some fixed

. More often, though, ideas I consider good just aren’t adopted by mozilla.org code. This isn’t to say the mozilla.org code base is bad. More accurately, the case is that I haven’t made a strong enough effort to see these enhancements through, especially in seeking reviews and confirming that mozilla.org actually wants them in their code base.

With that said, one of XUL Widget’s goals is to lower the barrier for creating new functionality for current widgets. Hopefully, these widgets will be useful enough for other developers to bring some of them back to the mozilla.org code base. Whether that will actually happen or not, I don’t know. There’s a pretty solid chance my place of employment, ManyOne Networks, Inc., will be using some of XUL Widgets’ functionality, so it will be supported. (One idea I haven’t yet explored is a tabbrowser with multiple rows of tabs. That ought to be fun to implement. It’s a request from a fellow developer at ManyOne.)

Probably in the next couple of days, I’ll start showcasing these widget improvements through XUL Widgets. They’ll build on current functionality, through a special attribute, xulwidgets=’true’. That way, the original widgets will still be available simply by omitting the attribute (or the XUL Widgets bindings stylesheet). I’ll also move certain common constructs into DTD entities, so they may be reused. My goal is to enhance current features, not to replace them.