Investigate a possible move to UXP

XUL/XULRunner and applications that builds atop these technologies have a future on the Unified XUL Platform. Research and investigate ways to do the transition.

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[AntoineTurmel]

This is nice, but the whole Mozilla code base is quite huge, and it's complicated to keep it up to date and to maintain it with a small team. Eventually @johnmurrayvi began some times ago to move the Nightingale code base to a more recent version of XULRunner in bug #207 but it's quite complicated since Nightingale (Songbird) code source is quite old now. (5 years for last version, 7 years for last XULRunner update which is based on Firefox 3.6)

[freaktechnik]

The big problems with Nightingale aren't necessarily the XUL things. It's the XPCOM stuff. I know that UXP also includes that, but it includes XPCOM from around last year, and not, as Antoine mentioned, at least 7 years ago. A lot has changed in how you do certain things in XPCOM. Some problems may even have been solved in a post e10s era (I remember a big issue was XPCOM in child processes).

All of that said, I would rather think of Nightingale as abandon ware than a software, that's desperately kept alive with aging technology. I know, it sucks that desktop media players are dying. And all of that. But I would really suggest to start from scratch by now if you want to invest actual work time. Or improve an active media player. If you want to prevent an XULRunner application from dying, consider helping the Thunderbird project, instead.

[AntoineTurmel]

Personally I have move to https://github.com/clangen/musikcube as my main desktop player which is command-line based, but now support mouse and also remote/streaming support as long as WebSockets.
Supporting Thunderbird is also important in my opinion 👍