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One thing that might release some of the pressure around addons would be to make Gecko more embeddable, the way Blink is. We've started seeing a lot of alterna
by Rusky 9y ago
One thing that might release some of the pressure around addons would be to make Gecko more embeddable, the way Blink is.
We've started seeing a lot of alternative Blink UIs (Brave, Vivaldi, new Opera, etc) alongside apps built on it via Electron. Those alternative UIs do things Chrome extensions can't, even including things Firefox 57 lost the ability to do.
I don't know how close to that state Gecko is right now, so maybe it would be less work just to recreate the necessary APIs like they're already doing. But if not it could help bring back some of Gecko's market share, which is at least as important as that of Firefox as a whole.
- JoshTriplett 9y agoServo was designed to be much more embeddable.
- Rusky 9y agoI'm pretty excited about that but I doubt it will lead to new alternative browser UIs anytime soon.
- pcwalton 9y agoBlink isn't very embeddable. In fact, removing the "ports" system that facilitated embeddability was one of the main goals of the Blink fork. The alternative "Blink" UIs, and Electron, are really just forks of the entire Chromium browser, soup to nuts.
- Rusky 9y agoAh fair enough. How easy then would it be for a Firefox fork to drop the chrome the way Electron does?
- LocutusOfBorges 9y agoI don't expect an Electron-style system to ever arise around Firefox while the engine continues to not support custom skinned scrollbars. They've become such a fundamental element of modern web apps- that so many of them just fall over and break on Firefox is alarming.