Interesting to think that Mozilla Thunderbird (2003) was an "electron app" ten years before Electron (2013) even existed!
Not passing judgement on whether that is a good or a bad thing. Just think it's interesting.
@HerraBRE You mean in the sense of the UI being built in Javascript? Firefox was as well.
@varx No, in the sense that it is a non-browser application built on top of a browser in order to leverage web tech (HTML, JS, etc.)
Firefox is a browser built on a browser, that is arguably a fundamentally different thing.
Mozilla is an e-mail client and productivity tool built on top of Firefox (not my words, that is how they describe themselves).
@varx Argh, I meant to say Mozilla Thunderbird is.. not just Mozilla. Sorry about the confusion!
@HerraBRE I suspect they're fudging the truth a bit for simplicity. I believe that Firefox and Thunderbird both ran on XUL, using the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XULRunner framework. That is, they both used a browser *engine* for their UI, which was coded in XUL, CSS, and JS.
@varx
If analogies are "fudging the truth", then ok.
All the benefits of building on a browser stack are comparable. All the downsides, bloat and release cycle sync issues, also berry similar.
The other details barely matter.
@HerraBRE I hope someone out there is sporting an XUL tattoo.