Top all-time · #6069
Brian Grinstead
Personal blog · briangrinstead.com/blogprogrammingweb
Brian Grinstead's personal blog at briangrinstead.com covers programming and web. Since 2010, 12 different Hacker News readers have linked it 17 times, most often “The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-09-03, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Brian Grinstead's blog for posts on Firefox internals (XUL, XBL, Web Components), Chrome DevTools tips such as monitorEvents, and A* pathfinding and grid representation in JavaScript.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Open Source, Web Development, and more
Most-linked posts?
- The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-11-20
- Chrome Developer Tools: monitorEvents2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-04-21
What Hacker News says?
Thanks for the reply! I'm a big fan of your work. I can only imagine the nightmare of trying to implement two separate XUL <=> HTML/CSS flex/box models in Servo/Rust. For readers that are unaware, there is also a great blog post breaking down some of these points in finer detail [0][1]. I guess my question is — are there replacements planned for any of the legacy yet performant XPCOM interfaces / XUL elements like n…
Comment linking /blog/xbl-replacement-newsletter-20/
on “Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering”Submitted The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components as a story · 587 points
HN discussionIt's used for things like pop-up menus, (i.e. things that can't be done with HTML) and was recently used in some obscure parts of the UI e.g. certificate viewer (however I'm not even sure that's still XUL any more) I think it's safer to say: It's almost all HTML these days. XUL is very much deprecated. As we killed XBL, our XUL components because web components. https://briangrinstead.com/blog/firefox-webcomponents/
Comment linking /blog/firefox-webcomponents/
on “XMLUI”Submitted A* Search Algorithm in JavaScript as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAnd unmonitorEvents(elt) to turn it off again. Monitoring every event is pretty noisy, so you can choose what to monitor with a second parameter: https://briangrinstead.com/blog/chrome-developer-tools-monit... It would be nice if this made live expressions or something instead of filling up the console.
Comment linking /blog/chrome-developer-tools-monitorevents/
on “Web developer tool secrets that shouldn’t be secrets”Submitted A* Search Algorithm in JavaScript as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt was XBL (XML Binding Language)[0] that was removed, not XUL - which is being phased out and replaced with HTML where appropriate. 0: https://briangrinstead.com/blog/xbl-in-firefox/
Comment linking /blog/xbl-in-firefox/
on “Thunderbird’s New Home”Submitted A* Search Algorithm in JavaScript as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttp://www.briangrinstead.com/blog/chrome-developer-tools-mo... I didn't know about monitorEvents, it's really nice! This link has more details about what events you can monitor.
Comment linking /blog/chrome-developer-tools-monitorevents
on “Show HN: A curated list of Chrome DevTools tips and tricks”Submitted A* Search Algorithm in JavaScript as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> Firefox has been an Electron-style app for 100+% of its lifetime That's technically correct, which is the best kind of correct, but horribly misleading. Firefox has always been mostly written in JavaScript, but not HTML [1]. A bunch of features that are being standardized now, like Web Components [2], are pretty similar to stuff that Firefox has used in non-standard form for decades. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/…
Comment linking /blog/firefox-webcomponents/
on “JavaScript hydration is a workaround, not a solution”Submitted Chrome Developer Tools: monitorEvents as a story · 1 points
HN discussionHey Matthew, great job on this! I had fun learning this algorithm, too. My implementation is here: https://github.com/bgrins/javascript-astar/blob/master/astar... , and I have a demo here: http://briangrinstead.com/files/astar/ I have added in a few optimizations: in my first run at it ( https://github.com/bgrins/javascript-astar/blob/master/astar... ) I used a standard array for the open and closed lists, and I fou…
Comment linking /files/astar/
on “Try the A* pathfinding algorithm with HTML5 canvas”This article was really helpful to me in understanding A*: http://www.briangrinstead.com/blog/astar-search-algorithm-in...
Comment linking /blog/astar-search-algorithm-in-javascript-updated
on “A* Search”I see your point. Thanks for posting this code - I implemented the a* pathfinding algorithm in javascript, so I looked into some of these options also. I ended up using the basic 2d structure to store the grid, since it was the most straightforward and seemed somewhat equivalent to 1d. For a demo of it ( http://briangrinstead.com/files/astar/ ), I used divs to represent the grid on the page, but I think it would be…
Comment linking /files/astar/
on “I benchmarked 8 different ways of representing a 2d grid in JavaScript”Clarification - in the past when I've written high performance data tools in JS, it was almost entirely to support the use case of needing it to run in a browser. Otherwise, there are indeed more suitable environments available. To your question, I was about to point out Firefox[1], but realized you clarified 'mainstream'[2]... [1] https://briangrinstead.com/blog/firefox-webcomponents [2] https://gs.statcounter.com/…
Comment linking /blog/firefox-webcomponents
on “We deserve a better streams API for JavaScript”I worked on this project - Web Components had a lot to do with it. It's true they weren't feature complete in Firefox when we started the project (notably missing Shadow DOM) - but the first migration from late 2017 was XBL->Custom Element ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1500626 ), and we used the migration project to inform performance and feature work for Web Components within Firefox. We could have…
Comment linking /blog/firefox-webcomponents/
on “Why Did Mozilla Remove XUL Add-Ons? (2020)”
