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I think Thunderbird is fine how it is. I think a lot of the projects Mozilla takes on are stupid (Rust being a giant exception, I love Rust). You know what I w

I think Thunderbird is fine how it is. I think a lot of the projects Mozilla takes on are stupid (Rust being a giant exception, I love Rust). You know what I want? NWJS/Electron but using Firefox/Spidermonkey. I want to package desktop apps with Firefox. They almost had this with xulrunner but killed it for some reason. And I want them to build crosswalk (https://crosswalk-project.org/ https://crosswalk-project.org/) for mobile, but with Firefox. The only real reason is that I don't trust Google or anything they touch, and I've never actually been able to build Chromium/NWJS from source (such a complicated build), which worries me. Call me paranoid, but the monoculture around Chromium creeps me out and I'd really like a viable alternative from Mozilla. Seems like they jumped ship from the packaged HTML5 desktop/mobile app paradigm right when it started getting popular.

jcranmer 10y ago
There actually was a fork of node.js that used SpiderMonkey. IMHO, one of Mozilla's greatest failures was its decision to more or less give up on embedding (for both SpiderMonkey and Gecko). They effectively killed off embedding in the process of moving to the train model back in 2011, 2012, but back then, the expectation was that they would have their 2 years of "let's kill our broken architecture." Instead, it sort of ended up dragging on how long it would take them to stabilize some APIs for embedding, and they certainly never bothered to try to maintain any documentation (I briefly attempted to maintain some client application that used SpiderMonkey in 2011, and it was a headache trying to find any sort of documentation on how to fix each incremental bustage, since everything that was found on MDN was woefully out of date). First, there was to be some sort of IPC-based embedding mechanism in Gecko. Then that idea was nixed in favor of just XULRunner. Then Mozilla decided it didn't want to maintain XULRunner anymore. For a period of time, they had a XULRunner-like setup called something like webapprt (which was basically a Firefox sans normal Firefox UI), but that too was killed off within a few years.
bzbarsky 10y ago
https://github.com/mozilla/positron https://github.com/mozilla/positron is a thing, though not under active development right now.

jcranmer 10y ago

There actually was a fork of node.js that used SpiderMonkey. IMHO, one of Mozilla's greatest failures was its decision to more or less give up on embedding (for both SpiderMonkey and Gecko). They effectively killed off embedding in the process of moving to the train model back in 2011, 2012, but back then, the expectation was that they would have their 2 years of "let's kill our broken architecture." Instead, it sort of ended up dragging on how long it would take them to stabilize some APIs for embedding, and they certainly never bothered to try to maintain any documentation (I briefly attempted to maintain some client application that used SpiderMonkey in 2011, and it was a headache trying to find any sort of documentation on how to fix each incremental bustage, since everything that was found on MDN was woefully out of date). First, there was to be some sort of IPC-based embedding mechanism in Gecko. Then that idea was nixed in favor of just XULRunner. Then Mozilla decided it didn't want to maintain XULRunner anymore. For a period of time, they had a XULRunner-like setup called something like webapprt (which was basically a Firefox sans normal Firefox UI), but that too was killed off within a few years.

bzbarsky 10y ago

https://github.com/mozilla/positron https://github.com/mozilla/positron is a thing, though not under active development right now.