14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla is trying all sorts of crazy things with its Labs teams and the latest project is no different. Chromeless is an experimental project aimed at making it easier for users and outside developers to create the browser's interface, the 'chrome,' using just standard web technologies.
"The 'Chromeless' project experiments with the idea of removing the current browser user interface and replacing it with a flexible platform which allows for the creation of new browser UI using standard Web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript," Mozilla's Marcio Galli explained.
The project is in the very early stages at this point is and labeled as pre-alpha, but it is functional.
The idea makes sense, Mozilla wants to make it easier to customize a browser's interface. Since web browsers are arguably the most used application a regular user runs it's very important to have a functional and pleasant interface.
But what works for one user doesn't work for another and trying to please several hundreds of millions of users is not easy. What's more, by empowering more people with the possibility to create the UI, great ideas might pop up when you least expect it.
With Chromeless, would-be interface designers just need to know standard web technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
There's a reason why these technologies are being adapted for things they were not originally designed for, like browser extensions, they're probably the most popular 'programing' languages in the world.
"This is a functional application written in HTML running on a pre-alpha version of the chromeless platform: the inner browser elements are iframes instead of XUL browser elements," Galli said
"It serves to illustrate the general idea of the project and does not yet provide proper sandboxing (among other things) — and plenty of details on the state of implementation are available in the form of annotations in the source code," he added.
You can get a better overview of the project and its current state in the Mozilla blog post. And if you're ready to get your hands dirty, you can check out the GitHub repository for the source code.