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I don't fully understand this, but I think this is a lot more complicated than it might seem. Because well, you'd first of all need to set up a separate Gecko i
by Sylos 9y ago
I don't fully understand this, but I think this is a lot more complicated than it might seem. Because well, you'd first of all need to set up a separate Gecko instance to render the UI, which isn't fundamentally different from what they're doing with tabs, but still an architectural change.
Well, and then you'd probably run into security restrictions, as under normal circumstances, you don't ever want something from inside Gecko to communicate with extensions and probably other things, but for this you need that capability.
Having said that, Mozilla is actually exploring into this direction: https://github.com/browserhtml/browserhtml/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/browserhtml/browserhtml/blob/master/READM...
And presumably, this is the future, as it would also allow them to get rid of the XUL UI Toolkit, meaning they can entirely focus on core browser technologies. (Which is something different from the XUL/XPCOM extension API that they're deprecating on Tuesday.)
- toyg 9y agoI have to say though, having chrome that is virtually indistinguishable from a webpage is a phisher's dream. You also lose 25 years of low-level graphic development in platform toolkits, which likely means losing a lot of performance.
- shmerl 9y agoThe alternative would be maintaining many toolkit backends. We already see how well that worked out. Qt backend wasn't maintained in a while, and fell into bit rot. That basically prevents Firefox from being used Plasma Mobile and the like. Having HTML backend is better than having none at all.
- Sylos 9y ago> I have to say though, having chrome that is virtually indistinguishable from a webpage is a phisher's dream. That's not terribly hard to do today either. That's why browsers implemented those obnoxious fullscreen animations and notifications somewhen last year.
- petecox 9y agoFirefox OS - IIRC, it rendered the entire UI using HTML drawing directly to the screen using Open GL ES with no 'native' toolkit to speak of, nor requiring any X11 or Wayland backend.