F.A.Q

• Q: Is Buzzbird affiliated with Mozilla, Inc.?
  • A: Nope.

• Q: Was this app called Bluebird at one time?
  • A: Yep. You can read more about the name change here.

• Q: It says this project is open source, can I help?
  • A: Of course! Drop me a line on twitter if you’re interested, my handle is @mdesjardins

• Q: Are these questions really “frequently” asked, or you just making them up?
  • A: Erm…

• Q: XUL sucks. Why on earth would you build an application in such a clunky, slow, ugly platform?
  • A: Hey! I don’t come over to your house for a free meal, then tell you that your wallpaper looks like crap!
    Here’s the deal: I wanted to build a cross-platform twitter client. These days, everyone is choosing Adobe AIR to build “rich internet applications” for that purpose. Well, I think Adobe AIR apps are slow, and look totally foreign on whatever operating system they’re running on. I considered Java FX, ‘cuz I’m a Java guy, but it didn’t have a nice browser component yet. I thought about using a toolkit like Qt with Python, but that seemed like a lot of work. I settled on XUL because it was cross platform, in Javascript (a language I already know), and looks reasonably decent on whatever platform it’s running on. Does it look perfect on every platform? Nope. Is it nimble and lightweight? Nope. But it was the best compromise I could come up with.