[alexlarsson]

As the original author of GtkMozEmbed I'd like to say that this is way too little, way to late. Mozilla has historically been very much against anyone trying to use the engine in anything other than the firefox app.

This is completely up to them of course, and it probably let them move firefox forward faster, due to not having to care about APIs. However, it also means that chrome completely took over the entire market with electron and similar things.

[GeneralMaximus]

I've always wondered why Mozilla doesn't make it easier to embed Gecko everywhere it possibly can. If Electron was built with Gecko, it would go a huge way towards preventing Chrome from becoming the de-facto way of accessing the Web.

As you said, this is too little, too late. I'm a Firefox user, but Chrome has pretty much won the browser wars. The only thing preventing it from achieving complete market dominance is the existence of Mobile Safari.

[roca]

Supporting embedding well is a lot of work, both to create the APIs and then deal with their constraints as the browser evolves. Mozilla has always been under-resourced compared to the competition (IE, then Chrome) and taking people off improving Firefox/Gecko to work on embedding never made the cut. I don't really regret those decisions.

What made it extra unappealing for Mozilla was that we knew the Firefox/Gecko architecture needed lots of work that would destabilize an embedding API. Not much point in supporting an API that assumes single-process while you're moving to multi-process, or that exposes XUL which you know is a dead end, or that isn't compatible with off-main-thread rendering or GPU rendering, etc. Things are much better now that a lot of that debt has been paid off.

[jefftk]

> If Electron was built with Gecko, it would go a huge way towards preventing Chrome from becoming the de-facto way of accessing the Web.

People coding specifically to Chrome when writing Electron apps is way less harmful to the web than people doing the same with web pages. The latter case specifically hurts other browsers, because people who don't use Chrome can't use the site.

Additionally, each Electron app represents a (smallish group of) developers. They're a very small number compared to all the developers writing public-facing websites that (should!) work in all commonly used browsers.

[arghwhat]

Mostly because it is a lot of work and tends to lead to new and exciting compromises.

This is for example why Chrome decided to fork WebKit.

(I do believe that people messed around with Electron drop-in replacements, but it's probably hard to sell if it doesn't bring anything new to the table.)

[dhruvkar]

>> Chrome has pretty much won the browser wars

Probably the same could have been said about IE ~20 years ago.

This is less of a war, more of a never-ending race. Currently (temporarily?) Chrome is ahead.

[Scaevus]

Considering the potential performance issues of Electron apps, I am still hopeful that someone can come up with an Electron alternative with the right engine, but I don't know if that engine is Gecko or not.

[fouc]

It was funny when I realized that mobile-first also means safari-first for the iOS world.

[slightwinder]

> I've always wondered why Mozilla doesn't make it easier to embed Gecko everywhere it possibly can. If Electron was built with Gecko, it would go a huge way towards preventing Chrome from becoming the de-facto way of accessing the Web.

On desktop Mozilla did that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XULRunner

It was quite successful und I never understodd what happend for them to abonded it and let mozilla run down so deep into s* as it is now.

[johnchristopher]

> As the original author of GtkMozEmbed I'd like to say that this is way too little, way to late. Mozilla has historically been very much against anyone trying to use the engine in anything other than the firefox app.

Your comment reminds me of a 15 or 20 year old remark from Feeddemon and Topstyle author (Nick Bradbury) about how he gave up baking firefox preview into his CSS editor.

https://nick.typepad.com/blog/2008/03/can-mozilla-be.html

I loved Topstyle. It was the first editor I invested time into (after Visual Basic for windows 3.11 in the 90's but I was a kid, not a professional or a student).

[m4rtink]

Yeah, the Sailfish OS project, which is an operating system for mobile devices. They use Gecko as engine for their default web browser, but are always lagging with engine updates as every time they have to painstakingly rebase all of their embedding patches on top of the new Gecko codebase.

[slezyr]

Same thing happens with CEF, QtWebKit (sometimes they just drop some features to update to a new version)

[smnthermes]

Why do they not use the ESR version?

[taf2]

Thank you so much for creating GtkMozEmbed. I spent a good part of 2004 working with it. The most fun I had was hacking it to run on Windows. I recall having to inject a callback function into the win32 event loop with assembly. It was like the coolest just out of college project ever for me.

[mintplant]

> As the original author of GtkMozEmbed I'd like to say that this is way too little, way to late. Mozilla has historically been very much against anyone trying to use the engine in anything other than the firefox app.

This has been in the works since at least 2016. I believe conversations around improving the embedding story were happening before that, too.

[luka-birsa]

I wonder if they changed the licensing to something you can actually use in a non FOSS product. Way way back (8 years ago?) we were deciding between webkit and gecko for our solution (we needed a web engine for server side GFX rendering) and the licence made it very simple for us to decide - WebKit was MIT, Gecko wasn't.

[mook]

Wasn't WebKit LGPL (because of the KHTML heritage)? I was under the impression that, for commercial usage, Gecko (with MPL) was more friendly. Either can be made to work, of course.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> we needed a web engine for server side GFX rendering

> the licence made it very simple for us to decide - WebKit was MIT, Gecko wasn't.

...So what? If it runs on your server, it could be just about anything and it wouldn't matter so long as it's not AGPL. Or was the server meant to belong to the customer?

[kick]

It can be used in proprietary software. You shouldn't, because that's unethical, but the MPL isn't a strong copyleft. And even with strong copylefts, there are only three that I can think of that apply to software that won't end up on user devices.

[LockAndLol]

Preach. Not only is Gecko a nightmare to embed, Firefox is terrible for headless. It's why something like phantomjs even had to exist.

An embeddable Gecko would've created a wonderful ecosystem around it, produced headless browsers, a much wider range of browser alternatives, and had much more leverage when it comes to standard. They had... 8 years? 5 years? on Chomium and now have one hell of a task to correct that error.

Looking at the code of their new layout engine written in Rust, making it embeddable wasn't even remotely on their minds either. A real pity.

[_pmf_]

XUL could have been a tolerable cross platform toolkit. Still not sure how you can blow something like that.

[shockinglytrue]

> tolerable cross platform toolkit

..for the 90s. There was very little about XUL that would survive today other than its layout model

Ignoring that XUL has a single implementation and for the most part a single application suite actually using it (not 100% true but very close), I'm not sure what there was to blow.

OTOH I remember some custom XUL apps of yesteryear, and they were always pretty nice to use. Does Firefox have any XUL left? I know there have been ideas to rip it out for a very long time.

[jmisavage]

Remember XULRunner that was doing Electron stuff about 6-7 years before the first version came out. Mozilla has so many good ideas and such terrible execution.

[dblohm7]

Clearly you never tried the original Firefox for Android, which was XUL-based. It was unusable.

I remember trying it on my Nexus One, back when that phone was hot shit. Constant full-screen checkerboarding.

Mozilla literally had to rewrite Firefox for Android and eliminate XUL from the Android version before it became a usable product.

[johnchristopher]

Maybe they lacked resources and dev mind share ? Javascript of those days wasn't javascript of today ? “Apps” were almost just glorified shortcuts for some.

Now that I think about it Winamp 3 had its own interesting application framework (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasabi_(software)).

[kodablah]

Yup, I built my little browser on Chromium due to ease of embedding though I would have loved to use FF.

I am investigating a way to use FF on system as is though by providing a custom profile, a user.css to remove everything but the browser window itself (i.e. no tabs, toolbar, etc), capturing it as a native window (e.g. via QWindow::fromWinId and QWidget::createWindowContainer), and communicating with it via marionette or other remote approach. So far it seems to be ok, but it's a bit of a hack.

[72deluxe]

Not sure what language you are using but CEF was good for Chrome under C#. Might be available under C++ too I think.

There was an equivalent Gecko one for Firefox but I could never get it working correctly so deferred to CEF under Visual Studio (think there's a nuget package for it, conveniently).

Also wxWidgets under C++ offers ability to host a local WebView instance or Trident with wxWebView.

[solarkraft]

Have you tried calling it with the same profile multiple times? I've been running into "Firefox is already running" a lot while trying to use it to integrate web apps with the OS ("site specific browser"). Also the WM-Class would never be set according to the command line parameters on the second call, but you probably don't care about that.