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People depend on Chromium/Blink because there's no other options. You can't really embed Gecko, and WebKit (Safari) can sometimes lack desirable web platform fe

by ronsor 7y ago

People depend on Chromium/Blink because there's no other options. You can't really embed Gecko, and WebKit (Safari) can sometimes lack desirable web platform features.

omeid2 7y ago
You can't embed Gecko? Patently false. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embedding_Mozilla https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embed...
- khuey 7y ago
  Speaking as someone who worked on Gecko at Mozilla for many years, that page is years (if not more than a decade) out of date and embedding Gecko is a rather miserable experience.
- robotblake 7y ago
  Disclaimer: Work for Mozilla but not on the browser core, thoughts are my own, grain of salt, etc. My understanding is that on Desktop it's much more difficult than it ideally should be. With that said we've got a pretty solid story being worked on for mobile via GeckoView [1] and Android Components [2], there's a post on the Mozilla Hacks blog about our use of them in Focus [3] and they're also what is being used for building the "next generation" version of Firefox for Android currently code-named Fenix [4][5]. I wouldn't be surprised if there was an effort to get some of the GeckoView work back onto our desktop platforms. [1] https://github.com/mozilla/geckoview https://github.com/mozilla/geckoview [2] https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/android-components https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/android-components [3] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/09/focus-with-geckoview/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/09/focus-with-geckoview/ [4] https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix [5] https://play.google.com/apps/testing/org.mozilla.fenix https://play.google.com/apps/testing/org.mozilla.fenix
  - omeid2 7y ago
    Yes, it is not exactly easy, but it is not like Chromium Embedded Framework despite being design for embedding is any easier to build. The truth is the browsers are complicated beasts these days for better or worst and so goes the complexity of building and depending on them.
ljm 7y ago
Yet still, we have Rust (a phenomenally innovative programming language) that was conceived, as far as I understand it, to build a new rendering engine. I've not checked in on Servo for some time but they were going for full on ACID2 compliance with CSS, meeting the specs for HTML...A lot of that work became Electrolysis and then Quantum. Mozilla has been a serious lab for innovation without the conflict of interest in ad revenue. Even if that effort has changed focus, the community now has Rust and I don't think we've seen such a fresh language paradigm since we got Lisp, Haskell, Ocaml, F#, Scala... In which case, the world has benefitted from browser competition as a total side-effect of competing with the incumbent browser; we got the various evolutions of C and C++. Exactly the same way we got V8 and then nodejs and the whole server-side rendering paradigm with React and JSX. If we all fall back to Chromium for everything, then Google has achieved a Pyrrhic victory. They need a disruptor to up their game... and it isn't WASM either.
- russdpale 7y ago
  I've been really liking rust thus far, its pretty awesome and I like the community. I didn't know it was made for a rednering engine. It would be nice to have something built by someone other than Mozilla though, just purely for more competition. I could care less that IE sold out, they made their bed in the 2000's and there was no escaping it. As a corporate programmer I am glad they a
- russdpale 7y ago
  I've been really liking rust thus far, its pretty awesome and I like the community. I didn't know it was made for a rednering engine. It would be nice to have something built by someone other than Mozilla though, just purely for more competition. I could care less that IE sold out, they made their bed in the 2000's and there was no escaping it.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  Mozilla get a lot of money from Google. They're not totally independent.
- danShumway 7y ago
  Servo is very promising, but not ready for commercial embedded applications yet (as of approx 3-4 months ago last time I checked it). It will likely be a better engine than embedded Chromium when it's done (if for no other reason than that it seems to have fewer dependencies[0]), but I wouldn't start building an application on top of it today. I am highly interested in finding a more performant alternative to Electron. I'm currently building a web-first game that will also be available as a fully offline native app. I'll probably use Electron unless the ecosystem changes drastically before I'm done. Some really interesting projects out there -- not just Servo, but also thin wrappers around OS web views, even a few re-implementations of CSS/HTML that just force you to cross-compile or port your Javascript to another language. But I haven't found any that were mature enough that I felt comfortable using them. Servo was the most promising project I personally have seen so far, but it needs more time. [0]: https://gist.github.com/flibitijibibo/b67910842ab95bb3decdf89d1502de88 https://gist.github.com/flibitijibibo/b67910842ab95bb3decdf8...
flukus 7y ago
Mozilla had XUL, which was basically electron a decade before electron.

by ronsor 7y ago

People depend on Chromium/Blink because there's no other options. You can't really embed Gecko, and WebKit (Safari) can sometimes lack desirable web platform features.

omeid2 7y ago

You can't embed Gecko? Patently false. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embedding_Mozilla https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embed...

khuey 7y ago
Speaking as someone who worked on Gecko at Mozilla for many years, that page is years (if not more than a decade) out of date and embedding Gecko is a rather miserable experience.
robotblake 7y ago
Disclaimer: Work for Mozilla but not on the browser core, thoughts are my own, grain of salt, etc. My understanding is that on Desktop it's much more difficult than it ideally should be. With that said we've got a pretty solid story being worked on for mobile via GeckoView [1] and Android Components [2], there's a post on the Mozilla Hacks blog about our use of them in Focus [3] and they're also what is being used for building the "next generation" version of Firefox for Android currently code-named Fenix [4][5]. I wouldn't be surprised if there was an effort to get some of the GeckoView work back onto our desktop platforms. [1] https://github.com/mozilla/geckoview https://github.com/mozilla/geckoview [2] https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/android-components https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/android-components [3] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/09/focus-with-geckoview/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/09/focus-with-geckoview/ [4] https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix [5] https://play.google.com/apps/testing/org.mozilla.fenix https://play.google.com/apps/testing/org.mozilla.fenix
- omeid2 7y ago
  Yes, it is not exactly easy, but it is not like Chromium Embedded Framework despite being design for embedding is any easier to build. The truth is the browsers are complicated beasts these days for better or worst and so goes the complexity of building and depending on them.

ljm 7y ago

Yet still, we have Rust (a phenomenally innovative programming language) that was conceived, as far as I understand it, to build a new rendering engine. I've not checked in on Servo for some time but they were going for full on ACID2 compliance with CSS, meeting the specs for HTML...A lot of that work became Electrolysis and then Quantum. Mozilla has been a serious lab for innovation without the conflict of interest in ad revenue. Even if that effort has changed focus, the community now has Rust and I don't think we've seen such a fresh language paradigm since we got Lisp, Haskell, Ocaml, F#, Scala... In which case, the world has benefitted from browser competition as a total side-effect of competing with the incumbent browser; we got the various evolutions of C and C++. Exactly the same way we got V8 and then nodejs and the whole server-side rendering paradigm with React and JSX. If we all fall back to Chromium for everything, then Google has achieved a Pyrrhic victory. They need a disruptor to up their game... and it isn't WASM either.

russdpale 7y ago
I've been really liking rust thus far, its pretty awesome and I like the community. I didn't know it was made for a rednering engine. It would be nice to have something built by someone other than Mozilla though, just purely for more competition. I could care less that IE sold out, they made their bed in the 2000's and there was no escaping it. As a corporate programmer I am glad they a
russdpale 7y ago
I've been really liking rust thus far, its pretty awesome and I like the community. I didn't know it was made for a rednering engine. It would be nice to have something built by someone other than Mozilla though, just purely for more competition. I could care less that IE sold out, they made their bed in the 2000's and there was no escaping it.
whatshisface 7y ago
Mozilla get a lot of money from Google. They're not totally independent.
danShumway 7y ago
Servo is very promising, but not ready for commercial embedded applications yet (as of approx 3-4 months ago last time I checked it). It will likely be a better engine than embedded Chromium when it's done (if for no other reason than that it seems to have fewer dependencies[0]), but I wouldn't start building an application on top of it today. I am highly interested in finding a more performant alternative to Electron. I'm currently building a web-first game that will also be available as a fully offline native app. I'll probably use Electron unless the ecosystem changes drastically before I'm done. Some really interesting projects out there -- not just Servo, but also thin wrappers around OS web views, even a few re-implementations of CSS/HTML that just force you to cross-compile or port your Javascript to another language. But I haven't found any that were mature enough that I felt comfortable using them. Servo was the most promising project I personally have seen so far, but it needs more time. [0]: https://gist.github.com/flibitijibibo/b67910842ab95bb3decdf89d1502de88 https://gist.github.com/flibitijibibo/b67910842ab95bb3decdf8...

flukus 7y ago

Mozilla had XUL, which was basically electron a decade before electron.